RECOIL II | Components Questions

Sam77

Member
Hello and thanks for your input,

I am extremely interested in the Recoil 2 as it seems like the best value laptop at the moment. I will be using it for video editing (and rendering), content creation, a lot of movies, some programming and casual gaming. Thus it is important for me to have a good screen and also perform well over a variety of tasks without overheating (I want to use it for 4-5 years hopefully). These are my questions:
1. How is the screen? I was thinking of getting the 60Hz, is the 144 is worth it? From my understanding it should only make games
smoother but since I am casual gamer & in future it is easier to plug larger monitor to it does it make sense to get 144Hz?
2. For the 1st hard disk I am wandering between the Seagate HDD(7200 rpm) or the SSHD?
3. For the M.2 from my understanding the Intel 760p should be much better than the WD black??
4. 120 or 180 W AC adapter?
5. Some people say it is running hot, some say it is cool, do you have problems with temperatures going over 90c?
6. With the bottom being a mesh doesn't a lot of dust get into the system?
7. The keyboard everybody talk about? Is it cheap and "mushy"? Can the lighting be adjusted to white instead of rainbow, adjusting the
brightness?
8. What would you say about dual booting? My plan is to partition the SSD with 200GB for Win & 50GB for Ubuntu?
Thanks!
 

Oussebon

Multiverse Poster
1. How is the screen? I was thinking of getting the 60Hz, is the 144 is worth it? From my understanding it should only make games
smoother but since I am casual gamer & in future it is easier to plug larger monitor to it does it make sense to get 144Hz?
Probably stick with 60hz. Unless you particularly want a competitive edge in twitch shooters. For casual gaming a 60hz screen is still very normal.

As for the screen quality check out this page: https://www.pcspecialist.co.uk/reviews/ which has reviews of the Recoil - including measurements and subjective opinions of the screen's performance.

2. For the 1st hard disk I am wandering between the Seagate HDD(7200 rpm) or the SSHD?
7200rpm HDD imo. It's faster as an HDD. While the SSHD has a small amount of flash storage, that only helps if the drive's algorithm has worked out what it needs to put on there for you. With an SSD as the primary drive, your OS, programs, and things like appdata folder etc will all be on that instead of the SSHD, which somewhat undermines the value of an SSHD.

3. For the M.2 from my understanding the Intel 760p should be much better than the WD black??
Other way around. The 760p is a fairly medicore NVMe SSD. The first gen of WD Black were probably worse, but PCS are now selling the 2nd Gen of WD Blacks which are actually pretty decent. The WD Black 1st gen is called "WD Black PCIe" and the 2nd gen "WD Black NVMe" by Western Digital, even though they are both PCIe NVMe drives. PCS have called both gens PCIe NVMe in their configurators (not unreasonable since that's exactly what they are...), but looking at the speeds you can tell what they're selling now is 2nd gen.
See: https://www.anandtech.com/show/12543/the-western-digital-wd-black-3d-nand-ssd-review/4

What's more, the 760p's price is too high for its performance class tbh.

4. 120 or 180 W AC adapter?
120W for GTX 1050 ti, 180W for GTX 1060, the configurator will tell you if you have the wrong one when you click "proceed"

5. Some people say it is running hot, some say it is cool, do you have problems with temperatures going over 90c?
Almost everyone says it's cool. Also see the reviews linked above.

6. With the bottom being a mesh doesn't a lot of dust get into the system?
I don't think anyone's owned one long enough to really say, but if it does a lot of air also gets in, which is part of why its temps are solid. You'll want to clean any laptop periodically anyway, and potentially repaste.

No idea on 7, read reviews in the links above and in the "show off your new system" sub forum.

8. What would you say about dual booting? My plan is to partition the SSD with 200GB for Win & 50GB for Ubuntu?
Do you need Ubuntu? If so, dual booting is a good idea and should work fine. If you don't need Ubuntu I'd say it's not worth it ;)
 
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Tony1044

Prolific Poster
Probably stick with 60hz. Unless you particularly want a competitive edge in twitch shooters. For casual gaming a 60hz screen is still very normal.

