In this article, I give you my Computer Upgrade King P955ER review with specs included. You know I have no bones with paying less for more. And that’s what you get here with this cleveo chassis.
And it’s not just any cleveo chassis though you can get a clean watch a seize from a lot of different makers we’ll talk about in a minute. This is computer upgrade King’s own p9 55 er house brand gaming laptop.
So they’ve been supplying a lot of the gaming laptops as launders that we’ve been reviewing Lading lately. Including the MSI gs70 gigabyte arrow 15 X. This competes with that with those as well as with the razor blades.
Up this starts at $15.99 pretty decently configured too. And they also have a p9 50 model which is $14.99. Slight difference in the display. The cheaper one has a TN panel 120 Hertz slightly wider color gamut. This one’s an IPS 144 Hertz panel.
So that’s a pretty cutting edge spec there but the rest of this is pretty much your standard 2017 gaming laptop. In terms of design the bezels are not super skinny on this you don’t have a unibody design like you’d see in something more expensive which is totally fair right.
Because you can spend two thousand twenty five hundred dollars easily on those competitors. Yeah it’s pretty light to four point three seven pounds which is one point nine eight kilograms. It’s less than an inch thick unless bout it 20 millimeters or so a little bit less.
Not bad we’re gonna look at it now. So for those of you who are not gaming laptop geeks and aficionados cleveo is what we call an OD M original device makers.
So they make these laptop chassis. So boutique brands small computer shops can sell it on to their own label and they can put their own branding on it change the software a little bit maybe order with different specifications.
The core stuff is always gonna be the same though. Yeah whether it’s an origin or a pro star or any of the other brands that are selling this. The keyboard the chassis the core i7 – 8750 H CPU the nvidia gtx 1070 max-q are gonna be the same.
The hard drive the SSD can vary on it in. The ram capacity will vary you get the idea there. And our model has a 15.6-inch IPS 144-hertz display like I said. It’s actually the same exact LG panel model that’s used in the razorblade 15.
But clearly when cleveo sourcing these that they probably are saying we’ll take the ones that didn’t rank quite as well. Because it doesn’t look as good as the razor blade 15 that we have in-house. And the metrics aren’t quite as good either.
I mean it’s not a terrible display but it just doesn’t have that without the razor. But it really looks nice when you look at it. This one looks like yeah it’s a decent gaming laptop display. You can see the metrics on screen and it’s all fairly respectable stuff.
You’ve got nearly full srgb coverage there. The black levels are you know we’re particularly poor. Which means the blacks. Don’t get really black they’re kind of like a gray dark gray color instead.
Which influences the way the panel is going to look. In terms of light blue that’s not bad at all. So for all the chorus specs you can see those on screen right now. Again core i7 all the way until 8th generation 45 watts 6 core CPU inside.
Which is the current part for the chorus for gaming laptops and higher and mobile workstations. Has to RAM slots a maximum of 32 gigs of RAM. You have an m2 SSD slot compatible with nvme ssds and that’s how computer upgrade King equips it.
And there’s a hard drive bay as well as you can get with a 5400 or a 7200 rpm hard drive. You know as Intel 95 60 AC Wi-Fi which is nice. It’s a little bit bump up from the lower and current generation Wi-Fi card.
That’s gigabit Wi-Fi and you’ve got real tech Gigabit Ethernet onboard as well. A full set of ports. You get us BC here Gen 2 but not Thunderbolt 3. And for this price yeah it’s pretty fair.
The keyboard is RGB backlit. It is zoned backlit it’s not / key not each individual key again. At this price it’s fine. This is sort of you know if you think of the MSI stealth pro not the stealth in. But the stealth pro that was available last year it competes with that. In some ways it’s really more of a direct competitor with the Asuza rogue Zephyrus GM 501.
This Alain kind of goes with the last year chassis thing where you still have a hard drive bay you have the bigger bezels you getting the idea there. You get the zoom back with sort of keyboard. As the keyboard goes it’s actually pretty nice.
Has a good amount of travel and fairly nice tactile feel. I have no complaints about it. And the to button dedicated buttons on the track that. I always appreciate those in the track that actually works pretty well two.
Speakers on this are actually pretty decent gives Sound Blaster X Pro Gaming 360 degrees round sound if you plug in external speakers obviously. You have separate mic and headphone jacks and that supports s/pdif optical out for those of you who are into that for high-end audio out.
Nicer than average actually for audio quality. The benchmarks are exactly where we would expect them to be and pretty much match the competitors I’ve mentioned. So performance here is good. Cooling not so much.
When you’re gaming otherwise no but when you’re gaming boy. The underside will get hot. But then these very thin and like gaming laptops that is not unusual actually. But the core temperatures were some of the highest.
To gigabyte arrow the MSI ge62 razor blade actually their core temperatures were a little bit cooler doing the same task. Being a fire strike test or playing far cry 5 with some game and. So we were pushing right at the hundred degree centigrade maximum thermal allowable on this really very easily.
