These are the specs I configured with PC Specialist:
Chassis & Display Optimus Series: 13.3" Glossy QHD+ IPS LED (3200x1800)
Processor (CPU) Intel® Core™i7 Quad Core Mobile Processor i7-4810MQ (2.80GHz) 6MB
Memory (RAM) 2GB KINGSTON SODIMM DDR3 1333MHz (1 x 2GB)
Graphics Card NVIDIA® GeForce® GTX 860M - 2.0GB DDR5, 640 CUDA Cores - DirectX® 11
Memory - Hard Disk 2TB SERIAL ATA II 2.5" HARD DRIVE WITH 32MB CACHE (5,400rpm)
Thermal Paste ARCTIC MX-4 EXTREME THERMAL CONDUCTIVITY COMPOUND
Bluetooth & Wireless GIGABIT LAN & KILLER™ 1202 WIRELESS GAMING 802.11N + BLUETOOTH 4.0
Total cost: £895.00
Out of my own accord (because it worked out about £40-£50 cheaper I purchased 16gb of Crucial 1600Mhz RAM (2 x 8gb) and a Crucial M550 256gb MSata SSD. I'm comfortable with messing around with PC Hardware, so the swap took me about 5 minutes to do. I knew this when I purchased the laptop - would have to be insane to use this spec! 2tb 5400rpm HDD with 2gb of RAM?! Sounds like hell! This took the cost to about £1100 in total, but the upgrade was obviously worth it. I'll go further into this later, but I was surprised about the ease of taken apart this laptop, it took about 1/2 an hour to open up my old ThinkPad! I used my own copy of Windows 8.1 for this notebook, and installing it to the SSD was a quick and easy process.
So what would I be using this notebook for?
I have just started my first year at university, and due to mitigating circumstances (lack of space) I was able to bring down my self-built workstation desktop, and had to make do with a 6 year old ThinkPad X60 - which was/still is a lot of fun to use but was very slow on Windows 8.1. I will be keeping my ThinkPad as a family heirloom and will pass it down from generation to generation. My personal primarily uses are Lightroom and Photoshop - both very heavy on the processor and RAM so that's why I decided to pick these. I also like to game from time to time, I would have been happy with a very cheap graphics card, but that fact that this came with the highly capable 860m was the icing on the cake for me! I also need to use intensive Geology/GIS/Programming applications so this processor has been pretty good!
Screen:
The main reason why I chose this laptop was the ability to pick a Quad HD screen, somewhat of a rarity still at the moment, with few laptops offering them, and especially at this screen size! The quality of the panel is just awesome, colour reproduction is great for LR and PS usage. I personally would have been more happy with a matte panel, as it is hard/impossible to see in direct sunlight, but I thought it would be worse than it actually is. The screen size is pretty nice making the whole notebook highly portable, comparing it to my mates MB Pro 13" this has got a more different aspect ratio, which isn't a problem but makes it better to watch media on. Screen brightness is also very good, can be set very bright if needed and can be bought down to a very low level when battery saving becomes important (This screen is a major battery drain, so don't pick this option if you want loads of battery life)
Graphics:
The 860m has exceeded my expectations entirely, I haven't bothered to run any benchmarks but I'm able to play League of Legends at 3200 x 1800 on highest settings and still get 60FPS+, but I chose to use 1920x1080 as the menus and text are not optimised for this sort of resolution yet, meaning that you'd have to have eyesight of an eagle to see anything. The only other game I've tried is Battlefield 4 - and it looks absolutely glorious at 1080p, never mind 1800p, on that I was getting very smooth gameplay, usually 40FPS+ I think, although I wasn't running any programs to measure this in the background.
General performance:
With the SSD, RAM and CPU combo any multitasking is completed in a breeze. Lightroom and Photoshop both run as smooth as butter, rendering is extremely quick, although there is a bit of lag this is to be expected as these programs are so CPU intensive a desktop 8 core i7 would still lag a little. The CPU tends to get pretty warm using these programs and you can hear the CPU fan ramping up. I've read from other reviews that this is very annoying, and it is I suppose, but as I wear over-ear headphones listening to music most of the time I don't notice it so it hasn't bothered me much yet.
