AVADirect Clevo W860CU 3D Gaming Laptop Review

By Loyd Case

As graphics chips and CPUs become more capable, laptops start to offer gaming experiences that may not be quite as robust as dedicated desktop gaming PCs–but they can come close. AVADirect’s Clevo W860CU tries to walk the line between the massive gaming laptops that are really luggable desktop systems and the thin-and-light units with discrete GPUs that can’t quite deliver robust frame rates in games.

Certainly the base specs look attractive: a Core i7 820QM quad-core CPU delivers robust processor performance, with the native clock speed of 1.72GHz pushing up to 3.06GHz in single-core Turbo-boost mode. The graphics chip is nVidia’s last-generation GeForce 285 GTX mobile unit, but it’s still a capable mobile gaming GPU. The inclusion of the nVidia GPU facilitates the use of that company’s 3D Vision stereoscopic 3D technology, which is discussed in more detail below.

The display is a 15.6-inch glossy screen offering a somewhat anemic 1366-by-768 pixels, which seems a little on the low side for a 15-incher. The lower resolution helps 3D Vision performance, since the frame rate needs to effectively double in stereoscopic mode. The key enabler here is the supported refresh rate that maxes out at 120Hz–much higher than in most laptop displays. Rounding out the specs are 4GB of system memory, a 500GB, 7200-rpm hard drive, and a Blu-ray ROM/DVD recordable drive. That positions the W860CU for the coming generation of stereoscopic 3D movies.

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