Optimus V 17.3 inch laptop review - part 1

TheGSL

Silver Level Poster
Optimus V 17.3 inch review

Pre-amble

This is my first computer from PC Specialist (from here on pcs). In fact, before the end of September 2013 / early October 2013, I hadn’t even heard of them. I haven’t read the paper UK pc magazines in a long time, as I don’t feel there is any need anymore, the internet more that serves my needs for information, free, and from a variety of trusted sources. When I started to look in earnest for a new laptop in early October 2013, I could not find anyone close to pcs in terms of price, I was aware of the likes of Cyberpower and OverclockersUK and Scan, and have used the latter two previously for orders. Because I had not heard of pcs before, I did some research, Trust Pilot amongst others, but I could not really find anything that suggested pcs were untrustworthy, so I took the plunge and ordered from them. Before I ordered I sent two emails as enquiries to see how they fielded them. True to their goal, they answered them both within 48 hours - just. I was happy to proceed at that point. Furthermore, their website is nice and clean and simple, without silly logos or adverts popping up in places, which is a large point in their favour for me.

October 4th, 2013 – the order

I placed my order on the evening of Friday, October the 4th, 2013. I ordered a 17.3 inch Optimus V, quad core 2.4 ghz cpu, 765m nvidia gpu 2gb ddr5 ram, 4 gb 1600 ghz ram, 500 mb 5200 rpm hd, no os, £5 silver service, £5 glossy screen, absolutely no other extras. The price was unbeatable – just under 740 ukp. I was happy with the price. I could have had the 15 inch version for less, however, I wanted a 17 inch chassis and screen, as this is a desktop replacement and there are a lot of hot components in a confined space, the 17 inch chassis is possibly a degree or two cooler by default. The chassis is Clevo as everyone will know – my last Clevo chassis was my Rock XCT in January 2006, which is still going strong with xp on it, an excellent machine albeit it did break down after 9 months, and had to go back for a new gpu, which Rock sorted without too many problems. There is no doubt that there is some of the xct dna in the Optimus Clevo chassis, but that is not a bad thing, I like them – having to press fn & f1 to turn off the touchpad is a throwback to the xct, I would have hoped for a bios option now, but it’s no biggie. The bios otherwise is fairly standard.

I was kept up to date by pcs by a) checking the website for the status of the order and b) receiving emails. I have never spoken to anyone there in person on the ‘phone – I have not had the need to. I ordered then simply waited to receive my order, no mithering, nothing. I did receive my order on Friday the 18th of October, after some very good clear emails about dpd delivering my order, and how to track it etc., which I did, and it all went perfectly in truth, no complaints at all. Two weeks from ordering to receiving my order was quicker than I expected, and I was very pleased.

The laptop was well packaged, in the large outer box, then packaging, then the smaller laptop box, along with the good advice to keep the packaging in case of returns etc. (or for that matter selling the laptop in future, something I did with my previous laptop, an Asus N55SF, a very good machine that paid for more than half of the Optimus when sold.)

Taking the Optimus out of the packaging, I liked the looks of it. I had of course seen the pictures on the website of it, but in the flesh it is a smart machine, charcoal grey, excellent Chiclet keyboard that I am typing this on now (good for both typing and gaming), superb glossy screen, well worth the extra £5 pounds (one criticism of the N55SF and a lot of laptops are the matte screens, I find them dull to look at. My xct has a glossy screen, it is the best laptop screen I have ever seen, equalled only by this Optimus now.) No dead pixels either, which was nice, I was prepared for a few, but lucky.

I selected as mentioned above no os, as I have w7 ultimate 64 bit. However, I thought I would turn the machine on, as I expected to find it had a blank 500 gb hd. It booted into w7, as pcs obviously put an image on for testing, so this was a little bonus too. I had asked if it were possible to buy a laptop without any drives in them by email as I didn’t really need the hd and wanted to save the money, but was told no, so fair enough. It was good to be able to turn the machine on and see it boot and use it a little to see it all working before I set about my own installations.

It was clearly all working fine, so I flipped it over and put 2 ssds into the chassis, a 60gb Kingston as hd0: and a 128 gb Crucial as hd1: (my Amiga heritage coming out there ;-) ) I am a big fan of ssds as I expect most people on here are, they are a fantastic speed increase.

October the 18th to present ...

So, moving on, over the course of time since the 18th of October to the present really, I installed w7 64 bit ultimate, on the 60gb Kingston, left the 4gb pagefile on there too (I know there are arguments against, but I doubt there is much in it really) and installed my other junk onto the 128 gb Crucial. I am not disappointed, but the Optimus doesn’t boot quite as quickly as the Asus N55SF – I think that is down to booting off the Crucial drive, which is slightly faster I would say, if not in stats then in real world use, than the Kingston.