Build quality:
Well, even though the entirety of the notebook is made of plastic, I think the build quality is pretty good. It's not up there with the MB Pro's aluminium unibody, but then again you pay a massive stipend for that. The good thing is that the body makes the whole notebook pretty lightweight which is perfect for me as I tend to lug it around a lot. I'm a fan of the colour (Silver/grey) which makes a change from all the black laptops I see around. I also love the black matte rubbery back which makes it easy to hold. It's a bit of a fingerprint magnet but I'm not to bothered about that at all. I've had people ask me about my laptop like "I love your laptop, where did you get it from?" so it shows that some people must be a fan of it's looks. I also like the angularities of the casing, don't really know why but it just looks sleek and futuristic. I/O port choice and amount is fine to me, I love having 3 x USB3.0 ports and 1 USB 2.0 although it would have been better to spread them out a little more, with a USB on the other side but it doesn't look like that would be possible anyway. Keyboard quality is surprisingly decent, no quips about it at all, along with the backlight which is useful in dark situations. With regards to changing hardware it was literally the easiest thing ever, only had to undo a couple of screws and I was looking at the motherboard with the massive copper heatsink, and was able to swap out the RAM along with install an MSata SSD with ease.
Sound:
I use headphones 98% of the time, and the audio jack, and Soundblaster Cinema 2 software I downloaded has worked well for me. I've read many negative complaints about the speaker quality, I didn't notice and hissing or suchlike whilst using the onboard speakers, they're just not that loud, but again I never use them, only wanted to test them out. Fan noise can be an issue with this laptop, due to the TDP of the CPU the speed ramps up a lot during prolonged gaming sessions/photo editing so this would be a major issue if you were using the on-board speakers whilst gaming.
Battery life:
Due to my choice of processor with it's 47W TDP battery life is mediocre at best. With screen brightness turned down low and set to battery saving mode I can squeeze about 3-3.5 hours on battery before it dies. To be honest I'm quite jealous when I see people with MB Pros' with their 8 hour battery life but then I remind myself that this laptop will beat them on anything graphically/processor intensive.
So what exactly is bad about this notebook?
- I regret my choice of CPU, the i7-4810MQ. I haven't seen it actually run at 2.9Ghz yet due to thermal throttling, haven seen it run at 80C+ during gaming. So I advice potential customers to choose the i7-4710MQ which is a tiny bit cheaper if you need a quad core (I needed it for editing).
- Battery life isn't great, but would be better if you chose a dual-core processor.
- Glossy screen is a bit meh sometimes, just have to get used to it, would prefer a matte panel.
- Generally gets a bit hot/noisy, but again this can be blamed on the processor.
- Took bloody ages to get to me, 18 working days dispatch time meant it literally took exactly 1 month from ordering to me getting my hands on it, so I'd recommend spending a little extra for the quicker build time. Mine was in pre-production for what seemed forever, and building, testing etc literally took 2 days which was very annoying.
- When I first acquired the notebook and did a clean install of Windows 8.1 (They installed it on the slow 5400rpm HDD = lol) it took ages to find the drivers for everything, especially the audio jack ones which were a massive pain in the arse to get working.
Would I recommend this notebook to anybody?
Hell yeah I would! It's a competitor to the MB Pro, for a similar spec you'd be spending £1,500+. One thing I'd recommend to potential buyers is to pick the lowest spec you can get away with (No SSD/only HDD), 2gb of RAM and purchase these separately as I did save about £50 installing them myself, there are videos on YouTube, anybody should be able to do it and you can then get used to the layout of your new laptop! I have yet to use customer services for anything, but I'm hoping I get a positive response. Hopefully I don't have to contact support, it looks like I'd be able to fix most issues myself anyway.
Well that pretty much concludes this very long, and random review of my new Optimus V notebook which I am very pleased with. I now await my free 8gb flash drive which would be very useful to me at the moment! I've now got to do some proper work, I will add more things I think of at a later point!
