By Brian Westover The Digital Storm Krypton ($2,297, as tested) poses a common question for mobile gamers. What's more important in a gaming laptop, the total package or pure performance? While we grapple with this quandry every time we review a new gaming machine, the answer here is clear. The Krypton focuses on high performance, thanks to an overclocked Intel Core i7-4810MQ processor and a new Nvidia GeForce GTX 880M graphics card. Other systems may be prettier, or offer more storage and entertainment options, but as far as pure gaming power, the Krypton delivers. It's enough to make the Digital Storm Krypton our Editors' Choice for midrange gaming laptops.
Design
Measuring 1.81 by 16.3 by 11.3 inches (HWD) and weighing 9.1 pounds, the Krypton is a big laptop that packs some potent hardware. The design itself is a bit generic, though. The Clevo chassis looks just like those we've seen from other manufacturers, and the black plastic with a matte finish isn't particularly exciting.
The 17.3-inch display has a 1,920-by-1,080 resolution, providing full HD support. With an anti-glare finish, there are no issues with reflectivity, though the blacks aren't quite as dark or rich as you might see on other displays. The accompanying audio—pumped out of two Onkyo speakers set just below the display and an integrated subwoofer on the underside of the chassis—is quite good, thanks to a Soundblaster X-Fi 3 sound card. The Krypton also adds amplification to the headphone output, which will help headset wearers to hear every little effect, from the crunch of footsteps to the staccato beat of enemy fire.
The keyboard offers plenty of room
for typing and gaming, and it features square keys—adjacent to one another instead of spaced out, like on a chiclet-style keyboard—with blue LED backlighting. The touchpad just below has a glowing insignia across its surface, which rotates through several colors. The mouse features separate right and left buttons, with a fingerprint reader nestled between them for easy, secure logins.
Features
On the sides and rear of the Krypton, you'll find all manner of ports and connectors. On the right is a tray-loading Blu-ray player/DVD burner, along with several audio connections (for headphones, a mic, and external speakers), and a USB 2.0 port. On the left are two USB 3.0 ports, a combination USB/eSATA port, a Gigabit LAN port, a multiformat card reader (SD/MMC/MS), and a FireWire 800 port. The FireWire port is a head scratcher, not only because it's a bit out of date, but also because the port on our review unit protrudes slightly, just begging to get snagged on something.
The rear of the chassis has a 4-pin power connector, an HDMI port, a DisplayPort, and a mini-DisplayPort. For wireless connectivity, there's Bluetooth 4.0 and dual-band 802.11ac Wi-Fi.
The Krypton has both 250GB solid-state drive (SSD) for booting and a larger 750GB, 7,200rpm hard drive. The laptop is refreshingly free of any bloatware. All you'll find when you first boot up are Windows 8.1 (64-bit), drivers and utilities for sound, and Nvidia GeForce Experience, which serves as the control center for the Nvidia graphics card. Recently added to GeForce Experience are features like ShadowPlay, which lets you record in-game video, Game Stream (for streaming your games to an Nvidia Shield), and Battery Boost, which offers dramatically improved gaming performance when the system is on battery power. Digital Storm backs up the Krypton with a three-year warranty on labor, with one-year of part replacement and lifetime tech support.
Performance
With a quad-core Intel Core i7-4810MQ (overclocked from 2.8GHz up to 3.8GHz) and 16GB of memory, the Krypton packs a punch when it comes to heavy processing. It scored 6, 375 points in PCMark 7, and cranked through our multimedia tests at a swift pace, finishing Handbrake in 33 seconds and Photoshop in 3 minutes 14 seconds. While none of these scores top the charts, they are competitive with gaming laptops that cost up to $1,000 more.
The Krypton is outfitted with a new Nvidia GeForce GTX 880M graphics card, the same GPU seen in the Alienware 17 (2014). In 3DMark 11, the Krypton scored 11,810 points at Entry settings, and 2,943 points at Extreme settings. In gaming tests, with the resolution set to full HD and the detail settings high, it cranked through Aliens vs. Predator at 46 frames per second (fps) and scored 49fps in Heaven. This system will play almost any game you throw at it, but for smoother gameplay (up in the 60fps range), it may be best back off of the eye candy a bit. For top-of-the-line graphics support, you might want to opt for a dual-GPU system, like the Origin EON17-SLX (2014); even with the newest Nvidia card, the Krypton couldn't top the graphics might of two GPUs working in tandem.
It's not built for portability, but the Krypton lasted a decent 4 hours 7 minutes on our battery rundown test. While that amount of time won't get you very far—and gaming will shorten it considerably—it lasted a good bit longer than the 3:19 of the MSI GT70 2PC Dominator, and was hours ahead of the paltry 1:13 of the Origin EON17-SLX (2014).
Conclusion
With its potent processing and graphics performance, the Digital Storm Krypton offers a lot for its midrange price, even competing against high-end systems. While paying more will get you things like improved design and construction, or a larger hard drive, these characteristics are secondary for a lot of gamers. What you really want for your hard-earned money is gaming power, and the Digital Storm Krypton delivers. Compared with our last winner in this category, the MSI GT70 2PC Dominator, the Krypton offers superior performance in several areas—graphics and gaming, battery life, and productivity—for nearly the same price.
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