Clevo M570 notebook - The Lamborghini Diablo of the notebooks

Ever heard of Clevo? I didn’t, so when I got the call to test something from this firm my first question was what’s a Clevo. Yeah, shame on me.

So the very beginning of the review is what I’ve learned about Clevo.

Clevo is a notebook and computer peripherals manufacturer from Taiwan. Interesting is, that they ship their notebooks as barebones. That means that the notebooks are half-assembled. But don’t worry, the firm doesn’t deal with end-users but with a very limited number of OEMs, who (custom) build the notebooks, then ship to resellers and end-users. So, when you get the notebook, it’s fully functioning.

Clevo is infamous because of the quality of the materials they use when building their notebooks. M570 is neither an exception. It’s extraordinarily beautiful. The materials for building this notebook are excellent, the mate plastic used is very pleasant and is very resistant to stitches. In one word: the finishes are perfect.

The keyboard is a full size one, something almost normal at 17″ notebooks. My only issue was that as they had to create the space for the numeric pad, they pushed the Home/End/PgDn/PgUp on the top of the cursor buttons and can be reached by pushing the Fn button and the appropriate cursor key simultaneously. I hate this solution and never could get used with it.
The touchpad on the other hand is very simple yet effective. It’s sensitive enough and the two buttons (right and left click) are responsive. I didn’t encounter a problem while using it. Just with like the fingerprint scanner. It always recognized my fingerprint without a single error.

The lid is made almost entirely of aluminum, less the top where is a strip of shiny plastic.
Unlike the other notebook manufacturers, Clevo has kept the old closing system by closing hook. A system which is very secure and easy to use.

The notebook is quite heavy, it has a weight of about 4 kg (all with battery), but I think this is normal; a monster like this with a 17″ LCD on the top of a graphic accelerator, nVidia 8800M GTX, neither is pillow-light. Due to its height, it’s unlikely you will take this notebook to trips. It’s excellent for office job or for home usages though.

The M570R1 from Clevo comes with a 17.1″ WXGA with an aspect ratio of 19 to 10. Unfortunately, the surface of the screen is shiny which makes the usage of the notebook difficult in very bright environments. But every downside has its opposite, namely that the shiny surface gives extremely vivid color and great visibility, even if viewing the screen from wide angles.
Also, it’s also quite annoying that the screen of the M570 suffers from backlight bleeding in about 60-70%, which is more than bad when watching movies.

Gaming and the Clevo M570

The notebook has been tested with 3 games as usual: The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion, World of Warcraft and F.E.A.R.
I think it’s better I tell you some specs of the M570R1 first. The CPU is an Intel Core2 Duo T7500 (Merom) wich is working at 2.2 GHz under maximum load and with 4MB L2 Cache. The front side bus is working at 800 MHz. The model I got had 3 Gigabytes of RAM and an nVidia GeForce 8800M GTX video card, with 512MB GDD3 VRAM.
Now that you know the specs, you can imagine how the above games run on the notebook. Truth is, that the notebook has been made especially for gaming.

The Clevo M570 and different operating systems

Miraculously, Clevo provided all the drivers for all the Microsoft operating systems on a DVD; I mean, every driver. The switch between OSes was the easiest in my career.

Verdict on the Clevo M570

It’s a piece of art! I can recommend it without hesitation for anyone, both gamers and for the business class, too. Its autonomy is excellent in its class: 2 and a half hours for office jobs and browsing and an hour and 20 minutes for gaming.
Is this a must buy? Yes, even if it’s around $2300 (~€1800) where I live.

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