Thanks!
Chassis & Display Optimus Series: 13.3" Glossy QHD+ IPS LED (3200x1800)
Processor (CPU) Intel® Core™i7 Quad Core Mobile Processor i7-4810MQ (2.80GHz) 6MB
Memory (RAM) 2GB KINGSTON SODIMM DDR3 1333MHz (1 x 2GB)
Graphics Card NVIDIA® GeForce® GTX 860M - 2.0GB DDR5, 640 CUDA Cores - DirectX® 11
Memory - Hard Disk 2TB SERIAL ATA II 2.5" HARD DRIVE WITH 32MB CACHE (5,400rpm)
Thermal Paste ARCTIC MX-4 EXTREME THERMAL CONDUCTIVITY COMPOUND
Bluetooth & Wireless GIGABIT LAN & KILLER™ 1202 WIRELESS GAMING 802.11N + BLUETOOTH 4.0
Total cost: £895.00
Out of my own accord (because it worked out about £40-£50 cheaper I purchased 16gb of Crucial 1600Mhz RAM (2 x 8gb) and a Crucial M550 256gb MSata SSD. I'm comfortable with messing around with PC Hardware, so the swap took me about 5 minutes to do. I knew this when I purchased the laptop - would have to be insane to use this spec! 2tb 5400rpm HDD with 2gb of RAM?! Sounds like hell! This took the cost to about £1100 in total, but the upgrade was obviously worth it. I'll go further into this later, but I was surprised about the ease of taken apart this laptop, it took about 1/2 an hour to open up my old ThinkPad! I used my own copy of Windows 8.1 for this notebook, and installing it to the SSD was a quick and easy process.
So what would I be using this notebook for?
I have just started my first year at university, and due to mitigating circumstances (lack of space) I was able to bring down my self-built workstation desktop, and had to make do with a 6 year old ThinkPad X60 - which was/still is a lot of fun to use but was very slow on Windows 8.1. I will be keeping my ThinkPad as a family heirloom and will pass it down from generation to generation. My personal primarily uses are Lightroom and Photoshop - both very heavy on the processor and RAM so that's why I decided to pick these. I also like to game from time to time, I would have been happy with a very cheap graphics card, but that fact that this came with the highly capable 860m was the icing on the cake for me! I also need to use intensive Geology/GIS/Programming applications so this processor has been pretty good!
Screen:
The main reason why I chose this laptop was the ability to pick a Quad HD screen, somewhat of a rarity still at the moment, with few laptops offering them, and especially at this screen size! The quality of the panel is just awesome, colour reproduction is great for LR and PS usage. I personally would have been more happy with a matte panel, as it is hard/impossible to see in direct sunlight, but I thought it would be worse than it actually is. The screen size is pretty nice making the whole notebook highly portable, comparing it to my mates MB Pro 13" this has got a more different aspect ratio, which isn't a problem but makes it better to watch media on. Screen brightness is also very good, can be set very bright if needed and can be bought down to a very low level when battery saving becomes important (This screen is a major battery drain, so don't pick this option if you want loads of battery life)
Graphics:
The 860m has exceeded my expectations entirely, I haven't bothered to run any benchmarks but I'm able to play League of Legends at 3200 x 1800 on highest settings and still get 60FPS+, but I chose to use 1920x1080 as the menus and text are not optimised for this sort of resolution yet, meaning that you'd have to have eyesight of an eagle to see anything. The only other game I've tried is Battlefield 4 - and it looks absolutely glorious at 1080p, never mind 1800p, on that I was getting very smooth gameplay, usually 40FPS+ I think, although I wasn't running any programs to measure this in the background.
General performance:
With the SSD, RAM and CPU combo any multitasking is completed in a breeze. Lightroom and Photoshop both run as smooth as butter, rendering is extremely quick, although there is a bit of lag this is to be expected as these programs are so CPU intensive a desktop 8 core i7 would still lag a little. The CPU tends to get pretty warm using these programs and you can hear the CPU fan ramping up. I've read from other reviews that this is very annoying, and it is I suppose, but as I wear over-ear headphones listening to music most of the time I don't notice it so it hasn't bothered me much yet.
