Under the hood
Let's start with a look under the hood. The Clevo D900T/SavRow K90 chassis has a number of user upgradeable components accessed through panels underneath the unit. Here's a photograph showing a couple of panels removed. I've overlaid different colours to define the sections.
Blue is where the graphics module goes. It's a user-upgradeable item which currently allows the installation of NVIDIA Quadro FX Go1400 (as tested), GeForce Go6800 or ATi MOBILITY RADEON X800. Red is over the panel that comes off to access the bay for the pair of 2.5in notebook hard disks. Green is over the memory modules, two of which are installed to give the sample its 1GB of DDR2-533 memory. In the section with a yellow overlay, the CPU heatsink is on the left, cooling the Pentium 4 in its LGA775 socket, and the quintet of copper heatpipes extend over to the right and are topped by a white thermally conductive solid material. Let's look at each in turn.
In the photograph above the heatsink for the graphics module and the module itself have been removed, exposing the bay. Two connectors at either end of the bay interface with the module, then you place the following heatsink and fan on top.
The cooler comprises an aluminium main structure with copper fin section and copper heatpipe, with a Sepa HY55A-05A-801 fan. Details for the fan are scarce and I'm unable to find a quoted figure for dBA. It's thermally controlled, spinning up to full speed only when required. At full speed, it resembles the noise the reference cooler for ATI's abortive X700 XT makes, so it's not quiet by any means. However, it rarely seems to have to spin up to full speed, even under heavy 3D load.
The photograph above shows the CPU's cooler assembly. Cooling an LGA775 Pentium 4 processor, you can see the main heatsink mass on the left, with the heat drawn away by five very long heatpipes. There's no fan in the cover that hides that area of the chassis - fans elsewhere do the required work.
The photograph above shows you the memory slot area. You can see two modules installed and the slots for two more. There's a Samlam Tech CF0550-B10M fan that cools the memory area of the chassis. It's quiet and doesn't appear to be regulated by temperature.
Lastly, you can see the chassis space for the hard disks. The photo shows you room for one more, in addition to the one that's already installed. Both are connected to the Promise 378 controller.
Overall
If the tour of the exterior exam didn't convince you that the D900T is a chassis built for power, the interior look should. The chassis is designed to use the fastest Pentium 4 processors available and take up to two hard disks, a pair of optical drives and, as stated before, your choice of an NVIDIA Quadro FX Go1400, GeForce Go6800 or ATi MOBILITY RADEON X800 for graphics. It means that the chassis is going to be big and the machine heavy.Unfortunately, things are going to get hot, too, and it's hard to think of ways to prevent that happening, short of sacrificing processor or graphics power or giving up one of the hard drives and one of the opticals. Doing any of these things defeats the whole purpose, which is to create a luggable PC that offers performance comparable to a powerful desktop machine.
More fans might be one answer but where to put them and how much extra noise would they create? Actually, although fan noise does border on the annoying at times, the unit is mostly silent even under load. Even so, I understand that some companies, such as AKASA with its AK-NBC-01 http://www.akasa.co.uk/spec/notebook_cooler/spec_ak_nbc_01.htm, are doing good business targeting users of machines like this with aluminium alloy sit-on trays with extra cooling fans.
Time for the benchmarks.
