Think a laptop is supposed to be a Light
and portable PC? Think again. iBuyPower’s CZ-17 is neither of those things.
With a carry weight of almost 11 pounds and dimensions measuring 16.9x11.3x2.2
inches, this thing is huge and friggin’ heavy. Imagine lugging around a
dumbbell in your pack all day and you’ll catch our drift.
The
Incredible Hulk Of Laptops
AestheticalLy, the CZ-17 Looks eerily
similar to our MSI GT60 zero-point Laptop (reviewed December 20121 except
super-sized with a 17.3-inch display. The 1920x1080, LED-backlit monitor
features a nice matte finish, which nicely diminishes glare. The TN panel
exhibits a slight shimmer when viewed more than 45 degrees off-axis, but a
crowd of three people won’t have issues watching a movie together on it. While
the CZ-17s chassis looks an awful lot Like the GT6O with its edgy contours and
cut-off corners, it doesn’t feature the zero-point’s gaudy-colored LEDs.
Instead, blue is the color of choice here. Everything from the speakers and
trackpad to the keyboard and lines are laced in blue luminance, only
iBuyPower’s beast logo on the top cover differs, with its red hue.
Under the bright lii’ and within the belly
of the beast lies a 2.4GHz Intel Core i7-36300M CPU, Nvidia GeForce GTX 680M
GPU, and 16GB of RAM. In terms of storage, the CZ-17 features a 120GB SSD a
7,200rpp 750GB hard drive. This duo allows the Laptop to boot Windows 8 in 26
seconds, which is fair.
This
duo allows the Laptop to boot Windows 8 in 26 seconds, which is fair.
The CZ-17 traded minor blows with our 6T60s
slightly lower-clocked 2.36 Hz Core i7-36100M in our three CPU-intensive tests,
but where it really stood out was in the graphics department. In our 3DMark 11
performance benchmark, iBuyPowers laptop performed an astonishing 95 percent
better than MSI’s counterpart. The gap only increased in our STALKER: CoP
benchmark, where the CZ-17 simply decimated the GT6O by more than 112 percent.
At first we thought we had made a testing error, thinking that a 680M couldn’t
be that much beefier than a 670M, but when we ran the benchmarks again, the
same results came up. Playing Counter-Strike: Global Offensive and Dota 2,
performance on the CZ-17 was silky-smooth, consistently staying above 60fps with
everything maxed out. It just goes to show you how Nvidia’s higher-end 680 GPU
and refined 28nm Kepler architecture really do make a substantial difference in
the graphics department.
In terms of battery life, the CZ-17 fell
short of MSI’s 15.6-inch laptop by almost 30 minutes, but considering the
laptop has a larger screen, you can’t expect the same power consumption.
Regardless, in our battery rundown test, the CZ-17 lasted two hours and 40
minutes, which should be enough for most movies, provided you don’t watch only
Peter Jackson films.
There
are plenty of outputs and inputs available around the Valkyrie, covering all of
your needs from USBs to full audio out. As well as a lot of venting holes for
the powerful components.
One feature we didn’t care for was the
trackpad. On paper, it sounds great: multitouch with touch-to-zoom. The problem
is that the touch-to-zoom is super choppy and unresponsive and if you
accidentally have a second finger touching the pad, it becomes confused.
Luckily, we were able to disable multitouch with a driver update given to us
directly from iBuyPower. The bigger annoyance actually pertains to the buttons
below the trackpad, which require a ridiculous amount of pressure to click.
People with weak fingers should not apply.
Of course, this criticism may not matter
because this extremely heavy laptop is clearly best used as a portable gaming
desktop (i.e., with a mouse). If you were hoping to buy a light and portable
gaming laptop for on the go play, you should definitely look elsewhere;
however, if all you’re looking for is something to lug in your car when you
drive to the nearest LAN party, the CZ-17 is certainly a solid solution.
