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What the Odachi adds in pure muscle it gives up in polish compared to Alienware’s Area-51 m17x and even ASUS’ G71. Granted, Killer Notebooks is a smaller boutique outfit, which puts it at the whim of style choices made by whitebook ODMs like Clevo, Armia, and Compal. In this case, Clevo’s D9C is tapped as the shell of choice for Killer Notebooks’ Odachi.
In contrast to the all-black Area-51, the Odachi sports a two-tone grey/black chassis that, by its very nature, is more generic. The notebook’s lid takes an 18-mil laminated graphic shield, adding a more custom feel to the chassis. This is something we’ve become accustomed to from certain resellers thanks to Intel’s CBB (Custom Building Block) initiative.
The ports on either side of the notebook match up well to the chassis. Unlike the Alienware’s flush body, the Odachi cuts in on the right and left sides underneath the available jacks and connectors. Aesthetically, the m17x looks more attractive. However, the stair-step cut into the Odachi’s chassis does serve as a good place to grip the heavy notebook.
With the lid open, you can see that Clevo clearly wasn’t going for the same flush-mounted touchpad. It’s instead recessed and surrounded by a chrome bevel. The keyboard does have good tactile response, though. And because this is a large desktop replacement, there’s naturally enough room for a full-sized keyboard and 10-ley number pad.
Our only other concern is ventilation. The Odachi, loaded with its desktop processor, three hard drives, and two 8800M GTX graphics cards, generates copious heat, which is exhausted from the chassis through four blowers. The quartet pulls air from vents on the bottom of the notebook. Although we didn’t have any heat problems on our test bench, it’d be conceivably pretty easy to block those vents and end up with insufficient cooling. At the very least, this probably isn’t a notebook you’ll want to use on your lap.
More Go-Fast Potential
The folks at Killer Notebooks obviously know they’re at a manufacturing disadvantage when it comes to the other former-boutique shops that have sold to larger vendors, such as Alienware and VoodooPC. To help bridge that gap between brains and beauty, Killer makes an extra effort to tune its notebooks for performance. In fact, the company originally sent its sample running a 64-bit copy of Vista Ultimate with several hours worth of tweaks applied, including optimizations for each installed application that’d milk the most performance from the quad-core CPU.
We formatted the machine to normalize on a 32-bit environment, but it’s still worth noting that our benchmark scores would have likely been higher had Killer Notebooks re-tuned the Odachi as it would have for a customer. In fact, the company says that if a customer sends his or her software to Killer Notebooks as his or her machine is being built, it’ll install and tweak the software to best utilize the hardware. Why didn’t we send the system back for another round of tweaks on our benchmark suite? As you’ll see, the performance results are already fairly compelling.
There’s also another option emerging. Killer Notebooks plans to make its Core Optimization Program (COP) available to customers, enabling do-it-yourself per-application optimizations. Killer says each app takes about 20 seconds to set up and gives the enthusiast complete control over where each thread runs. In this way, you’re able to dictate that a virus scan runs on Core 4 while Crysis employs Core 1, for example.
- Forthcoming Notebook Roundup -- Wish List [Mobile Computing]
- Mobility Roundup? [Graphic & Displays]
- Un-finished Santa Rosa laptop lineup [Laptops & Notebooks]
- $1500 Small College Gaming Laptop [Laptops & Notebooks]
- Vista Workshop: More RAM, More Speed [Windows Vista]
Questions? Ask Tom's community!
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From a money point of view, it's never going to make sense buying a gaming laptop. Scaled down performance and inability to upgrade are issues.
But it sure as hell feels good having one ^___^
Hey, that aint green...
http://www.tomshardware.com/review [...] 023-6.html
"shipped the system with a 64-bit copy of Vista Ultimate (Alienware included x32 Home Premium)."
4 Grand? Are you guys nuts? I would say that right there would rule out about 90% of us normal gmaers..
Besides the gaming scores looked weak imo..
I personally thought it was a better idea to go get a Gateway P7811FX with a single Geforce 9800GTS. It plays Call of Duty at 1920x1200 max settings around 50FPS. AND it cost me ONLY $1249 (Plus Best Buy let me pick any game I wanted for FREE!)
what about www.xtremenotebooks.com?
agree with kitsilencer, gaming laptop is never practical.
even with a beast graphics card, you'd be pretty hard to get more than 2 hours of shitty performance.
get a gaming desktop and perhaps an EEE or iPhone for travelling. my iPhone has 20+ games and enough media (don't forget TV connector for watching films in hotels) to keep me busy for more than one week away from my gaming rig.
oops cant spell "gamers" lol
Not true my "Gmaing Laptop" is great at LAN Parties and I play it for 6-8 Hours straight there...
