Recoil IV 15 Review after 5 months

TsvPan

New member
Hello everyone,

I would like to give a review of my Recoil IV 15 after 5 months of use.

Here is the config:
Chassis & DisplayRecoil Series: 15.6" Matte Full HD 240Hz 72% NTSC LED Widescreen (1920x1080)
Processor (CPU)Intel® Core™ i7 Eight Core Processor 10875H (2.3GHz, 5.1GHz Turbo)
Memory (RAM)32GB Corsair 2666MHz SODIMM DDR4 (2 x 16GB)
Graphics CardNVIDIA® GeForce® RTX 2070 - 8.0GB GDDR6 Video RAM - DirectX® 12.1
1st M.2 SSD Drive512GB PCS PCIe M.2 SSD (2000 MB/R, 1100 MB/W)

I would like to start the review with the order process.
The website is easy and pleasant to navigate and use. During the order process, there was a small issue, due to an error on my side. Nevertheless customer support handled it well and the order was quickly on its way. Overall the laptop was built for 7 days and delivered for 8 to South Eastern Europe. There were no scratches and marks on the laptop due to delivery and as such the packaging was sufficient. The protective foam in the packaging is 3cm thick.
Due to an error on my side, I order the laptop with a UK kettle. Fortunately the cable is standard (C13 connector) and I had one European lying around so I used that.

I also timely received the Death Stranding code, that comes with the Nvidia GPU.

Moving on to hardware:
Build quality is very good, but not quite up to the standard of the Macbook Pro 15 2018 or HP Zbook G2 I previously had. The differences are mainly in the display (a bit more flex) and its hinges (not as sturdy as the other two) and also the bottom panel (plastic and somewhat thin, especially around the fan cut-outs duo to less material there).

I personally like the keyboard, but acknowledge that some people might not. Its definitely better for gaming than any other laptop keyboard I have used. For typing I would have prefer more space between the keys. The keyboard without the backlighting is difficult to read though even in broad daylight. The backlight itself gets reasonably bright

The touchpad is worse than both the Macbook Pro 15 2018 or HP Zbook G2 in part due to integrated buttons, but mainly due to the rattling ( ) at the bottom.

The infrared camera works flawlessly. The standard camera is nothing special.

The display is very good, both in terms of refresh rate (240hz) and response time (sub 5ms), but also brightness (300 nits) and colour accuracy. It doesn't quite stand up to the Macbook Pro display in terms brightness and colour accuracy, but that's not needed for my use cases.

A small note on the power button - I have to press it a bit harder than the profile changer button in order for it to work. This of course might be intentional, to

Taking into consideration the powerful silicon, the laptop delivers fantastic performance, both in gaming and programming related tasks (VMs, compiling, 100 chrome tabs, etc). For a more in depth review of performance you should probably take a look at one of the chassis youtube or reddit reviews. A final note is that I am running a +155/+764 GPU overclock for a 5-10% boost and not thermal penalties with MSI Afterburner and a -50mv CPU undervolt from bios, for a 2-5% boost.

Battery Life:
Due to the MUX switch you can run the laptop in 3 modes: integrated GPU, dedicated GPU, hybrid
The best battery life is expectedly in integrated GPU mode - around 7 hours. Dedicated GPU mode cuts that back to at maximum 3 hours. Hybrid has been a hit or miss for me, probably due to some software issue, as the Nvidia GPU is activating sometimes for not apparent reason (which is obvious as the right fan which is for GPU briefly spins every couple of seconds or so). My best guess is that its related to Windows GPU latency, but will do more testing with that.
Another note is that my thunderbolt dock does not work if the Nvidia GPU is disabled. Taking into consideration the fact that the port is connected directly to the dedicated GPU, this makes sense. I have not tested this with other thunderbolt or USB-C devices.

Moving on to software:
Initially I experienced some issues with Thunderbolt connectivity and the GamingCenterU software but after installing the most recent updates and drivers, everything seems to be working correctly. I actually really like the GamingCenterU software and its ability to configure the keyboard and lightbar backlighting. Also to my linking are the different power profiles, which can be changed from the software and also from the button beside the power button, which has 3 step LED lightning to indicate which profile you have on.
The profiles are sufficiently different from each other and the quiet office option has a fan curve editor. The other two profiles have an option to max out the fans.

Despite the somewhat critically sounding review I am overall very happy with my purchase and would recommend the laptop to anyone looking for compact gaming performance with a very good battery life.

Thank you for taking the time to read this.
I am open to questions if I have missed anything.
 

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