Novatech X70 CA Pro review

The Core i7 has taken so long to arrive in a notebook friendly form. It's here now though and the Novatech X70 CA PRO has one. 

Hidden behind the 1080p, 15.6inch screen and tres chic-let keyboard of the X70 CA Pro is one of Intel's 720QM processors. That chip has four individual Nehalem hearts beating in unison beneath its silicon surface, with Hyper Threading thrown in for octo-threading abilities. 

The differences between this Clarks field chip and a desktop Core i7 sound fairly cosmetic. A slightly smaller 989 pin package reflects the specialist notebook design, and there's only 6MB of level-3 cache in this model, rather than the 8MB in the other processors, but these differences are fairly slight.

The most remarkable change is that the Thermal Design Power (TDP) rating is just 45W, compared to 130W for the desktop chip. Theoretically, this chip consumes just a third the power of the Nehalem’s we've seen so far. 

That's impressive, but the bad news is that this particular laptop still tops out at around two and a half hours of usage, although that's likely to be because of the top-end GeForce 280M graphics chip to which the CPU is coupled.

At 3.3Kg it's not the lightest 15-inch laptop around