I am a big fan of tweaking, and really knowing the os, and how to get the most out of it. In truth, I’ve still not finished tweaking yet, mainly through being distracted playing Skyrim (more on that later) however, the fresh installation was more or less hassle free. The discs supplied by pcs are fine for the tasks of installing the drivers etc., however, there was one issue with the usb 3 drivers, which had me stumped for a day or so, until I went oldschool and used the Have Disk option to forcibly install the drivers I needed to get the ports to work, which worked fine as a result. The drivers disc supplied makes a fair jumping off point to getting better drivers. Everyone for instance updates I imagine the gpu drivers regularly, especially if they are gamers. Some drivers are less important to update.

Pcs also supply a nice handbook, about how to install w8 or 7, it looks good, not needed but a useful thing none the less. I would like a paper version of the manual instead of the 300 page pdf, however, I can understand why this isn’t supplied due to its size. The other disc supplied is some Nero Media Essentials cobblers, which I haven’t even bothered to put into the drive, I’m not one for bloatware or free dross.

So, the machine arrived safely, well on time, and worked fine. The gtx 765 gpu seems very capable, and I think is very good value for money, the same spec machine (albeit a different chassis, the Skyfire III or whatever it’s called) would have cost about 220 more, just for a gtx 770, which I thought was not as good value, and I didn’t like the chassis as much either. Having said that, to be able to get a 770m in a laptop for under a grand is excellent overall, again, I do not know of anyone else who could match pcs on that price.

The quad cpu is fairly quick too, I monitor it and the gpu for temperatures when they have been stressed and the load on them, mainly after Skyrim, but they are fine, (this is the main demanding task I put on the hardware, gaming, though other readers may use demanding productivity software.) However, the dreaded fans do come on. And in truth, what of them? I expected fans to be on the laptop and audible, they have been on every laptop I have ever owned. The noise is fine when gaming, I can certainly put up with it. The 4 gb of ram is more than enough for gaming, with there being typically 1gb spare when running Skyrim, though as stated, my system is tweaked, you might have a load of junk running in the background.

There used to be an option on my old xct to press fn and f2 to put the fans on full blast when required permanently, and they really were noisy then, but it meant there was maximum cooling going on. I have a Cooler Master 17 inch laptop cooler but I do not use it for the Optimus at the moment, instead I have it resting on two custom cut pieces of 2 by 1, which provide a perfect inch high gap under the machine for airflow. I would recommend some kind of support under the machine, as the rubber feet that are on the bottom are inadequate in my opinion in terms of raising the machine up to a great enough height for ventilation purposes, maybe lifting it about 2 mm in total.

continued in part 2
 
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TheGSL

Silver Level Poster
Optimus V 17.3 inch laptop review - part 2

continued from part 1

The chassis is fairly robust it seems to me, no flexing in it, and I have large hands and heavy arms, but so far nothing but support. When I had the machine apart in order to put the ssds in it looked well enough constructed, and I think the casing was painted with graphite internally, though I might be imagining that. There were no rough edges or untoward mouldings.

If the small rubber feet are a very little criticism, a larger one would be the optical drive. It works but it is very noisy and clanky, and although it works it does not seem very healthy. However, it is working, but it is somewhat flimsy feeling. The next criticism, probably the biggest one, is of course … the ‘premium’ Onkyo speakers. Now, I was aware of this issue before I bought via the forums, so I do not have any complaints, just pointing it out for this review.

The speakers are garbage. No matter what you do with them software wise, they will not sound very good. I can tolerate them, and they work, and I use headphones anyway for gaming. Software wise, the Via drivers were somewhat tricky, they were installed fine on the pcs image on the original harddrive, but were a lot more problematic in installing for me. However, I did play around with them, and the included Soundblaster Cinema software too. Nothing I have tried thus far has improved the sound, except uninstalling the Via drivers and using the Microsoft default hd sound drivers, which seem to work better, and louder, when all enhancements are disabled. If anyone has any advice or links to good drivers that will make a difference then, literally, I am all ears ;-)

I think, really, the above three things are about all I could pick the Optimus up on, and in truth, they are not pcs’ doing, the feet, or the speakers, maybe the optical drive, but as I say it does work, it just doesn’t look, sound or feel very healthy. It’s no problem though really, unless it stops working.

The speakers do of course work, though, and I can live with them on the occasion when I put sound through them. The alternative is to get a decent sound card and put some decent speakers on it. For the price I have paid for this machine I am really not complaining. My old N55SF had excellent, if not that loud, sound, with Bang and Olufsen speakers and a separate sub woofer, so this is a comedown. It is worth remembering that good laptop speakers and sound are not commonplace by default.

