17.3" Octane Review

Gagaman

Member
Specs:
Chassis & Display Octane Series: 17.3" Matte Full HD LED Widescreen (1920x1080)
Processor (CPU) Intel® Core™i7 Quad Core Processor i7-4790 (3.6GHz) 8MB Cache
Memory (RAM) 8GB KINGSTON HYPER-X IMPACT 1600MHz SODIMM DDR3 (1 x 8GB)
Graphics Card NVIDIA® GeForce® GTX 980M - 8.0GB DDR5 Video RAM - DirectX® 11
Memory - Hard Disk 750GB WD SCORPIO BLACK WD7500BPKX, SATA 6 Gb/s, 16MB CACHE (7200 rpm)
mSATA/M.2 SSD Drive 250GB Crucial MX200 M.2 2280 SSD (upto 555MB/sR | 500MB/sW)
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 Intel 2 Channel High Definition Audio + MIC/Headphone Jack
Bluetooth & Wireless GIGABIT LAN & WIRELESS INTEL® N-7265 M.2 (300Mbps, 802.11BGN) + 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 Lead & Adaptor 1 x UK Power Lead & 230W AC Adaptor
Keyboard Language OCTANE SERIES BACKLIT UK KEYBOARD WITH NUMBER PAD
Notebook Mouse INTEGRATED 2 BUTTON TOUCHPAD MOUSE
Webcam INTEGRATED 2.0 MP FULL HD WEBCAM

Previous Laptop:
I previously had a HP Pavillion G6, which I have owned since 2012. It's specs were really basic, you can see the userbenchmark analysis of it here.
Safe to say this new laptop was a major upgrade and instantly noticeable! Here is this new laptop's specs for comparison!

PC Specialist Service:
First time I've ever had a laptop built before. From all the sites I looked up PC Specialist had the best feedback and prices. I learnt more about computer specs in the week I spent deciding on what to get than any previous year combined haha! Finally decided on the Octane based on advice from this forum of whom were really helpful in nailing down the specs I could get within my budget (which admittedly went up over the week!).

Before I went ahead with my order I also phoned up PC Specialist to go over the specs to check they here all good and the person over the phone managed to save me around £120 by swapping some of the parts about!

In total the laptop took 8 working days to be built, tested and sent. The emails updating me on the status and the details on the order page were really useful, even going into details like the names of the people responsible for each step of the development, which was nice!

The box that arrived was superbly handled and packed, a box within a box with the thickest bubble wrap I have ever seen, like it was wrapped in a bouncy castle! Very pleased with the service, smooth and seamless.

Laptop Chassis/Design:

At 3.9kg it is heavy, certainly compared to the 2.5kg notebook I had before, but for carrying from one room to another it's fine, not as heavy as I was expecting to be honest. I have yet to carry it in a carry bag for a long period of time yet mind. My previous was also a 15" so the extra big screen is a real treat. This is also not a particularly thing laptop, but you can't expect it to be with so much under the hood so to speak. The power brick is also quite huge and a bit heavy.

The plug port is slightly fiddly to get in to at the middle of the back, I guess because I got used to having one on the side of my last laptop, and the cable has to go in a certain way kind of like a USB where you always end up flipping it a few times heh.

The texture of the laptop is a finger print magnet, making the surface look kind of patchy wherever I touch it. I need to look up the best way to wipe this thing over, if anyone has any advice let me know.

Popping the bottom open is really simple: just two screws to access the SSD and HDD and four screws to access the two fans and RAM.

Keyboard:
The font of the keyboard letters is a bit..."stereotypical gamer"? Would have preferred a simple font like many other PCS laptops but I've gotten used to it. I thought at first the keyboard having a backlight would be pointless and silly but I actually really like it when I have the lights on low at night. You can change the colour of the lights to anything you want and can turn them on and off and adjust brightness with function keys. You can also make it animate in different ways and flow like a rainbow but I'm happy to keep it on a simple lowish blue hue. The Enter key is a bit thinner than usual but I've gotten used to it.

On my old HP laptop the extra functions on the F-row of keys were the extra functions by default, making doing basic F-key things very tedious like F5 to add frames in Flash, but luckily on this laptop it's the opposite. I have yet to dabble with it but there are options to create your own function key shortcuts anywhere on the keyboard too.

Windows/ General programs:
Boots up Windows 7 in about 23 seconds, and Chrome with multiple default tabs (tweetdeck, gmail, outlook) can be opened straight away. Multi-tasking is a complete cinch and everything is so snappy!
Because all the programs are on the SSD and the files are on the HDD, every time I save a file to the HDD, it takes a couple seconds for the HDD to rev up and save. I assume it's a good thing that the HDD isn't constantly running though, only when it needs to.

Graphics/Gaming:
The 980M is superb for everything I have flung at it.
Tried out some benchmark demos like Unigine's Valley and Heaven, which it ran at an average of roughly 100fps on high settings. The Nvidia human head demo runs smooth as butter too.

Full 1080p 60fps on games like Sonic Generations, even when capturing them with Open Broadcast Software: capping at 1080p 30fps or 720p 60fps works, 1080p 60fps would require dropping some detail as it lead to drops in the captured video. The framerate gets knocked down a bit when unplugged but I don't intend to play games on it anywhere but on my desk plugged in anyway.

I don't play high-end games like Witcher 3 or GTAV but I may consider the latter now if just for the daft mods!

The Fans:
One of my biggest concerns in getting a new laptop was fan noise, as my old laptop was noisy as hell and got to the point where it sounded like a plane taking off when doing any kid of multi-tasking.
Thankfully not only does this have two rather big fans (one by the CPU and one by the GPU) but they only tend to kick in when either:
- Playing a high-end 3D game or benchmark demo.
- Editing/rendering from Premier Pro/Any video converter etc.
- Playing a game and capping said game at the same time.
They do kick in quite suddenly and when running at full speed you do feel warm air flowing out of it, including out of the speakers just below the screen oddly enough.

Will add more to this review later possibly, but after a week of owning it so far I am very, very pleased with this purchase. For just under £1500 I got some insane specs and PCS service was faultless.

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