This is the same Tongfang chassis as the Eluktronics Prometheus XVII, it’s the Infinity M7 here in Australia, and it offers some of the best gaming performance I’ve ever seen from any gaming laptop.
Specs
Mine has basically max specs with 8 core Ryzen 9 5900HX processor, 32 gigs of memory, and Nvidia RTX 3080 graphics which power the 17” 1440p 165Hz screen. There are of course cheaper lower specced models though, you can check out examples with the links down in the description.
Design / Size & Weight
It’s got a black metal lid, though the logo will vary depending on who you’re buying from. The interior is also black, but it’s a kind of rubbery texture, it reminds me of the Lenovo Legion series. The laptop alone weighs 2.4kg or 5.4lb, then 3.3kg or 7.3lb with the 230 watt power brick and cables for charging. It feels large for some reason, though the dimensions are quite similar to a lot of other 17” laptops.
Screen
Mine has a 17.3” 1440p 165Hz screen and we do have the option of disabling optimus after a reboot which will boost gaming performance. It’s got FreeSync, but it’s only possible to use that with Optimus enabled, so with Optimus disabled for a performance boost you miss out on FreeSync. Colour gamut wasn’t great, fine for gaming, but I’d probably be after better for content creation. It gets fairly bright at full brightness though at 380 nits. Average grey-to-grey screen response time was measured at around 7.3ms, so not quite the 6ms we need for all transitions to occur within the refresh window. When compared against others, it’s a somewhat middle of the pack result, not amazing, but also not bad. There was some minor backlight bleed, but not enough for me to actually notice during regular use, but this will vary between laptops and panels.
Camera Test
There’s a 720p camera above the screen in the middle and it has IR for Windows Hello face unlock which I found to work well. So the quality isn’t that great even with studio lighting. Here’s what it sounds like to type on the keyboard, and this is what it sounds like with the fan at full speed, so you can still hear me ok over the fan noise.
Keyboard / Touchpad
The keyboard has a single zone of RGB backlighting which illuminates all keys and secondary functions. There are four levels of key brightness, and we’ve only got extremely limited effects through the software. Typing was alright, personally I don’t like the large feeling spaces between the smaller keys but that’s personal preference. There’s also RGB lighting on the corners at the back, and the software has much more customization for these than the keyboard as you can change the individual light colors. The precision touchpad is comically large. Generally I prefer a larger touchpad but this thing is insane. You can double tap the top left to disable the touchpad which turns on a light, or double tap the top right to instead disable the right half of it. This might be beneficial when typing as your right hand rests on the touchpad and triggers clicks, granted I didn’t find this to cause issues even with the full touchpad enabled as the palm rejection seemed fine, I suppose it’s for peace of mind.
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I/O Ports
The left has an air exhaust vent, USB Type-A port, and separate 3.5mm mic and headphone jacks. The right has a full size SD card slot, two USB Type-A ports and there’s an air exhaust vent on this side too. The rest of the I/O is on the back between the two air exhausts. From left to right there’s a Kensington lock, USB Type-C port, HDMI 2.1 output, 2.5 gigabit ethernet port and the power input. The Type-C port cannot be used to charge the laptop, but it offers DisplayPort output, and both it and HDMI connect directly to the Nvidia graphics. There’s no groove on the front, but the lid sticks out a little due to the angle so it’s still easy to open.
Build Quality
There’s some keyboard flex when pushing down, but no issues when actually typing. The screen has more flex than many others because the hinge is in the middle. This wasn’t really an issue in practice, but the screen could wobble a little with enthusiastic typing. Fingerprints show quite easily on the black interior, but it’s easy to clean with a microfiber cloth as it’s smooth, despite the rubbery texture.
Getting Inside + Internals
Underneath has plenty of air vents directly above the intake fans and over the heatpipes in the center. Getting inside requires taking out 12 Phillips head screws, and I found it a little challenging to remove around the back using the tools linked in the description. In doing so the back corner light covers popped off, but I found those easy to clip back on. Inside we’ve got the battery down the front, two M.2 storage slots above to the left, two memory slots near those in the middle, and WiFi 6 card over on the right, so your standard level of upgradeability.
Speakers
The speakers are on the left and right sides towards the front. They don’t sound great, below average for a gaming laptop and tinny sounding, and the latencymon results were alright.
Battery
It’s got a 62Wh battery. I’ve tested it with all RGB lighting off, background apps disabled and screen set to 50% brightness. I’ve run my YouTube playback test both with optimus enabled and disabled, and I was able to get an extra couple of hours using optimus, as the Nvidia discrete graphics alone uses more power. It’s not doing very well when compared to most other laptops tested, despite being Ryzen based, generally I’ve found Ryzen laptops to do much better but that wasn’t the case here.
Software
The control center software also lets you change between these options which control the maximum charge level to help increase battery life span, though it would have been preferable if it actually said what the charge levels are. Let’s check out thermals next. The control center software lets us change between different performance profiles, which from lowest to highest are office mode, game mode and turbo mode. We can also enable fan boost in any of these modes which sets the fans to full speed to improve cooling. While plugged into wall power we’ve also got the option of adjusting various power limit sliders for the CPU and GPU. I’ve tested with the default levels, but also with all manually set to maximum too so we can see the difference.