As for the screen quality check out this page: https://www.pcspecialist.co.uk/reviews/ which has reviews of the Recoil - including measurements and subjective opinions of the screen's performance.

7200rpm HDD imo. It's faster as an HDD. While the SSHD has a small amount of flash storage, that only helps if the drive's algorithm has worked out what it needs to put on there for you. With an SSD as the primary drive, your OS, programs, and things like appdata folder etc will all be on that instead of the SSHD, which somewhat undermines the value of an SSHD.

Other way around. The 760p is a fairly medicore NVMe SSD. The first gen of WD Black were probably worse, but PCS are now selling the 2nd Gen of WD Blacks which are actually pretty decent. The WD Black 1st gen is called "WD Black PCIe" and the 2nd gen "WD Black NVMe" by Western Digital, even though they are both PCIe NVMe drives. PCS have called both gens PCIe NVMe in their configurators (not unreasonable since that's exactly what they are...), but looking at the speeds you can tell what they're selling now is 2nd gen.
See: https://www.anandtech.com/show/12543/the-western-digital-wd-black-3d-nand-ssd-review/4

What's more, the 760p's price is too high for its performance class tbh.

120W for GTX 1050 ti, 180W for GTX 1060, the configurator will tell you if you have the wrong one when you click "proceed"

Almost everyone says it's cool. Also see the reviews linked above.

I don't think anyone's owned one long enough to really say, but if it does a lot of air also gets in, which is part of why its temps are solid. You'll want to clean any laptop periodically anyway, and potentially repaste.

No idea on 7, read reviews in the links above and in the "show off your new system" sub forum.

Do you need Ubuntu? If so, dual booting is a good idea and should work fine. If you don't need Ubuntu I'd say it's not worth it ;)

I can't really add much to this beyond saying I know some of our other forum colleagues have reported good results with Ubuntu flavoured Linux.

There've been a few issues with things like not being able to set a colour on the keyboard lights (a pale blue, I believe, seems to be the only option) and driver issues with some of the NVidia cards, although that seems to be less so with the latest versions.
 

Sam77

Member
Thank you for your replies. Just to get some more feedback on 2, 3 & 8.

I read a few reviews bench-marking claiming that the SSHD is quite faster, hence why I was wandering (https://babeltechreviews.com/sshd-vs-hdd-2tb-seagate-firecuda-sshd-vs-2tb-toshiba-hdd/3/ , http://hdd.userbenchmark.com/Compar...16-vs-Seagate-Barracuda-720014-1TB/3902vs1849).

As of the M.2 - same thing bench-marking reviews claimed the 760p is quite faster (even the advertised speed is higher?) while the price is lower, hence they called it the best value on the market (https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/intel-760p-ssd-review,5435-4.html , http://ssd.userbenchmark.com/Compar...0p-Series-NVMe-PCIe-M2-256GB/m237667vsm434656). Am I missing something?

As of the Linux - yeah need it mostly for programming. Since I will buy the laptop without OS will the lights/game control studio make problems?

Thank you!
 

Oussebon

Multiverse Poster
I read a few reviews bench-marking claiming that the SSHD is quite faster, hence why I was wandering (https://babeltechreviews.com/sshd-vs...toshiba-hdd/3/
This is a desktop SSHD, which is a 7200rpm drive plus the flash cache. The laptop SSHDs are 5400rpm drives.
Furthermore, the benchmarks were either synthetic benchmarks, or were for things like loading games. Which is irrelevant because you'll be loading games off the SSD

Certain websites like userbbenchmark, CPUboss, GPUboss, gamedebate, and others, are best avoided entirely as their comparisons are 100% meaningless.