Build quality:
Well, even though the entirety of the notebook is made of plastic, I think the build quality is pretty good. It's not up there with the MB Pro's aluminium unibody, but then again you pay a massive stipend for that. The good thing is that the body makes the whole notebook pretty lightweight which is perfect for me as I tend to lug it around a lot. I'm a fan of the colour (Silver/grey) which makes a change from all the black laptops I see around. I also love the black matte rubbery back which makes it easy to hold. It's a bit of a fingerprint magnet but I'm not to bothered about that at all. I've had people ask me about my laptop like "I love your laptop, where did you get it from?" so it shows that some people must be a fan of it's looks. I also like the angularities of the casing, don't really know why but it just looks sleek and futuristic. I/O port choice and amount is fine to me, I love having 3 x USB3.0 ports and 1 USB 2.0 although it would have been better to spread them out a little more, with a USB on the other side but it doesn't look like that would be possible anyway. Keyboard quality is surprisingly decent, no quips about it at all, along with the backlight which is useful in dark situations. With regards to changing hardware it was literally the easiest thing ever, only had to undo a couple of screws and I was looking at the motherboard with the massive copper heatsink, and was able to swap out the RAM along with install an MSata SSD with ease.
Sound:
I use headphones 98% of the time, and the audio jack, and Soundblaster Cinema 2 software I downloaded has worked well for me. I've read many negative complaints about the speaker quality, I didn't notice and hissing or suchlike whilst using the onboard speakers, they're just not that loud, but again I never use them, only wanted to test them out. Fan noise can be an issue with this laptop, due to the TDP of the CPU the speed ramps up a lot during prolonged gaming sessions/photo editing so this would be a major issue if you were using the on-board speakers whilst gaming.
Battery life:
Due to my choice of processor with it's 47W TDP battery life is mediocre at best. With screen brightness turned down low and set to battery saving mode I can squeeze about 3-3.5 hours on battery before it dies. To be honest I'm quite jealous when I see people with MB Pros' with their 8 hour battery life but then I remind myself that this laptop will beat them on anything graphically/processor intensive.
So what exactly is bad about this notebook?
- I regret my choice of CPU, the i7-4810MQ. I haven't seen it actually run at 2.9Ghz yet due to thermal throttling, haven seen it run at 80C+ during gaming. So I advice potential customers to choose the i7-4710MQ which is a tiny bit cheaper if you need a quad core (I needed it for editing).
- Battery life isn't great, but would be better if you chose a dual-core processor.
- Glossy screen is a bit meh sometimes, just have to get used to it, would prefer a matte panel.
- Generally gets a bit hot/noisy, but again this can be blamed on the processor.
- Took bloody ages to get to me, 18 working days dispatch time meant it literally took exactly 1 month from ordering to me getting my hands on it, so I'd recommend spending a little extra for the quicker build time. Mine was in pre-production for what seemed forever, and building, testing etc literally took 2 days which was very annoying.
- When I first acquired the notebook and did a clean install of Windows 8.1 (They installed it on the slow 5400rpm HDD = lol) it took ages to find the drivers for everything, especially the audio jack ones which were a massive pain in the arse to get working.
Would I recommend this notebook to anybody?
Hell yeah I would! It's a competitor to the MB Pro, for a similar spec you'd be spending £1,500+. One thing I'd recommend to potential buyers is to pick the lowest spec you can get away with (No SSD/only HDD), 2gb of RAM and purchase these separately as I did save about £50 installing them myself, there are videos on YouTube, anybody should be able to do it and you can then get used to the layout of your new laptop! I have yet to use customer services for anything, but I'm hoping I get a positive response. Hopefully I don't have to contact support, it looks like I'd be able to fix most issues myself anyway.
Well that pretty much concludes this very long, and random review of my new Optimus V notebook which I am very pleased with. I now await my free 8gb flash drive which would be very useful to me at the moment! I've now got to do some proper work, I will add more things I think of at a later point!
Thanks!
