RaveBeforeLunch
Member
THE SPECS I GOT
Chassis & Display
Optimus Series: 17.3" Matte Full HD LED Widescreen (1920x1080)
Processor (CPU)
Intel® Core™i7 Quad Core Mobile Processor i7-3630QM (2.40GHz) 6MB
Memory (RAM)
8GB KINGSTON HYPER-X GENESIS 1600MHz SODIMM DDR3 (2 x 4GB)
Graphics Card
NVIDIA® GeForce® GTX 660M - 2.0GB DDR5 Video RAM - DirectX® 11
Memory - 1st Hard Disk
750GB SEAGATE MOMENTUS XT HYBRID, SATA 6 Gb/s, 32MB CACHE (7200 rpm)
Thermal Paste
STANDARD THERMAL PASTE FOR SUFFICIENT COOLING
Sound Card
Intel 2 Channel High Definition Audio + MIC/Headphone Jack
Network Facilities
GIGABIT LAN & WIRELESS INTEL® N135 802.11N (150Mbps) + BLUETOOTH
Operating System
Genuine Windows 8 Standard Edition 64 Bit - inc DVD & Licence (£79)
Price - £846
PC SPECIALIST - 10/10
PC Specialist themselves were absolutely amazing. The delivery time was 9 working days from order date to delivery which I think is great considering it was around Christmas time. Any questions I had were answered and their consistent update e-mails were very good for tracking the order. One problem that I had was with the tracking on their actual website froze on pre-production and suddenly jumped to awaiting dispatch, but the DPD tracking on their website didn't fail. DPD were also very good as they gave us a 5pm-6pm time slot and delivered at 5:30pm.
PACKAGING - 7/10
Pretty standard and extremely protective. I have never seen so much protective foam in my life! There was a massive box with a lot of tape and foam containing another small box with more tape and foam, which contained the actual laptop itself.
THE MASSIVE POWER BRICK - 5/10
The first thing that strikes you is the size of the power brick. The size is literally the size of your average house 'brick' and adds a lot of weight, but they have halved the size and reduced the weight in the newer power brick which my friend got as he ordered his a few months after mine.
THE 17 INCH AMAZING SCREEN - 5659/10
The second thing that you notice is THE SCREEN! It is the nicest screen I have seen! The colours, the resolution and the contrast easily beat my £500 samsung 40 inch TV and I just couldn't believe that this screen was on a laptop! If you're thinking about getting a 15 inch instead, don't do it! At first it seems too big and too much, but once you get used to it you can never live without the size. Coming from a 13 inch macbook, I was very impressed.
THE PERFORMANCE - 10/10
This 'laptop' is more of a tank than anything else. It can easily run BF3 on high, Skyrim on Ultra, SimCity on High, Arma II on High, Just Cause 2 on High and COD on Max. The i7 allows photoshop, after effects, premiere etc to run with ease and you'll never look back. Obviously each laptop has different specs but I would definitely recommend the i7 as it helps massively. My favorite part is coming from a 2.5 minute boot up time of 18 SECONDS! The Seagate Momentus XT Hybrid is a great little hard drive and I was not expecting 18 second boot times from a non SSD. The laptop cools down very quickly and the fans are silent when doing normal activities but are very loud when gaming!
THE CASE - 7/10
The case is pretty much exactly what I expected. It's pretty cheap but extremely solid. I love the variety of ports and the screen and the buttons on the left side is very useful. As well as this, the GPU switcher is a very handy feature and I use it all of the time. It does have some problems, which I'll explain in the 'problems' section but on the whole, this case does the job.
KEYBOARD - 8/10
The keyboard is a dream to type on and I love the numpad. It is very spacious and comparable to a macs keyboard but one of my keys comes loose about once a month which I can easily pop back in. My problem with this is that there are no play/pause/next/previous keys which I had to assign myself using 'AutoHotkey'. The keys are responsive and great to type on.
