Seeing as there aren't many reviews of the Skyfire II and I'm sitting here on mine, I figured I might try and be nice and give some sort of idea of what it's like. Firstly, my original budget was about £800 to £850, waiting the the Optimus III, however when I saw this available I might have got a bit excited and gone for it, hence the lower amount of RAM and 5400RPM HDD. Seeing as I bought it only the day after it was available, only the second gen intel processors were available, but I pushed ahead anyway assuming that gaming performance wouldn't be bottlenecked anyway and the performance gains would be modest.
Chassis & Display
SkyFire:17.3" Glossy Full HD LED Widescreen (1920x1080)
Processor (CPU)
Intel® Core™i7 Quad Core Mobile Processor i7-2670QM (2.20GHz) 6MB
Memory (RAM)
4GB SAMSUNG 1333MHz SODIMM DDR3 MEMORY (1 x 4GB)
Graphics Card
nVIDIA® GeForce® GTX 670M - 1.5GB DDR5 Video RAM - DirectX® 11
Memory - 1st Hard Disk
500GB SERIAL ATA II 2.5" HARD DRIVE WITH 8MB CACHE (5,400rpm)
Onwards to the actual review part, the first thing I thought is that it actually looks really good, the pictures on the PCS website don't do it any justice in my opinion. The touch buttons for disk drive, wireless etc took a bit to get used to, but now I don't have a problem with them at all and they look pretty cool. Mainly, like probably most people on here, it's for gaming. I've been going through Crysis and just started Crysis 2, and been getting 30/40 FPS on high (crysis), extreme (crysis 2), and about 20 or just over on ultra on both of them. Multitasking out of games has been better than I expected with 4gb of RAM, so I'm happy with that. The keyboard seems good, but coming from using a desktop it's hard to say what it's like compared to other laptops. It seems very well built, sturdy and durable from what I can tell, although I've been very careful with it. The left and right click are very solid, I don't know if a bit too much so, but I got a USB mouse with it so it doesn't really affect me too much. Overall it was definitely worth going over budget by a way, I've been impressed with the customer service, and the product itself is excellent so far.
UPDATE:
So now that I've had this for a bit longer, I thought I'd extend my review slightly or give some kind of overview of what it's been like over the past month. I've really got used to the keyboard and the touch sensitive buttons, the keyboard is actually rather good compared to most laptops I've used. The keys make a nice noise and feel sturdy enough, and I certainly haven't had any problems with the build quality. The sound quality is pretty good too, coming from a laptop with the integrated sound card I've been very impressed. The bass is reasonable, better than a normal laptop because of the subwoofer but you can still tell a difference with external speakers. It's still being very fast and is great for gaming, the webcam seems to work well with pretty decent quality, haven't used that as much but from what I've seen it's good. I've managed to get some multitouch features working on the touchpad which have vastly improved my experience, e.g. two finger scroll. The build quality in general is excellent, no problems there at all.
I've been having problems with the small right shift key, which is the cost of having full sized arrow keys. I do tend to hit the up arrow instead of shift sometimes, and also the small enter key can be annoying, but I'm sure I will get used to it. As far a practicality goes, I'm not really bothered that it's big and heavy, I'm happy to carry that round with me all day, but it isn't really the most practical or portable laptop, even for a 17", so that's something to think about. The fans can be quite noisy if you use the turbo button, which doesn't usually matter as the heat levels have been absolutely fine for me so far. Finally, there isn't a caps lock light or num lock light as far as I can tell (unless I'm being really stupid), so trial and error often has to be employed in order to work out whether they're on.
I think that's about it, any questions please ask, and I'll try and get some better photos when I have some time .
EDIT 2: Battery life is excellent, I was expecting very little but in actual fact I've got up to 5 hours when just browsing the internet, I think it's about an hour and a half when gaming.
Pictures below
Chassis & Display
SkyFire:17.3" Glossy Full HD LED Widescreen (1920x1080)
Processor (CPU)
Intel® Core™i7 Quad Core Mobile Processor i7-2670QM (2.20GHz) 6MB
Memory (RAM)
4GB SAMSUNG 1333MHz SODIMM DDR3 MEMORY (1 x 4GB)
Graphics Card
nVIDIA® GeForce® GTX 670M - 1.5GB DDR5 Video RAM - DirectX® 11
Memory - 1st Hard Disk
500GB SERIAL ATA II 2.5" HARD DRIVE WITH 8MB CACHE (5,400rpm)
Onwards to the actual review part, the first thing I thought is that it actually looks really good, the pictures on the PCS website don't do it any justice in my opinion. The touch buttons for disk drive, wireless etc took a bit to get used to, but now I don't have a problem with them at all and they look pretty cool. Mainly, like probably most people on here, it's for gaming. I've been going through Crysis and just started Crysis 2, and been getting 30/40 FPS on high (crysis), extreme (crysis 2), and about 20 or just over on ultra on both of them. Multitasking out of games has been better than I expected with 4gb of RAM, so I'm happy with that. The keyboard seems good, but coming from using a desktop it's hard to say what it's like compared to other laptops. It seems very well built, sturdy and durable from what I can tell, although I've been very careful with it. The left and right click are very solid, I don't know if a bit too much so, but I got a USB mouse with it so it doesn't really affect me too much. Overall it was definitely worth going over budget by a way, I've been impressed with the customer service, and the product itself is excellent so far.
UPDATE:
So now that I've had this for a bit longer, I thought I'd extend my review slightly or give some kind of overview of what it's been like over the past month. I've really got used to the keyboard and the touch sensitive buttons, the keyboard is actually rather good compared to most laptops I've used. The keys make a nice noise and feel sturdy enough, and I certainly haven't had any problems with the build quality. The sound quality is pretty good too, coming from a laptop with the integrated sound card I've been very impressed. The bass is reasonable, better than a normal laptop because of the subwoofer but you can still tell a difference with external speakers. It's still being very fast and is great for gaming, the webcam seems to work well with pretty decent quality, haven't used that as much but from what I've seen it's good. I've managed to get some multitouch features working on the touchpad which have vastly improved my experience, e.g. two finger scroll. The build quality in general is excellent, no problems there at all.
I've been having problems with the small right shift key, which is the cost of having full sized arrow keys. I do tend to hit the up arrow instead of shift sometimes, and also the small enter key can be annoying, but I'm sure I will get used to it. As far a practicality goes, I'm not really bothered that it's big and heavy, I'm happy to carry that round with me all day, but it isn't really the most practical or portable laptop, even for a 17", so that's something to think about. The fans can be quite noisy if you use the turbo button, which doesn't usually matter as the heat levels have been absolutely fine for me so far. Finally, there isn't a caps lock light or num lock light as far as I can tell (unless I'm being really stupid), so trial and error often has to be employed in order to work out whether they're on.
I think that's about it, any questions please ask, and I'll try and get some better photos when I have some time .
EDIT 2: Battery life is excellent, I was expecting very little but in actual fact I've got up to 5 hours when just browsing the internet, I think it's about an hour and a half when gaming.
Pictures below
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