Thermals & Performance
It was cool enough when sitting there idle. I've run stress tests with both the CPU and GPU loaded up to represent a worst case, as well as playing an actual game. The CPU was hitting thermal throttling in most tests outside of the lowest office mode, though as shown given we have power limit control we could of course lower the temperatures at the expense of performance, just depends what the priority is. No GPU thermal throttling at least. These are the clockspeeds for the same tests. The speeds are quite decent for an 8 core processor, granted the smaller ASUS Scar 15 I recently tested with the same processor could hit higher speed at lower temps. The GPU was only hitting high power limits after we manually boost it, by default turbo mode doesn’t set it to max power. 55 plus watts on the CPU while the GPU is running above 130 is pretty decent, though we needed a cooling pad to make it happen, the model I use is linked in the description. Here’s how an actual game performs with the different modes in use, so basically no difference between game and turbo modes while office was basically offering unplayable performance, but hey I guess it’s called office mode for a reason right, no games at work! Here’s how the different modes perform in Cinebench. There’s a bit more of a difference between game and turbo modes in multicore, though single core differences were minor comparatively. The Ryzen 9 5900HX is stacking up well when compared to other laptops, only slightly behind the other two laptops I’ve tested with the same CPU, a good result if you’re after CPU performance. We don’t lose too much multicore performance when running on battery, however single core drops more sharply in comparison. The keyboard was in the low 30s when idling, so normal stuff and cool. It gets up to 10 degrees warmer on the keyboard with the stress tests now running, though game mode is even warmer despite louder fans as the performance delta is quite large, as we saw earlier. Turbo mode is similar, warm in the middle but not at all hot to the touch, let’s have a listen to fan noise. It sounded silent to me when idling, and it’s still relatively quiet with the stress tests in office mode too. Game mode was much louder comparatively, then turbo was only a little louder. In this specific test it was actually hitting max fan speed anyway, because it was the same volume whether or not I turned on fan boost.
Gaming Comparison
Now let’s find out how well this laptop, compares against others in games, but use these results as a rough guide only as they were tested at different times with different drivers. I’ve tested Battlefield 5 in campaign mode at ultra settings, and the Infinity M7 / Prometheus is highlighted in red. It’s giving me the second highest average frame rate I’ve ever recorded from any gaming laptop in this test, a very impressive result thanks to the high end CPU and GPU combination in my unit. Shadow of the Tomb Raider was tested with the games benchmark tool with the highest setting preset. It’s still in second place out of the same selection of laptops, the RTX 3080 with reasonable power limit does indeed seem quite capable here, too bad I don’t yet have enough data for 1440p comparisons as these screens are still relatively new. Far Cry 5 was also tested with the games benchmark tool at max settings. It drops down a few places now, this test typically depends more on the processor, but that said it’s still the highest result I’ve recorded from any Ryzen laptop, so it may just be that the test favours Intel machines given 8 core Intel laptops with lower tier GPUs are ahead of it. Now for the benchmarking tools, I’ve tested Heaven, Valley, and Superposition from Unigine, as well as Firestrike, Timespy and Port Royal from 3DMark, just pause the video if you want a detailed look at these results.
Content Creation
Adobe Premiere was tested with the Puget Systems benchmark, and this laptop is giving me one of the best results so far, basically tied with the ASUS Scar 15 just above it with similar hardware. Adobe Photoshop generally depends more on processor performance, and the 5900HX is doing very well here, at the top making it the fastest laptop I’ve got data for in this test. DaVinci Resolve is more GPU heavy, and despite the fairly high wattage 16 gig 3080 it’s down a few places now, though still one of the better results. I’ve also tested SPECviewperf which tests out various professional 3D workloads.
Storage Testing (SSD/SD Card)
The drive speed for the 1TB NVMe M.2 SSD was doing alright, but results will vary based on what you select when buying in the case of Eluktronics. The SD card slot was doing fairly well, but the card sticks out a fair bit so be careful not to knock it.
Linux Support
I booted an Ubuntu 20 live CD to test Linux support and most things worked, including keyboard, touchpad, camera, speakers and WiFi. You can still use the keyboard to adjust key brightness, and technically you could adjust performance modes in BIOS, I’m not sure about doing that through software for Linux.
BIOS
The BIOS was pretty standard, pretty much everything here could be done through Windows with the software, including changing light effects, performance modes and swapping between optimus enabled or disabled.
Pricing & Availability
Let’s discuss price, you can check the links in the description for updated prices, as these will change over time. At the time of recording, in the US the Eluktronics Ryzen 4800H model with RTX 3060 starts at $1700 USD, while the highest they offer is with 5800H and 3080 graphics for $2600. Here in Australia the Infinity M7 is $4300 AUD for the model I’ve tested, so definitely not cheap, but that’s expected for top end hardware, there are of course cheaper options too.
Conclusion
Overall the laptop is alright, but there are some things to be aware of. The main things that concern me were that the battery life isn’t great, the speakers aren’t very good and it can run hot, though we do have the option of adjusting power limit sliders in the software which most laptops don’t even give us the option of, so if you really do care about lower temperatures it should be possible to achieve them by lowering the power limits, of course at the expense of performance. As we’ve seen, performance in games and content creator workloads with these high end specs is great, and presumably that would translate to the lower specced models too. I’m not personally a fan of the spacing between the keys and that gigantic touchpad, but a mouse does solve one of those, and RGB corners should give you an epic performance boost. If you’re fine with those caveats and after a 17” laptop then there’s not much else to complain about, it just comes down to price and what else is available.
By Take Care ❤️