It is surprising that Clevo uses two variants of the GTX 980. On the one hand there is the standard model with a TDP of 180 Watt. Its size is reminiscent of the cheaper high-end siblings GTX 980M and GTX 970M and evenly fills the MXM slot. On the other hand there is the 200-Watt variant, which we had under review, which covers a port of the secondary MXM slot in the P870DM (the barebone is also available with two GTX 970M chips in SLI).

While the 200-Watt model needs - as expected - a more powerful cooling, the GeForce GTX 980 should be able to clock higher. Nvidia specifies a core clock of 1064-1190 MHz, which is almost on par with the desktop GPU's, whose reference design clocks at 1126-1216 MHz. According to GPU-Z, the GPU reaches 1228 MHz under load in the P870DM barebone, which is slightly higher. Even better: By means of the preinstalled Control Center the processor, RAM and graphics card can be further overclocked. However, depending on the barebone reseller, this can have an impact on warranty.

All our measurements were done in factory state. This also applies to the old ForceWare 355.98 GPU driver (replaced by ForceWare 358.50 in the meanwhile), which did not cause any graphics error or system crashes - and this is not to be undervalued. Due to different drivers and processors, the results of the other notebooks mentioned in this review are not fully comparable. As we reviewed a plethora of (gaming) benchmarks, the ranking and the evaluation should be meaningful, anyway.