17.3" Octane (not G-Sync) Review

Kezza110

Member
Price: £1,715.00 Excluding VAT. £2,058.00 Including VAT.

The laptop surpassed my expectations by a lot! I am very happy with it!

Positives:
+ Performs extremely well
+ Turns on ready to use in 15 seconds (SSD)
+ Arrived one day earlier than expected
+ Beautiful screen at 1080P
+ Lovely trackpad and mouse function buttons
+ Biometrics works great!

Negative(s)
- The temps are a little... scary.


Conclusion:

The laptop is amazing but so it should be at £2,058.

Amazing performance all-round especially during gaming and with the overclock of the GPU (GTX 980M)

The main downfall with this laptop is the temperature of the components.
Optimal gaming temps for any system is 70 D Celsius or below but the CPU when playing games reached up to nearly 100 D Celsius which is not good at all.

After some research I have found that these components are allowed to get hotter than most, they are very stable components but 100 degrees is not good at all.

To fix this problem I had to turn off some of the features of my CPU and it now only runs at 3.7Ghz instead of 4.0Ghz Which is not an issue for me at all.

I would recommend this machine to many people but I'd advise them to be in a cool room with a cooling mat for the laptop and to make sure the fans are on maximum during gaming or anything intensive for the components.

Well done PcSpecialist, your company is great and a special thank you to those that were involved with the creation and assembly of my machine (If someone that works there sees this could thank them in person for me I'd appreciate that)

I have ordered 3 laptops from PcSpecialist and had zero problems and zero complaints!

PICTURES:

i6YGhdJ,RidY4lv
 
Last edited:

Stephen M

Author Level
Thanks for the review. Is there a chance you cold post the full specs of your machine, I am thinking of getting the Octane and would be interested. What OS are you using, I intend to run a few Linux Distros on mine.
 

Kezza110

Member
Thanks for the review. Is there a chance you cold post the full specs of your machine, I am thinking of getting the Octane and would be interested. What OS are you using, I intend to run a few Linux Distros on mine.

Chassis & Display
Octane Series: 17.3" Matte Full HD LED Widescreen (1920x1080)
Processor (CPU)
Intel® Core™i7 Quad Core Processor i7-4790k (4.0GHz) 8MB Cache
Memory (RAM)
16GB KINGSTON HYPER-X IMPACT 1600MHz SODIMM DDR3 (2 x 8GB)
Graphics Card
NVIDIA® GeForce® GTX 980M - 8.0GB DDR5 Video RAM - DirectX® 11
1st Hard Disk
1TB Samsung 850 EVO SSD, SATA 6Gb/s (upto 540MB/sR | 520MB/sW)
2nd Hard Disk
2TB SERIAL ATA II 2.5" HARD DRIVE WITH 32MB CACHE (5,400rpm)
M.2 SSD Drive
240GB KINGSTON SSDNow M.2 2280, SATA 6Gb/s (550MB/R, 520MB/W)
Memory Card Reader
Integrated 6 in 1 Card Reader (SD /Mini SD/ SDHC / SDXC / MMC / RSMMC)
Thermal Paste
ARCTIC MX-4 EXTREME THERMAL CONDUCTIVITY COMPOUND
Sound Card
ASUS™ XONAR-U7 Compact 7.1 USB soundcard and headphone amplifier
Wireless/Wired Networking
GIGABIT LAN & WIRELESS INTEL® AC-7265 M.2 (867Mbps, 802.11AC) + BLUETOOTH
USB Options
4 x USB 3.0 PORTS (1 x POWERED) + 1 e-SATA/USB 3.0 PORT COMBINED
Battery
Octane Series 8 Cell Lithium Ion Battery (82WH)
Power Cable
1 x UK Power Lead & 230W AC Adaptor
Keyboard Language
OCTANE SERIES BACKLIT UK KEYBOARD WITH NUMBER PAD
Operating System
NO OPERATING SYSTEM REQUIRED
Windows 10 Upgrade
FREE Upgrade to Windows 10 with all Windows 7 & Windows 8.1 Purchases*
DVD Recovery Media
NO DVD RECOVERY MEDIA REQUIRED
Office Software
NO OFFICE SOFTWARE
Anti-Virus
NO ANTI-VIRUS SOFTWARE
Browser
Google Chrome™
Mouse
INTEGRATED 2 BUTTON TOUCHPAD MOUSE
Webcam
INTEGRATED 2.0 MP FULL HD WEBCAM

I ordered the laptop with no OS to save some money as I already had a Windows 8.1 Key.

OS: Windows 8.1

The laptop came without a disk drive an disks with the drivers on them, I had to use my old laptop to rip the data from them and transfer it onto a USB stick so I could install them on the octane! Still not a problem
 

Stephen M

Author Level
Thanks, looks a great laptop. I will be going with the i4790 CPU and the 970 GPU and less storage, although already have a good collection of USB3 external drives from 1-4TB. This will be my second PC Specialist laptop, got a Voyager a few years. Not really had a driver problem so far, Fedora, Ubuntu and Zorin work straight from install, although did need a bit of WiFi firmware for Debian.
 
Top