There are various features on the Optimus I have tried but will never really use, just wanted to make sure that they worked. One is the webcam – fine. Another are the web cam, mute and airplane buttons to the top left, just no need to use them. Another is the touchpad. The Synaptics software that drives it is quite decent looking if rather bloaty, the pad is permanently disabled through f1 & fn as mentioned at the start from boot, but it worked well and had some fancy features, well, for me anyway, but I am a dyed in the wool mouse user.

All the usb ports worked once the correct drivers were installed, you get a single usb 2 and 3 usb 3 ports, one of which doubles as a sata port too. Not tried the hdmi port, or the memory card reader either, see no reason to doubt they will work if ever used. There is some slight thought gone into putting all the ports on either sides too, with just the psu and vga out on the back of the machine. The microphone just above the touchpad works, but again, it’s never going to be used. Looks like it might gather gunk if you’re not careful. The laptop is connected via lan cable to the internet, and the lan works and runs fine, everything as you would expect, out of the box.

I use the machine for 4 things really – a) gaming b) internet c) tweaking d) work, which is word processing mainly. It hammers all four with nary a whisper, apart from gaming. New games will turn the fans on, older games like Unreal Tournament 2004, even with everything turned up to 11 do not trouble the cpu/gpu/fans in the slightest. I do not have anything newer than Skyrim to really test it graphically, but for those who are interested, it defaults to ultra settings, and then tweaking the .ini files a bit more easily puts out between 30 to 200 plus fps, depending on the complexity of what you are looking at, in full 1080p resolution. I am not running any mods with Skyrim at the moment either. It looks spectacular, and ultimately, this is what you want your cpu and gpu grunt for, to grind out beautiful graphics whilst keeping a good frame rate. With headphones on it sounds fine too, and can be too loud when set to maximum. I am looking forward to playing Elite: Dangerous on it next year, that should test it a little more.

I’ve been using the laptop solidly since it arrived, so all the above is not an abstract test feature, it is based on real world use and ownership. The optimus feature, switching between graphics cards depending on load, works fine, either the orange led is on for the 765m or the green is on (like now) for the intel on chip, which uses less juice. This is a desktop replacement as stated, so it is permanently plugged in, I’ve only had it on battery once or twice, and that will be it, but it all worked fine. I’ve played with the power settings too in control panel, but decided against the old core parking tweak, or non-tweak (see tweakhound for more) and left the minimum cpu state when plugged in as 5 percent – see no reason to overly stress the cpu, I am happy it runs flat out when needed judging by the results of process explorer.

No parts of the chassis seem to get too hot to me, the obvious bits are the cpu/gpu areas but they are okay, and the hd bays a little, but nothing unbearable at all. The psu supplied is quite small physically, it seems to cope, and gets hot when I’ve been gaming, but so far no problems, I would have preferred it to have had an led on it so that it is clear when it is plugged in and on, but again, it’s minor really. The screen as stated is fantastic, lovely and bright (turned down to 90 percent in power options) – I can’t fault it, but I can’t fault the Optimus at all seriously, only praise it.

Post-amble

I received another couple of emails from pcs after receiving my order. One was how to claim a free 8gb usb memory stick, by filling in a bit of feedback, which I duly did and a few days later I received my stick, which works fine, thank you very much, excellent! Another email was about cancelling the insurance policy I took out for free for a month on the machine, which by clicking on a link again was cancelled.

Conclusion

In short, PC Specialist have been exemplary in their service regarding this order. The product itself is excellent in quality, recommended very highly in terms of features and price, and the lines of communication between the company and this customer have been faultless.

Disclaimer – in no way am I affiliated to PC Specialist, the company, or any of its employees. No pictures are necessary for this review, there are plenty on the internet already.
 
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daveeb

Enthusiast
I enjoyed reading that, good review ! Also I had been asking on the forums about the month free insurance and you've even answered that question for me ! Please have some rep.
 

TheGSL

Silver Level Poster
Update - 01/01/14

I re-contacted PC Specialist via email regarding the version of the bios in my Optimus V that I received in October 2013.

After a couple of emails from PCS asking what bios version I had etc. they dispatched a bootable usb stick to me free of
charge with an updated bios on it.

I duly updated the bios and it was fine. This cost me nothing and the service again was excellent from PC Specialist, after
sales customer care cannot be faulted thus far. The entire process took a couple of days from start to finish.

I even got to keep the usb memory stick, which was 8gb, so that's 2 I've had from them now, wonderful!

I hope this is of use/interest to people.

TheGSL.
 
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