Eurocom X5 (Clevo P177SM)

Depending on reseller, you can get a variety of display panels with most Clevo systems. It’s one of the benefits to going the Clevo route—you have a lot more control over the individual components than you get with any of the bigger notebook manufacturers. Eurocom gives you three display options, all 17.3” 1080p TN panels. The standard display is a matte Chimei Innolux N173HGE, with the AUO B173HW01 available in matte (V.05) and glossy (V.04) variants for $45 extra. No matter which panel you chose, the display comes calibrated from Eurocom, a nice touch that not all resellers give you.

Our evaluation unit came with the Chimei Innolux display, but we’ve had a lot of experience with the AUO B173HW over the years as well. The V.05 matte version has been in both previous generations of Razer Blade, and Jarred reviewed the previous generation Clevo P170EM with the glossy V.04 panel.

The panel from Chimei Innolux is quite good, with great brightness and a contrast ratio on the good side of 1000:1. It’s actually the same panel that came in the GT70 Dragon, so we can see the panel-to-panel variation that exists. Color reproduction and accuracy are solid and it’s a very nice panel overall. I think the AUO is still a nicer looking panel, but you won’t miss much by skipping the option and saving that money. Both of them are TN panels, but they’re both of higher quality than you typically see in cheaper notebooks, and viewing angles are pretty solid considering that they don’t use in-plane switching or any of the other wide angle display technologies we have become accustomed to in the ultraportable space.

I’ve come to terms with the lack of IPS displays in the larger 17” gaming space; the response time of the panel tends to be more important to this market than the viewing angle, and some of the IPS panels out there on the notebook side do really suffer from sluggish response times. In smaller devices, the presence of an IPS panel basically means that there was legitimate money spent on the display and so the viewing experience won’t suffer. I can count the number of high quality 11”-15” TN panels that I’ve come across in the last four years on one, maybe two hands, and most of those are Apple notebooks (11” and 13” MacBook Airs, 13” and 15” MacBook Pros, the non-Retina ones). In the ultrabook/thin and light market, it’s almost a binary—if it’s an IPS panel, it’ll be good; otherwise it’ll be bad. That doesn’t really hold true with what I’ve seen in 17” gaming notebooks, so given that the rest of the display hasn’t suffered, I don’t think it’s too much of an issue here.