Why I'll never buy another Clevo laptop (Clevo PB51RF-G rant)

Last year I was in desperate need to replace the laptop which I had bought in 2013. Although that laptop was still zippy enough, it had developed a number of faults, including a partially defective mainboard where pressing to one side of the keyboard would randomly disconnected and reconnect USB devices on one side. Thus it was that I decided to splurge on a new laptop from Schenker (MySN, now BestWare), as part of their XMG range of gaming laptops.

Expecting to use this laptop for at least six years like my old laptop, I wanted something that would still be relevant by then, so Intel graphics were out. The XMG Pro 15 laptop that I ended up getting is a rebadged Clevo PB51RF-G. Clevo is a large OEM who design and manufacture basic laptop configurations which can then be customised by assemblers and sold to end-users.

The laptop as I ordered it features an Intel Core i7 8750H (6 core/12 thread), 16 GB dual-channel DDR4, 15" 144 Hz FHD display, NVidia RTX2060 video card and a 250 GB Samsung 970 Evo NVME (PCIe x4) SSD. All for a cool 2,000 Euro. Upon receiving it, I intended to add a 2 TB 2.5" HDD for additional storage. That is also where the problems started.


Whoever designs these Clevo laptops really hates end-users. Although marketed as being end-user upgradable, the actual procedure for getting this laptop open involved removing a whole range of screws from the bottom, then hidden screws underneath the keyboard which required forceful removal of the keyboard. Instructions for this procedure are few and far between and required me to first figure out which Clevo model it is so that I could track down disassembly instructions. Two days after I had received the laptop the SATA HDD was installed.

The BIOS on these Clevo laptops is utter trash. I thought I had seen useless barebones BIOSes after more than two decades of messing with DIY and OEM systems, but this one takes the cake. Providing only the most minimalistic UEFI BIOS, it makes it impossible to install anything but Windows 10 or a Linux distribution which offers an installer that does not rely on any 'legacy' features in the BIOS like a VGA driver. There are barely any options in the BIOS to configure... well, anything really. I guess it does allow you to change the boot order. Yay.

The keyboard.... it's junk. It's a cheap chiclet keyboard with horrible squishy tactile response and all the flex in the world. After a few months of use some of the printed-on letters began to wear off already. It's got RGB lighting embedded in it, which courtesy of the worst BIOS in the world cannot be disabled, will always start full blast on every boot in the most annoying sparkly rainbow fashion possible. It makes me ashamed to turn the system on in public because of how garish it looks.


After installing Windows 10 on it, performance was poor. Despite all the tweaking that the crippled BIOS allows, the system would soon start chugging while performing a few parallel tasks, like browsing in Firefox and editing a document in LibreOffice while running a compilation (single thread) in the background. When after a few months of this I was able to get my 2015-era PC (Skylake i7 6700K-based) back out of storage and use it as my main system again I was surprised at how zippy this PC feels, despite having only HDDs and zero SSDs, SATA or NVME.

The final kick in the teeth was the battery life. Despite using Windows 10 and confirming that the Optimus switching between the NVidia GPU and built-in Intel graphics worked as intended, battery life when using the most frugal battery life settings was even worse than that of my old 17" gaming laptop that used to get just under 2 hours of battery life when I set Windows 7 to use its 'low power use' profile. On this Clevo laptop I can get an hour if I'm lucky, rather nuking the point of going with a smaller display and it being a laptop.


In hindsight I should probably have returned the laptop in disgust shortly after receiving it, but personal circumstances didn't allow for this and part of me was happy to not be using a slowly dying laptop any more, so that I ended up just living with the frustrations. That said, I'm at the point now after more than a year with this laptop where I would gladly sell it for any reasonable offer.

This isn't just buyer's remorse, but more like feeling frustrated at having bought something that is so clearly a very expensive lemon and a joke of a laptop. Even if I cannot find another victi^Wsucker^Wbuyer for this laptop, I'm sorely tempted to get a new laptop once I got the funds scraped together. Just so that I can use a laptop that gets 8+ hours of battery life, doesn't have anaemic IO performance, a fatally crippled BIOS and the worst RGB keyboard joke ever inflicted on an end-user.

And it sure as heck will not be a Clevo laptop again. Because clearly they are the burning trash fires of the laptop world which make me dearly wish that I had just gotten a Dell or Lenovo instead.


Maya