CyberPower Xplorer X6-9200 Gaming Notebook Review - PAGE 10

As stated in at the beginning of the review, notebooks cannot be judged simply off of performance alone as there are many other determining factors at play. The most important factors usually include battery life, portability and pricing along with performance. For these reasons we examined the Xplorer X6-9200 from all angles to determine if it includes everything the mobile gaming market currently demands.

Breaking it down, let’s first look at the performance. In terms of overall computing power the Xplorer X6-9200 is an extremely well-balanced notebook. The Intel 2970QM is a snappy processor that gets the job done. Along with 8GB of memory and a 7200RPM hard drive, this pushed the X6-9200 to the top of our performance charts and kept it there when it came down to overall computing power.

The X6-9200 also did quite well in our gaming benchmarks, but the GTS450M is not designed to be a hard-core gaming solution. It was designed to offer good performance at an affordable price point, so don’t expect bleeding edge gaming power from this notebook. It will play the majority a majority of DX10 and DX11 games at or above 30FPS while gaming at 1080P. Though the GTS450M is not a gaming powerhouse, it does come with some interesting features such as NVIDIA Optimus, which improves the notebooks battery life by dynamically switching between the IGP and GPU depending on the current system load. This saves battery life when the system is being used for standard computing tasks, and boosts the rendering power while gaming.

Te X6-Xplorer showed mixed results when it came down to the battery life. CyberPower included a lithium-ion battery that can produce 4400mAh and has a Watts-per-hour rating of 47Wh. Overall this gave us about 45 minutes of power duing load off a single charge. However, we were able to get nearly two to three hours of use when running standard applications such as Word, Excel or just surfing the net. This is standard for most gaming notebooks, but it would have been nice if the battery included had a slightly higher Wh rating.

Even while the battery life could be stronger, the MSRP of the Xplorer really makes up for any shortcomings. At just $885,  the X6-9200 is one hell of a deal. We were hard pressed to find similarly performing models with the price of this unit. While the X6-9200 is not perfect, it is going to be hard for another company to beat CyberPower in this price range.

The largest issue we had with the notebook was the high gloss finish. I’ll be the first to admit that the finish looks great, but when handled it collects more fingerprints than any other product I can recall in recent history. This applies to both the inner and outer surfaces of the unit, and we had to clean off the enclosure multiple times just to keep it looking clean. This affects the appearance of the notebook, and the constant cleaning can get annoying quickly.

At just $885, the CyberPower X6-9200 is one of the best notebooks available, hands down. It offers a ton of computing power, can play most modern games at medium settings and comes loaded with features. Even while we were dissapointed with the glossy finish, it is going to be hard for another laptop to compete with the X6-9200 in this price range.