Vortex IV 17.3" review

Bensonator5000

New member
Before doing my review on the laptop itself I thought I should give my thoughts on PC Specialist since this is the first time I have used them. For what I personally wanted PC specialist had the best prices I could find, they also had a good amount of options and customer service was good with me only being on hold a couple of minutes at most. They also built and tested the laptop quickly as I got it a week after ordering - could have arrived sooner but was dispatched on Friday, but had to wait until Monday for delivery which is more to do with the delivery company - so all in all I would personally recommend PC Specialist.

Now for the laptop: I have been using it for a week now and overall I am very impressed with the laptop. I wanted one I could use for gaming and uni work which includes 3D modelling and it excels in both. That being said there are pros and cons for the laptop and while the pros outweigh the cons they are as follows:

Pro's:

I'm definitely happy to have went for the larger screen and the fact that it can have two hard drives while also being able to retain the DVD drive is a big plus for me as well. The speakers are also the best I have heard that were built into a laptop although admittedly I haven't heard much to compare it to and sound quality isn't a big deal to me. Finally the gaming performance is great for me and has been able to play any games that I normally play at ultra settings perfectly fine. Fire Strike score's for the laptop on battery and plugged in will be attached for reference.
Fire Strike Battery.png Fire Strike Plugged in.png

Con's:

In all honesty there's only really one con to me but the other stuff may make a difference to other people. The main con is that at the time of writing this review the windows 8.1 drivers for the fingerprint scanner aren't working. It was suggested that I downloaded the windows 7 drivers and while they allowed the scanner to work there were issues with windows where I could't access any files or the control panel. It's possible that the drivers are unrelated to the issue but since installing them at first I removed the drivers and windows has worked fine.

The noteworthy parts are that first of all the laptop and the ac adapter are big and heavy. My friend has a Lenovo Y50-70 and my laptop monsters it in terms of size and weight, although I personally find the ability to have a second hard drive and a DVD drive worth it. Also if not looked after properly the material that make up the chassis can be a fingerprint magnet, not an issue but I personally feel the need to wipe them off. The laptop also has an indicator to say when the GPU is in use which can be handy. While playing Bioshock Infinite I found that the battery lasted around an hour and 15 minutes to an hour and 50 minutes depending on which power saving options were on. Furthermore the fan is very quiet when using normally and while there is an obvious increase in noise when gaming I never found it too loud. Finally for my laptop I used the base wireless card and with the router in the same room I got speeds of 70.69 Mbps download and 18.28 Mbps upload whereas I got 74.90 Mbps and 18.94 Mbps when using Ethernet so while Ethernet is obviously the better choice the wifi isn't far off.

If I was to give an overall rating for the laptop overall it would probably be a 9.5 out of 10.

Following Photos show the size of the laptop's ac adapter next to my last laptop's adapter, the laptop itself next to a standard laptop and the laptop itself with my preferred choice of backlit colour .
DSCF1028 (2).JPG DSCF1036 (2).JPG DSCF1039 (2).JPG
 
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Danny boy

Bronze Level Poster
I got the finger print scanner to work by down loading an updated driver if you send a message to pc specialist they can send you a link. In fact if you give them a ring they can point you in the right direction.




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LAPTOP: Vortex IV 17" Elite, i7 4910MQ 2.9GHZ, 2x NVIDIA GTX 980m 8Gb, 16Gb Kingston Hyper-X Impact 1600mHz, 1TB Samsung Evo, 2tb Serial ATA, RAT 3 Mouse, Zalman ZM-NC11 Ultra-Quiet Laptop Cooler
 
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