TRACK-PAD - 3/10
The track-pad is....terrible. It's not very smooth, the buttons feel cheap and it's not very responsive. The placement is definitely the biggest problem with the laptop. It means your right hand is always resting on the trackpad which makes you accidentally brush it with your hand making the mouse click. This moves the cursor and makes you type in a different place which is very frustrating. On other laptops, the trackpad is to the left, underneath the middle of the space bar which eliminates the problem. You get used to not resting your right hand on the laptop, but it is uncomfortable after a while. Poor design Clevo!
WEBCAM AND SPEAKERS - 3/10
They do the job and that's about it. The actual sound card is fine and if you have headphones and speakers you're going to be ok, but for general use they're terrible. They sound very 'tinny' and are much worse than your average phone speakers. Furthermore, dust can get into the wholes of the speakers which spoils the look and you can't get them out! I don't use the speakers more than once a month but if you use them a lot, you will need to buy some speakers. The webcam is no better, but it's not a problem for me as I never use it.
THE PROBLEMS I HAD
I had a few problems when getting my laptop. First, the trackpad buttons didn't work and it wasn't responding, but installing the drivers instantly fixed it. Also, it took me a while to find my serial key for windows 8, which was on the bottom of the laptop. My main issue (which is recent) is the fact that my fans are weird. In demanding games, the fans go from max power, off for 0.2 seconds and back to max power again. They do this every 10 seconds and it's pretty annoying. The problems below are general problems with the laptop and not my unique problems:
THE BAD
The trackpad placement
The disk drive is slightly loose when open
Dust can get into the speaker wholes and can't be cleaned
No iTunes play/pause/skip/previous buttons
The speakers and webcam are average.
THE GOOD
A startup time of 18 SECONDS!
The amazing screen
The keyboard
The size of the screen
The hardware
The flawless service from PC Specialist
THE CONCLUSION
A great laptop that I would highly recommend. I'm very impressed with the hardware, the keyboard is lovely to type on but the screen is the star of the show here - it's really superb. The only main drawbacks is the trackpad placement and the average speakers/webcam.
I would give this laptop a total of 8.5/10
Chassis & Display
Optimus Series: 17.3" Matte Full HD LED Widescreen (1920x1080)
Processor (CPU)
Intel® Core™i7 Quad Core Mobile Processor i7-3630QM (2.40GHz) 6MB
Memory (RAM)
8GB KINGSTON HYPER-X GENESIS 1600MHz SODIMM DDR3 (2 x 4GB)
Graphics Card
NVIDIA® GeForce® GTX 660M - 2.0GB DDR5 Video RAM - DirectX® 11
Memory - 1st Hard Disk
750GB SEAGATE MOMENTUS XT HYBRID, SATA 6 Gb/s, 32MB CACHE (7200 rpm)
Thermal Paste
STANDARD THERMAL PASTE FOR SUFFICIENT COOLING
Sound Card
Intel 2 Channel High Definition Audio + MIC/Headphone Jack
Network Facilities
GIGABIT LAN & WIRELESS INTEL® N135 802.11N (150Mbps) + BLUETOOTH
Operating System
Genuine Windows 8 Standard Edition 64 Bit - inc DVD & Licence (£79)
Price - £846
PC SPECIALIST - 10/10
PC Specialist themselves were absolutely amazing. The delivery time was 9 working days from order date to delivery which I think is great considering it was around Christmas time. Any questions I had were answered and their consistent update e-mails were very good for tracking the order. One problem that I had was with the tracking on their actual website froze on pre-production and suddenly jumped to awaiting dispatch, but the DPD tracking on their website didn't fail. DPD were also very good as they gave us a 5pm-6pm time slot and delivered at 5:30pm.
PACKAGING - 7/10
Pretty standard and extremely protective. I have never seen so much protective foam in my life! There was a massive box with a lot of tape and foam containing another small box with more tape and foam, which contained the actual laptop itself.
THE MASSIVE POWER BRICK - 5/10
The first thing that strikes you is the size of the power brick. The size is literally the size of your average house 'brick' and adds a lot of weight, but they have halved the size and reduced the weight in the newer power brick which my friend got as he ordered his a few months after mine.
