GTX 765M in 2024 – 10 Year Old Gaming Laptop Revisited, E-Waste or Gaming Beast?

In this episode of what old gaming tech has my friend left at my house, we have this, a Chillblast branded Clevo gaming laptop. This bad boy hails from around 2013, making it 11 years old now. Spec wise it’s pretty mid-range, featuring an Intel i7-4700MQ, 8GB of DDR3-1600 RAM, a 512GB SSD that might be a post-purchase addition, and most importantly anyway, an NVIDIA GTX 765M GPU with 2GB of GDDR5 VRAM. That would have been pretty decent for it’s day, but 11 years on, in 2024, how usable actually is this? Let’s take a look, and see just how much improvement there was between that hunking behemoth, the Asus G53J, and this, much smaller portable gaming machine!

Let’s start with the physical. This is a Clevo W230ST chassis – Clevo being one of the largest laptop OEMs, especially among those “customisable” laptops from system integrators like Chillblast, PC specialist, or people like Cyberpower. Especially in this era, if you ordered a “custom” gaming laptop from an SI, chances are it was a Clevo machine. They are sold barebones, ie without RAM, storage, and sometimes even things like WiFi cards. You then spec what you want from their configurator, they stick the appropriate parts in, then ship it to you. This machine looks to have been specced with 8GB of Corsair Vengeance DDR3-1600 RAM, which would have been decent, but not amazing for the time. Interestingly, one of the perks of this being a ‘customisable’ laptop means that Clevo designed this to be really easy to get into and replace parts like storage and RAM, designing a big hatch that just needs a couple screws taken out, then there’s even a handy finger-pry-spot to pop it off. That’s something I sorely miss on more modern machines… 

This still isn’t exactly the thinnest machine on the block – it’s worlds slimmer and lighter than the G53J, for sure, making for a genuinely compact and portable machine, but it’s no thin-and-light. IO is decent, with three USB 3 ports on the right, along with HDMI, VGA, ethernet and DC in, then just one USB 2 port on the left, along with headphone and microphone jacks. Having the majority of the IO on the right isn’t exactly ideal for a gaming laptop, and it’s something we’ve generally moved away from these days, but there is actually some thought behind why that is the case. The frankly terrible cooling solution, comprising of a single fan, just two heat pipes, and one heatsink, expels the hot air out the left hand side of the laptop, which at very least keeps the heat away from your right hand while gaming. It isn’t perfect – most machines these days prefer rear-facing exhausts and left sided IO, but still.

Creaking the plastic clam shell open, ignoring the horrible texture of degrading soft-touch plastic on the lid, you’re greeted with a pretty early 2010’s look. Wide bezels, 16:9 display, a normal keyboard, and a comically small trackpad. Admittedly, this is all very usable, if not quite as good as today’s machines – especially on the trackpad front. This doesn’t seem to support gestures, which makes scrolling in particular a pain, although there is a pretty strong expectation that you’ll be using this with a mouse, especially since the battery that’s in here is fully dead. Like, if I unplug the power cord, the laptop turns off. She’d dead jim. It is a removeable part though, so you certainly could just replace it if you wanted. 

What interests me the most about these old machines is seeing how they fare under load – both on the CPU for productivity and creative type stuff, and of course for gaming too. On the CPU front, this 4700MQ is a quad core (as everything was until worryingly recently, thanks AMD) with hyperthreading. It seems to suck back about 50 watts, which is an awful lot for this cooling solution. Performance wise you can expect much better results than the 740QM in the G53J – in fact around twice the performance in multi-threaded, and nearly twice the single threaded performance too. I guess that’s what a four generation leap should look like! In Blender it’s about the same – actually a touch better – going from nearly 30 minutes in the BMW scene, to a bit over 12 minutes, compared to a modern machine taking just 92 seconds. That’s still more than twice as fast as the 740QM, so that’s a win. The Gooseberry scene still did take an eternity, at around an hour, compared to two hours on the G53J, or 8 and a half minutes on the new i9. Still, that’s a hell of a lot of progress.

And with that much progress on the CPU front, you’d have to assume that a three generation leap in GPUs would mean considerably more performance in games too, right? Well…. No. At 1080p on all low settings, the 765M in this thing does outperform the GTX 460M in the G53J, but not by all that much. CS2 has the 765 at just shy of 60 FPS on average, compared to just under 50 from the 460, which does make it technically playable, although it really isn’t a great experience with hitching and stuttering like mad. Siege is almost identical, except it is actually a little more stable, seeing again just shy of 60 FPS average compared to just under 50 FPS on the G53J, but of course both pale in comparison to a modern machine that’ll run you well into the hundreds of FPS. Anything more intensive though and you run into issues. Shadow of the Tomb Raider, which isn’t exactly the most intensive game on the planet anyway, ran at just 20 FPS average on this thing. That is an improvement over the 17 FPS the G53J eked out, but it’s just not playable. It’s not even worth opening it, because it honestly feels like a slideshow. 

One rather telling thing is that when I tried to run Aperture Grille’s Smooth Frog tool to see just how bad the display was for motion clarity, it just wouldn’t run smoothly at all. It would hitch to the point of being useless, even at the lowest graphical settings and the fastest motion per frame. It just won’t run normally. That’s the sort of performance you can expect here. I think this, much like the G53J, is past its best-before date. That doesn’t mean it’s e-waste, as a documents/web browsing machine it does work just fine. The display is actually remarkably nice for viewing content on, even if it isn’t a great gaming display. I’m pretty sure it’s an IPS panel, which looks pretty nice. It’s far from perfect, but it’s definitely good. That, combined with the decent enough keyboard, make it a nice little work machine. It’s not super fast, but it’ll do. For gaming though? Yeah that’s a no from me. Sure, if you wanna play Stardew, go right ahead. But anything 3D? I’ll pass.