Optimus laptop review.

Hiya, I've had my laptop for over a week now and it runs really well. The only thing is that it can sometimes get really loud with the fans whenever I open up a game and it is making me consider buying noise cancelling headphones to enjoy the game audio in peace without the fans overpowering the sound.

Pros:

Very fast.
Runs quietly when not gaming.
Starts up quickly.
Plenty of space.
Easy to see keyboard.

Cons:

The fans get really loud when running a game.

Could you post the spec please?

Chassis & Display
Optimus Series: 15.6" Matte Full HD IPS LED Widescreen (1920x1080)

Processor (CPU)
Intel® Core™ i7 Quad Core Processor 7700HQ (2.8GHz, 3.8GHz Turbo)

Memory (RAM)
16GB Corsair VENGEANCE 2400MHz SODIMM DDR4 (1 x 16GB)

Graphics Card
NVIDIA® GeForce® GTX 1050 Ti 4.0GB GDDR5 Video RAM - DirectX® 12.1

1st Hard Disk
500GB SEAGATE FIRECUDA 2.5" SSHD - UP TO 5X FASTER THAN HDD!

Memory Card Reader
Integrated 6 in 1 Card Reader (SD /Mini SD/ SDHC / SDXC / MMC / RSMMC)

AC Adaptor
1 x 120W AC Adaptor

Power Cable
1 x 1 Metre Cloverleaf UK Power Cable

Thermal Paste
STANDARD THERMAL PASTE FOR SUFFICIENT COOLING

Sound Card
Intel 2 Channel High Def. Audio + SoundBlaster™ Cinema 3

Bluetooth & Wireless
GIGABIT LAN & WIRELESS INTEL® AC-8265 M.2 (867Mbps, 802.11AC) +BT 4.0

USB Options
1 x USB 3.0 PORT (Type C) + 2 x USB 3.0 PORTS + 1 x USB 2.0 PORT

Thank you for that. How’s the battery life? Is it easy to remove and swap the battery?

According to PCS, the Optimus VIII is a CLEVO N850HK1.

According to the service manual I found, this is how you remove the battery:


Seems pretty simple to me. No need to unscrew the chassis.

Cheers for the advice, it is worth knowing as a friend has been looking at the Optimus, the battery change on this model is much simpler than the older one.

Thanks for your input. How would you say that you've found the screen quality on the Optimus VIII? I use my laptop for video and photo editing a lot so this is quite important for me.

The screen on the Optimus VII is fine for photo and video work, although I do not do a lot on it. What is your budget for a new laptop as for your needs I would consider an Octane with a desktop CPU. The downside is it is a desktop replacement, nearly 4kg and a massive power brick but if you do not mind that the extra power is a great help.

Thanks for your response Stephen. My budget is around £1000, £1200 at the very most. My current laptop is a Samsung Series 5 (i7-3610QM processor, 6GB RAM, Intel HD Graphics 4000 graphics card) and that's a fair weight to lug around already, I don't have a desktop computer of my own as I'm on the road a fair amount so 'desktop replacements' aren't an issue. I suppose I could expand my budget by selling my old Samsung (I could get £300 for it?) and using it to offset the cost but I was hoping to use that money for new software.

Unfortunately an Octane would very quickly eat up an extra 300, although I still think it worth considering. What software do you use or would you be prepared to change. I went fully to Linux several years ago and there is a lot of very good open source free ware, GIMP, Blender etc. If you have time I would suggest having a look and if the free ware is Linux only, dual-booting with a linux distro. The Studio distros are good for this as they come with a lot relevant software pre-loaded and Ubuntu Studio gives you an option to only take what packages you want to save download time and space - eg the music stuff on it is great but of no use if you don't do music production.