Userbenchmark for instance lumps together scores from all kinds of systems. So for CPUs it includes overclocked and stock results... ot its credit for the SSHD it notes:
Poor consistency
The range of scores (95th - 5th percentile) for the Seagate FireCuda SSHD 1TB (2016) is 67.3%. This is a particularly wide range which indicates that the Seagate FireCuda SSHD 1TB (2016) performs inconsistently under varying real world conditions.
http://hdd.userbenchmark.com/Seagate-FireCuda-SSHD-1TB-2016/Rating/3902
Which means either the drive gives very inconsistent performance (and we've had people complain about its performance on this forum) or that the benchmarking system sucks. In this case, probably both.

Some people will have run userbenchmark with the SSHD as a secondary drive, some with it as a primary drive, likewise the HDD. And the environments won't have been controlled. People will have had all kinds of stuff running on their PCs, affecting the performance and results. Or might have had overheating systems or poorly cooled systems causing thermal throttling in the SSDs. Anything you can think of to make the results as robust as a paper towel.

It's really fun as a benchmark and gives a nice sense of ego stroking if you can get your system to be better than other people's. But avoid like the plague if you want to actually know how good a piece of hardware is versus alternatives.

And once more, that drive is the desktop 3.5" SSHD, not the 2.5" laptop one that is based around a 5400rpm HDD...
As of the M.2 - same thing bench-marking reviews claimed the 760p is quite faster (even the advertised speed is higher?) while the price is lower, hence they called it the best value on the market (https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews...ew,5435-4.html , http://ssd.userbenchmark.com/Compare...37667vsm434656). Am I missing something?
Yes, you are I'm afraid :) The WD Black in that review is the "PCIe" i.e. gen 1, which was indeed pretty crud. Not the "NVMe" i.e. gen 2 which PCS are selling and as per the review article I linked above is faster than the 760p by quite some way. I discussed this in my post above. Plus same comments about userbenchmark

As of the Linux - yeah need it mostly for programming. Since I will buy the laptop without OS will the lights/game control studio make problems?
You can download those things from your PCS account. You might not get the RGB lights working under Linux, though people may have posted fixes online for that Tongfang chassis.

The laptop will actually come with a version of Windows with drivers installed when it ships even if you order without OS as PCS use this to test. So you could presumably activate that copy with your own licence key, shrink the partition, and the install Linux, without needing to do a clean install if you wished. Though a lot of people would prefer to do their own install.
 
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Sam77

Member
Thank you for the time you took to respond.
About the M.2 what confuses me is that from the drop-down in the configurator, the disk is named as NVMe PCIe, so is it the PCIe or the NVMe is not clear? Since the difference between the WD black and the 970 Evo is 6 bucks I might as well take the Samsung?
 

Oussebon

Multiverse Poster
I went over the PCIe / NVMe thing in my post above:

The first gen of WD Black were probably worse, but PCS are now selling the 2nd Gen of WD Blacks which are actually pretty decent. The WD Black 1st gen is called "WD Black PCIe" and the 2nd gen "WD Black NVMe" by Western Digital, even though they are both PCIe NVMe drives. PCS have called both gens PCIe NVMe in their configurators (not unreasonable since that's exactly what they are...), but looking at the speeds you can tell what they're selling now is 2nd gen.

But yeah, if the price difference with the Evo is small by all means go for that.

It's not like the 760p is bad, it's just that it's nowhere near cheap enough to be worth buying vs something that's actually very good.
 
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Oussebon

Multiverse Poster
PCIe:
https://www.wdc.com/products/internal-ssd/wd-black-pcie-ssd.html

Sequential Read/Write
512GB
Up to 2,050 MB/s Read
Up to 800 MB/s Write

256GB
Up to 2,050 MB/s Read
Up to 700 MB/s Write


NVMe:
https://www.wdc.com/products/internal-ssd/wd-black-nvme-ssd.html

Sequential Read/Write
1TB
Up to 3,400 MB/s Read
Up to 2,800 MB/s Write

500GB
Up to 3,400 MB/s Read
Up to 2,500 MB/s Write

250GB
Up to 3,000 MB/s Read
Up to 1,600 MB/s Write
So you can see what they are from the speeds :)

In fairness, the naming convention by WD Black is pretty unhelpful.
 
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