I think maybe you had a bad experience with a laptop that claimed to be a "gaming" laptop. I bought one before like that and it have an 8600M Geforce and it Sucked bad... If you get a good laptop with say a 9800gts or so you would be suprised...
4 Grand? Are you guys nuts? I would say that right there would rule out about 90% of us normal gmaers..
99.90%
PS gaming laptops hold value much better than desktops. I had one I paid 1250 for, had it for a year, then sold it for $1100 and bought the newer "upgraded" model that just came out for $1250. I got an Upgraded CPU (From Core 2 1.67 GHZ to Core 2 Centrino 2 2.26 GHZ), Memory (from 3 Gigs DDR2 667MHZ to 4 Gigs DDR3 1066MHZ), Hard Drive (faster), Video Card (from 8800gts to 9800GTS), Screen (from 1440x800 to 1920x1200) and OS (From 32 bit to 64 bit). Not bad upgrade for $150 or so!
Yeah, I'm a student at a university, and I find my laptop invaluable. Saves tons of space on my desk, and can play any game maxed out - save crysis, where I have to lower the res - with 60fps or more. I payed $2500 for it, too. It gets 2 hours on the battery. I haven't ever run into a situation where I needed it and it was dead.
There are many types of people that I can think of that would be better off with a gaming laptop.
Truck driver's, students, profesionals on the move or frequent travelers.
then there are people who like low electrical bills.
and most of these people can use thier laptop plugged in.
"Although they come from a previous generation of named graphics processors, the GeForce 8800M GTX GPUs used in Killer Notebooks’ Odachi are actually better than the 9800M GTs used in Alienware’s m17x. Again, chalk it up to poor naming on Nvidia’s part.
From an architecture standpoint, the two mobile components are similar. Both center on the G92M GPU manufactured at 65 nm. Both include 96 unified shader processors fed by 512 MB of GDDR3 memory on a 256-bit bus. Where the components differ is clock speed. The 8800M GTXs boast 560 MHz clocks, 1,400 MHz shaders, and 900 MHz memory. All three figures are faster than what you’ll get from the 9800M GTs."
These are overclocked, it has nothing to do with poor naming by Nvidia.
Gaming laptops have their niche in the computer world. It's obviously not as big as a gaming desktop, but it's definitely there. This is also a competition of which laptop is the best (in performance, value etc), not if gaming laptops are viable.
Either way, it's always fun to watch Alienware's overpriced creations get thrashed. Go Killer Notebooks
Well, the review does a great job of pimping Alienware & one of the most expensive Clevo resellers (Go KillerNotebooks? They're way overpriced too). You can get equivalent ones cheaper at other resellers, and no, it's not $4k at these places, for the same notebooks.
Try $1800ish for the 15inch Montebello equivalents (same as Eurocom's price or thereabouts), with a much better cooling design than cheaper systems (Gateway 7811x's - which should have also been reviewed in here, as well as a few others). Ah well.
Base price for the D901C at other resellers (Power Notebooks, XoticPc - Sager resellers, ProStar, Lynnbay, Eurocom) is $2090 starting. Sure you can put in overpriced (currently) dual cards and tack on $1200, and put 3 overpriced RAID'd hard drives and pay a lot more, or you can do it yourself, save money and/or put one card in and upgrade later. So yeah, pretty over the top pricing estimates (And I've priced KillerNotebooks, at least for the M860TU 15.4inchers, and they've come out to $700 more - ouch).
Decide what's worth the price. $850 extra for an extreme CPU? No.
Um, isn't the point of all this to build the fastest notebook? Money no object?
Well Done Killer Notebooks!
The Silk Pigs
Its nice to see these charts but I watched prices at bestbuy on the gateways P-6860FX all summer and picked it up when it hit 1150. I wanted something that could play games on the go and I think the 1000-1500 dollar gaming notebook range is about to really open up. As price is really an issue for most of us and while they sacrafice some specs they can play games. Maybe we can get some more reviews on cheaper gaming notebooks hint hint.
Side note: I really wanted something smaller so I'm hoping that the 15.4 inch gaming notebooks become more affordable.
The Gateway P-7811FX is a useless piece of trash. I went through 5 bad units from two different BB stores because they would all lock-up and freeze 5-20 minutes into any game I played.
About the only positive I could say about it was that the CPU, RAM, HDD and optical drive were all user-replaceable. The WUXGA screen had backlight bleeding problems and the GPU gave decent framerates in Crysis at 1920x1200, until the damn thing froze...
I find it difficult to see that there is no viable option between a $1300 Gateway and a $4000 boutique build. $2000 could get you all the parts for a top-performing 17" gaming laptop. Why those wingnuts haven't figured it out yet is beyond me.
Well the 6860-fx is now $809 dollars at select best buys with 1.83ghz dual core and 8800gtx gpu and a 320gb hard drive