Recoil II 17.3" Laptop review

Hi all,

These are my impressions on the recoil II 17.3" laptop, firstly i have never written any form of review before. However i could only find reviews for the 15" version prior to buying this, so i thought i should share my experience on its bigger brother, these are the specs i have ordered for the laptop.

Chassis & Display - Recoil Series: 17.3" Matte Full HD 144Hz 72% NTSC LED Widescreen (1920x1080)
Processor (CPU) - Intel® Core™ i7 Six Core Processor 8750H (2.2GHz, 4.1GHz Turbo)
Memory (RAM) - 16GB Corsair 2666MHz SODIMM DDR4 (2 x 8GB)
Graphics Card - NVIDIA® GeForce® GTX 1060 - 6.0GB GDDR5 Video RAM - DirectX® 12.1
1st M.2 SSD Drive - 500GB SAMSUNG 970 EVO M.2, PCIe NVMe (up to 3400MB/R, 2300MB/W)

At first i was very surprised at how thin and light this laptop is, the build quality is very sturdy and gives a very premium feel to the laptop. I personally love the mechanical keyboard, has a nice click sound while using (maybe not to everyone's taste). The quality of the 144hz screen is very sharp and clear, the depth of color seems very good too.

Now enough about the aesthetics, lets talk about its gaming capabilities and temps. I have found that this laptop is able to run all new titles at high/ultra on the graphics while maintaining FPS between 45-60, after 60mins ++ of gaming CPU/GPU temps remain between 60-66c. I would put this down to good design of the case, it has plenty of venting along the bottom & exhaust fans at the sides and back. This was all achieved while using the standard gaming fan curve on the system, i have never heard it ramp up anywhere near its full fan capabilities to maintain these temps either. It never became too loud and never caused my wife to complain while she watches telly

Now for a little bit about the CPU, having 6 cores and 12 threads really does give the power you would need for streaming while gaming (if that's what you're into) or some video rendering/editing tasks. I have found that in practice underload the CPU will throttle itself to a steady 3.4GHz, however this can be increased by under volting the CPU. This allowed me to maintain the same temps while increasing core speeds to a stable 3.9GHz under load. To put it into numbers this set a Cinebench score at 997 base, increased to 1284 after the under volting - demonstrating a solid 20% performance increase if required.

Hope this wasn't too long winded and gave people some guidance, any other questions people have please do ask and ill answer if i can.

Thanks

Good review, and interesting info on the CPU. Thanks for posting it

I'd really appreciate it if you could tell me whether the panel is IPS (though, I guess it would have been listed as so if it were). Also, how's the battery life when doing basic stuff (web browsing, reduced brightness)?

Thank you for the review!

I'm commenting as a recoil II 15.6" user.
The panel in the 17.3" does appear to be ips looking at other website. The standard display on the 15.6" is also ips without being marketed as so.
The battery life on the 15.6" is bad enough that you need to carry your charger everywhere although varies significantly depending on what you're doing. I maybe get 3 hours web browsing at a low-mid brightness if I'm very lucky. For whatever weird reason, the 17.3" still only has the same tiny (smaller than my cheap 6yr old celeron laptop) 46wh battery but a bigger screen and no 60hz option so battery life will be worse.

Thank you very much for your reply!

kammak743 said:

I'm commenting as a recoil II 15.6" user.
The panel in the 17.3" does appear to be ips looking at other website. The standard display on the 15.6" is also ips without being marketed as so.
The battery life on the 15.6" is bad enough that you need to carry your charger everywhere although varies significantly depending on what you're doing. I maybe get 3 hours web browsing at a low-mid brightness if I'm very lucky. For whatever weird reason, the 17.3" still only has the same tiny (smaller than my cheap 6yr old celeron laptop) 46wh battery but a bigger screen and no 60hz option so battery life will be worse.

Click to expand...

I'm back with a question: could you, please, tell me where you found that the display on the 17.3" version is IPS? I was told by PCS support that the panel is this one (but actually overclocked to 144Hz, as it is only 60Hz): http://www.panelook.com/NV173FHM-N44_BOE_17.3_LCM_overview_36366.html , but panellook does not say anything about it being IPS. Thanks!