THE 17 INCH AMAZING SCREEN - 5659/10
The second thing that you notice is THE SCREEN! It is the nicest screen I have seen! The colours, the resolution and the contrast easily beat my £500 samsung 40 inch TV and I just couldn't believe that this screen was on a laptop! If you're thinking about getting a 15 inch instead, don't do it! At first it seems too big and too much, but once you get used to it you can never live without the size. Coming from a 13 inch macbook, I was very impressed.
THE PERFORMANCE - 10/10
This 'laptop' is more of a tank than anything else. It can easily run BF3 on high, Skyrim on Ultra, SimCity on High, Arma II on High, Just Cause 2 on High and COD on Max. The i7 allows photoshop, after effects, premiere etc to run with ease and you'll never look back. Obviously each laptop has different specs but I would definitely recommend the i7 as it helps massively. My favorite part is coming from a 2.5 minute boot up time of 18 SECONDS! The Seagate Momentus XT Hybrid is a great little hard drive and I was not expecting 18 second boot times from a non SSD. The laptop cools down very quickly and the fans are silent when doing normal activities but are very loud when gaming!
THE CASE - 7/10
The case is pretty much exactly what I expected. It's pretty cheap but extremely solid. I love the variety of ports and the screen and the buttons on the left side is very useful. As well as this, the GPU switcher is a very handy feature and I use it all of the time. It does have some problems, which I'll explain in the 'problems' section but on the whole, this case does the job.
KEYBOARD - 8/10
The keyboard is a dream to type on and I love the numpad. It is very spacious and comparable to a macs keyboard but one of my keys comes loose about once a month which I can easily pop back in. My problem with this is that there are no play/pause/next/previous keys which I had to assign myself using 'AutoHotkey'. The keys are responsive and great to type on.
TRACK-PAD - 3/10
The track-pad is....terrible. It's not very smooth, the buttons feel cheap and it's not very responsive. The placement is definitely the biggest problem with the laptop. It means your right hand is always resting on the trackpad which makes you accidentally brush it with your hand making the mouse click. This moves the cursor and makes you type in a different place which is very frustrating. On other laptops, the trackpad is to the left, underneath the middle of the space bar which eliminates the problem. You get used to not resting your right hand on the laptop, but it is uncomfortable after a while. Poor design Clevo!
WEBCAM AND SPEAKERS - 3/10
They do the job and that's about it. The actual sound card is fine and if you have headphones and speakers you're going to be ok, but for general use they're terrible. They sound very 'tinny' and are much worse than your average phone speakers. Furthermore, dust can get into the wholes of the speakers which spoils the look and you can't get them out! I don't use the speakers more than once a month but if you use them a lot, you will need to buy some speakers. The webcam is no better, but it's not a problem for me as I never use it.
THE PROBLEMS I HAD
I had a few problems when getting my laptop. First, the trackpad buttons didn't work and it wasn't responding, but installing the drivers instantly fixed it. Also, it took me a while to find my serial key for windows 8, which was on the bottom of the laptop. My main issue (which is recent) is the fact that my fans are weird. In demanding games, the fans go from max power, off for 0.2 seconds and back to max power again. They do this every 10 seconds and it's pretty annoying. The problems below are general problems with the laptop and not my unique problems:
THE BAD
The trackpad placement
The disk drive is slightly loose when open
Dust can get into the speaker wholes and can't be cleaned
No iTunes play/pause/skip/previous buttons
The speakers and webcam are average.
THE GOOD
A startup time of 18 SECONDS!
The amazing screen
The keyboard
The size of the screen
The hardware
The flawless service from PC Specialist
THE CONCLUSION
A great laptop that I would highly recommend. I'm very impressed with the hardware, the keyboard is lovely to type on but the screen is the star of the show here - it's really superb. The only main drawbacks is the trackpad placement and the average speakers/webcam.
I would give this laptop a total of 8.5/10