Hardware Kobalt G860 Laptop Review

This is Kobalt's sumptuous G860 laptop. It's fitted with a Core i7-Q920 processor and an Nvidia GeForce GTX 280M graphics card. We find out how the impressive core spec and tidy chassis shapes up against other mobile gaming rigs.

http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/laptops/2010/01/12/kobalt-g860-laptop-review/1

 

Finally someone who realises that gamers don't need led lights all over the place and funky paint jobs to play games in a laptop...

 

+1

 

i love the look of it, nice and subdued but a shame that Clevo is sticking to only Nvidia. If it came with an Ati mobility 5850/5870 I'd be sorely tempted but as its not i'll be going for HP Envy 15 w/ ati 5830 or something similiar

 

Looks ok, goes ok, costs too much*.


*Well its over £500 more than I paid for my equally peforming Advent 6555 (gaming wise).

 

this is quite clearly a clevo barebones laptop

clevo barebones are terrible with massive failure rates

why is this fact not accounted for in your review?

 

Yup and we make no bones about it

Really? I would like to see some facts to back that statement up because from our experience it's quite the opposite, certainly on the models we sell.

 

Looks like a nice laptop, 15" screens with a slightly lower resolution always seem to be the best balance for a gaming laptop (at least until faster mobile GPU's appear). Reasonable weight to carry around too.

 

I have a Dell Studio 15 with the same processor, hard drive, but the ram is DDR3 1333 4gb. When I run the CPC benchmarks I get about 30 points (averaged, after a few runs) higher than this laptop and the similar spec Alienware), is this gain just down to the faster ram I have ? Curious as to why Dell (legendary cheapos where its applicable) would use better ram.

The GPU I have is the 4570, obviously nowhere as good as this laptops GPU.

 

Thats odd, the Novatech X80R I used to own was pretty damn good despite being Clevo based.

Also, if you are going to make such statements it helps if you back them up with some facts.

 

Nearly £1500 for a laptop with a G92b inside. I thought I would mention that since bit tech left out this pretty important bit of info. You would expect GTX 280M to be related to the GTX 280 - but it isn't.

The mobile Radeon 5000 series has been released (just about) as well. So this laptop seems pretty poor way to blow £1.5K!

Bit tech may recommending this laptop. But I would advise definitely do not buy it. Wait for new laptops with ATI 5000 series inside.

 

Wait for the Alienware M11X

Isn't the whole point of a gaming laptop so you can play games on the go?

MW2 @ 30fps @ 1336x768 with 4 hours battery life

I'm sold, where do I sign?

 

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=446882

GTS 360m is coming to the genre.

 

From what I could work out, that is just going to be the lacklustre GT240 down-clocked, and re-badged. G92b would be better. I don't like the rebranding from nvidia. It's dishonest. You get mislead; from Kobalt website for the G860 overview: "NVIDIA® GeForce™ GTX 280 1GB Graphics Card". No it isn't! It's a GTX 280M. Not even closely related card! I'm not saying Kobalt is a dishonest company, I'm saying they should think about changing their ODM.

 

Nice and I want a gaming laptop... but just not affordable for me tbh. I'm sure in a few years though as technology miniaturises etc. there might be something like this for £700 or so in today's money (e.g. the best part of a single month's salary, rather than two!). If this was a prize... say in a bit-tech competition... and say I won that competition... I wouldn't be unhappy .

But as it stands I can barely justify the money to upgrade my c2d desktop let alone buy something to the tune of 1400. So my opinion: GREAT laptop, shame about the price.

I'm sure that wont be a sticking point for those with better paid jobs.

I'd definitely get the 1080p screen though.

 

I'm wondering how bad (or good) the 1GB (probably no better than 512mb) 4670 GDDR3 is compared to the 260M, I imagine its not as good, but probably uses less power. If its not that bad, some very nice laptops can be had for about 1000-1100 UKP, such as the Studio XPS 16, last time I looked they were doing it for 1100 with a 1920x1080 16.4 inch RGBLED screen, Blu-Ray, 6GB of 1333 DDR3 and the 720 1.6 i7 CPU, but the graphics are the 4670.

 

I can't actually see anywhere on our G860 pages that it is listed as anything other than a GTX 280M card. If it is then it is a mistake (could you drop me a PM where you found it and we will happily correct!).

 

Sorry, I should have said the laptop overview. I got it from here: http://www.kobaltcomputers.co.uk/notebooks.php

Copy paste again: "NVIDIA® GeForce™ GTX 280 1GB Graphics Card"

 

I'd rather a Clevo or Compal than some flimsy, plasticy piece of crap from Acer, MSI or Dell.
My Compal IFL90 has survived being dropped twice and still plays UT3 at ultra settings, native resolution (1440x900), ~30fps.

Oh and I bought it two years ago for ~£1100. Two. Years ago.

Meanwhile, my friend who bought her Acer gaming laptop less than a year ago has been plagued with problems from the outset, from an overheating GPU to a randomly self-throttling CPU, due to poor assembly at the factory.
Just one of countless horror stories I've heard or witnessed with Acer laptops.

Give me a cheap Compal or Clevo gaming laptop over some flashy, gimmicky, flimsy Acer, MSI or Dell any day.

 

Ok thanks.. we have amended that page