Skyfire II Review

tom6561

Gold Level Poster
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 :)
 
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tom6561

Gold Level Poster
tUeGs.jpg
FICuE.jpg
EaZA1.jpg

EDIT: More pics :). Apparently they're too high res to upload on here and I've had enough of playing with upload sites now, so hyperlinks it is.

http://img804.imageshack.us/img804/6550/img0577o.jpg
http://img843.imageshack.us/img843/7776/img0576bgh.jpg
http://img703.imageshack.us/img703/8162/img0575mp.jpg
http://img687.imageshack.us/img687/9483/img0580ob.jpg
http://img204.imageshack.us/img204/9128/img0581qk.jpg

Also I would have liked to format these slightly more nicely but I'm not aware how to do that.
 
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jonny123

Bright Spark
Good review man,Ive got this laptop too and i love it,The screen is a big upgrade to my 1366x768 desktop monitor and the speed is also awsome.For me i dont realy like the keyboard but its not too much of a issue.Also i didnt realise how big it would be lol,I bought it for taking it to sixth form and i never expected it to be that big and if they did a 15.6" and i had the chance i would of got that.Apart from that though its a nice design,Very fast and and all round a nice laptop. :)
Enjoy :p
 

tom6561

Gold Level Poster
I've upgraded from a 1440x900 desktop, I actually love how big it is, I'm just leaving sixth form for university so that's what mine is for. I think the design overall is really good, and it is pretty damn quick...
 

jonny123

Bright Spark
Yeh i agree with the speed and espically as its my first time using a ssd :p.I like the screen size but its still abit much to be carrying around with you.
 

tom6561

Gold Level Poster
I can't wait to get an SSD, when I have a bit more money I'm definitely going to get one, as well as upgrading to 8gb of RAM.
 

jonny123

Bright Spark
Yep,Deffiantly worth it (I didnt think it would be ) but when i turn on my laptop i normally go do something else for a minute or two and itll be done but as soon as i turn this on its pretty much loaded,Its awsome :D.
 

tom6561

Gold Level Poster
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 .
 
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PCS

Administrator
Staff member
Thanks for the feedback, + rep :)

We have added your review to the reviews section on our configurator.
 

tom6561

Gold Level Poster
Thanks :). I've also added some more pictures in case anybody is interested, put them with the others.
 

tom_gr7

Life Serving
looks ace dude,

If you could create a "skyfire pics" thread in this (Clicky ) section and re post all ya pics that would be hugely appreciated.
 

Deathstar1996

New member
the name of the MSI case used in this configuration

nice review :) this has helped me on deciding weather to get this or the VortexIII 17" :)
could you tell me the name for MSI chassis this is using? also does this chassis have Dynaudio
 
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