Now there are a bunch of fan profiles that you can try and you might just want to go with the max fan. Then thought max q setting is actually more aggressive than the auto fan setting go figure. Usually max Q means the quieter setting some.
That’s the default on it but you might want to actually change your fan curves and bring it up higher because that will be more effective. Also you might want to consider under vaulting using Intel XTU or throttle stuff.
Go for a negative 130 millivolts should be pretty stable and can help with a couple of degrees there. And also because this is very easy to open up you might want to consider replacing it. Because these cleveo chassis typically don’t use particularly high in thermal paste.
That could help some too. Because it definitely needs a little help. Even putting it on a laptop cooler a passive one without fans built in didn’t have a whole lot. In terms of noise well if you had those fans set high you’ll hear it has a lot of air moving.
Which is par for the course for a gaming laptop. But not really bad in any way. And not whining not squealing no annoying sounds if you know what I mean. It’s not like the previous generation razorblade 14 which really could make some pretty annoying high-pitched sound so.
I have no issues with that but you probably would want to use headphones when gaming if you’re setting it to max fans. The chassis on this is good quality. It’s not exceptional unibody fancy-pants looking cutting-edge kind of stuff here.
It’s pretty plain looking but not offensive either. And uses aluminum panels for the top for the keyboard deck and even on the underside. Its decent not there’s no creaks it’s fine yeah. Now battery life on this is again gonna be like your typical 2017 situation with thin and light gaming laptops.
Gets thin in life by reducing battery size basically. So they maintain the space to the hard drive bay which isn’t anything because gamers do tend to install games that are typically 50 gigabytes sometimes in size a piece.
But you only have a 55-watt-hour battery. It ships with a hundred fifty watt charger. Really it should be a hundred eighty watt charger with a gtx 1070 max Q and this 45-watt CPU. So yeah it might actually drain a little bit when you’re really seriously gaming.
With that 55-watt-hour battery well you know. For average productivity use we’re not talking gaming here you’re going to maybe get four hours and that’s about it. Obviously, it’ll be less when you’re gaming but like all current-generation laptops it also steps down the CPU and the GPU pretty hard to actually stop it from doing that.
So it’s not gonna run in full throttle. That’s not its fault that’s just the way the platform works these days but yeah. So battery life this is not long battery life.
If you’re looking for something longer battery life it’s back to some more expensive products like the MSI gs70 nor perhaps so Dell XPS 15 if you’re not really looking for hardcore though. I think this really is for those who are looking for some pretty hardcore performance with that core i7 and with the gtx 1070 max q.
This is gonna run circles around something like a Dell XPS 15 95 70 current generation that only has an gtx 10:50 TI max q inside. This is has the chops to play most current demanding games at around 100 frames per second on high at 1080p.
So it’s it’s good stuff in terms of them. So to take the bottom cover off it’s pretty easy. Just undo all the Phillips head screws. They’re all readily visible and then pull off the cover right here. And this is what the underside of the cover looks like.
It’s metal with some plastic reinforcements and insulation around the edges. And there’s our 55-watt-hour battery. Doesn’t think of a whole lot of space does it. Here’s our m2 SSD slot. And again upgrade King will sell too with variety of capacities of SSD is for your boot drive right here and hard drives too.
And that’s the hard drive caddy honestly we didn’t get a hard drive with this model. You’ve got your Wi-Fi card right there the Intel 95 60 AC. 2 Ram slots and that comes with ddr4 two six six six megahertz Ram. So maximum 32 gigs is possible here.
And you can see we have a three fan design going out. Which should be pretty good. And I like to see partial isolation of the CPU and the GPU cooling system so that they don’t pollute each other with heat.
But so like I said those core temperatures for the CPU are pretty darn toasty man. As you can see it’s pretty easy to access everything right here. If you want to take off your heatsink and repay State what have you you can do that.
Now you discerning eyes might have noticed on the cover there is actually a little nano-SIM card slot holder. A computer upgrade King doesn’t offer that option but cleveo leaves it there in case some manufacturer decides to order with that.
And really typically I haven’t seen it. But the SIM card slot would go over here and this is the connector which is not even connected to the motherboard if such a thing we’re actually available on this.
So that’s a computer upgrade King otherwise known as cuck sorry that is what it is. P 955 ER gaming laptop. And again you get a lot of bang for your buck here.
Obviously, when you care about more about performance than anything else an upgrade ability this certainly has it in spades. You’ve got the gtx 1070 max-q in here. The latest six-core i7 CPU inside a good selection of ports it’s really easy to open it up and put stuff in.
The cooling could be better on it. And this is the theme with all the intel 8th gen 45-watt CPU laptops that we’ve reviewed. But still it runs even a bit hotter in terms of poor temperatures than the gigabyte aro 15 X the MSI’s stealth in the razorblade 15 even.
But there are some tweaks you can bring those temperatures down. So yeah I mean you’re getting a lot for not too bad or price.
Computer Upgrade King P955ER
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