If you have not dabbled with Linux, this site is worth a visit: https://distrowatch.com/

Software-wise the biggest investments would be updating Photoshop Elements (I'm still on version 8 and they're currently on 15) and the Vegas Movie Studio suite. I reckon that should come to about £150-£180. I appreciate the Linux recommendation and if I was a bit more settled I'd probably be more willing to try it out but I have field work which means I'm on the move quite a lot and I just don't have the time to experiment unfortunately.

PC Specialist recently had an updated Octane on sale with the 8th Gen Intel CPUs.

This shows some benchmarks of your i7 3610QM vs a laptop i7 7700HQ, and the new i7 8700k, which as well as being a desktop CPU has 2 more cores:

http://tinyurl.com/y82cq7oo

The multithreaded performance difference of an i8 8700k vs an i7 7700HQ is insane. The 7700HQ in the Optimus would give you a boost of ~30% over your current CPU. The i7 8700k would give a *150% increase in multithreaded performance, which can be very relevant to video editing.

The Octanes currently on sale are ones with the older 7700k, but if you have the budget and can hold off on the purchase it's worth looking into.

I understand the time problem but if you have a chance look at GIMP, a couple of friends, one a production editor on a newspaper, has moved from photoshop to GIMP and found it fairly easy. For your next laptop it may not be an option but for future consideration worth it.

Wow, Oussebon, that really is a big difference! I've had a look around for i7-8700k processor tests and this one definitely seems to show a significantly better performance (although more 40% than 250%...!) in video and photo editing: https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/a...ormance-Core-i7-8700K-i5-8600K-i3-8350K-1055/

That's exciting, but how long do you think it would take for these to start getting into laptops and what's the sort of price range? I could wait for the 8th-gen, by which time they'll be touting the 9th-gen, and so on. I'm just worried about letting the perfect be the enemy of the good.

A few minor comments

Wow, Oussebon, that really is a big difference! I've had a look around for i7-8700k processor tests and this one definitely seems to show a significantly better performance (although more 40% than 250%...!) in video and photo editing: https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/ar...i3-8350K-1055/

Click to expand...

Yes, it's about 45% better than an i7 7700k in that benchmark. That's not too surprising when you consider that they're very similar CPUs except for 50% more cores. So about 45% more performance in a multithreaded benchmark isn't surprising.

The 45% in the Puget benchmark is a smidge lower than the ~51% increase in the multithreaded performance benchmark on notebookcheck above. One possible reason (speculating here) is that the Puget bench was done early after release, and I heard that some motherboards weren't letting the 8700k boost quite as high as it could. This will likely have been fixed in BIOS updates, but could explain why the CPU was only getting ~45% more multithreaded performance rather than 50%.

All that is compared to the i7 7700k, however, which is a desktop (S-Series) CPU, and the one currently available in the Octanes on sale at PCS.

The CPU in the Optimus is the i7 7700HQ, which is a laptop (H-Series) CPU and has lower frequencies than its H-Series counterparts. And so has a good bit less performance for CPU intensive tasks.

My post above had a typo - it's a 150% increase in multithreaded performance vs the i7 3610QM in your current laptop (250% would be the total performance relative to the i7 3610QM). I wasn't claiming an 8700k had 250% the performance of an i7 7700k...

The i7 7700k would offer a 65-70% increase in multithreaded performance over your i7 3610QM.

So with the i7 8700k you'd be getting over double the increase in multithreaded performance than you would with an Octane sporting a 7700k.

That's exciting, but how long do you think it would take for these to start getting into laptops and what's the sort of price range? I could wait for the 8th-gen, by which time they'll be touting the 9th-gen, and so on. I'm just worried about letting the perfect be the enemy of the good.

Click to expand...

Apparently it shouldn't be too long. Someone already specced one up in this post: https://www.pcspecialist.co.uk/foru...Render-3ds-Max&p=402985&viewfull=1#post402985 and said:

So it looks like the 8th gen processors are in for the Octane IV (well 27th November).

Click to expand...

You can always phone PCS and ask if their ETA is still late Nov.

But if you can hold off, getting double the increase in raw performance would seem like the best play.