Vortex 17inch for Photography Review

[andbro]

Well had my laptop now for about a week, not had much chance to use it but thought a quick review was in order. I bought it to replace my old Phenom triple core desktop from PC World (booo hisss), so it's mainly for use sat on the sofa, not for carrying around. This is a good thing as it's a hefty PC! Was a little surprised at first but have got used to it it now, I needed the performance rather than portability so think it's the right choice.

Build time took about 15days, regular updates were good. Delivery was really good from DPD and they texted the morning of delivery with a 1hour slot (it arrived 5 mins after the text!). It was well packed and double boxed, no problems there, keeping the box of course in case it needs to be sent away ever.

First impressions were it's hefty, as previously mentioned! It is very well build though, nice and solid so will hopefully last a looooong time. Keyboard looks really good and have got used to the half height return button quickly. Had a little trouble when it first booted up, after entering Windows 8 key and selecting my wireless router during setup it sat with blue screen for ages, in the end I rebooted and skipped this step, connecting to the wireless in Windows and it was fine. Windows 8 takes a bit of getting used to but that's not really laptop related.

Good bits:
Solid, boots up in <10seconds, powerful, processes 16 RAW images in Lightroom 5.2 without crashing! (unlike previous PC), looks good when connected to 1080p TV.

Ok bits:
Not 100% sure about the screen yet, have tried to calibrate it etc. but think it needs more work, colours aren't quite right and contrast isn't as good when connected to tv, think it needs more effort to calibrate, tips welcomed! A little prone to fingerprints! Especially if you have an 18month old daughter who loves laptops.... The only other thing I'd have liked was a scroll bar on the right hand side of the touchpad, we have one on our cheapo Tesco Acer laptop and it's pretty handy.

Bad bits:
Speakers are pretty poor for an expensive laptop, these should be better for the price. Haven't fully tested battery life yet but with everything turned low reckon it will be <2hours, but it does have a huge screen so can't really complain.

Overall good service from PC Specialist, glad I got a 240Gb SSD for primary drive, 750Gb backup.

Have attached a few quick pictures, JPEGs straight out the camera with no editing. Pentax K-r on 35mm 2.4 lens, handheld at ISO1600 if anyone is interested.


Chassis & Display Vortex Series: 17.3" Matte Full HD LED Widescreen (1920x1080)
Processor (CPU) Intel® Core™i7 Quad Core Mobile Processor i7-4700MQ (2.40GHz) 6MB
Memory (RAM) 16GB KINGSTON HYPER-X GENESIS 1600MHz SODIMM DDR3 (2 x 8GB)
Graphics Card AMD® Radeon® HD 8970M - 4GB DDR5 Video RAM - DirectX® 11
Memory - 1st Hard Disk 240GB INTEL® 335 SERIES SSD,SATA 6Gb/s(upto 500MB/sR|450MB/sW) SPECIAL
2nd Hard Disk 750GB WD SCORPIO BLACK WD7500BPKX, SATA 6 Gb/s, 16MB CACHE (7200 rpm)
1st DVD/BLU-RAY Drive 6x BLURAY WRITER, 8x DVD ±R/±RW & CYBERLINK SOFTWARE
Memory Card Reader Internal 9 in 1 Card Reader (MMC/RSMMC/SD: Mini, XC & HC/MS: Pro & Duo)
Thermal Paste ARCTIC MX-4 EXTREME THERMAL CONDUCTIVITY COMPOUND

 

[mantadog]

How are you attaching the pictures? Might be a case of a moderator having to approve them. I just approved the post as a whole but no attachments asking for approval, give it another go see what happens.

Glad you seem to be enjoying the laptop, seems like a nice balanced spec. Should be a blast to use, especially if your old desktop was slow and clunky.

The only other point I will pick up is the battery life. You have a high end CPU, GPU, 17 inch screen, a SSD and a mechanical HDD, With the best will in the world anything short of a car battery isn't going to keep that thing going for long.

 

[keynes]

Nice review I got the 15" version and can't comment on the speakers since I use headphones and the sound is fine for me.
Didn't know we needed to calibrate the screen :whistling:
Any gaming involved?

 

[andbro]

Hi, I'm trying to add them via. the uploaded, the bar scrolls across as if it's uploading then when it reaches the end an exclamation mark says it was unable to move/copy the file. Have tried it from my laptop and home and now from my PC at wirk and same things happens both times!

 

[andbro]

No gaming at all, I think the 4Gb graphics card is a little over-specced for my needs, perhaps I should take up gaming to make the most of it! Regarding the screen I've had a quick go at calibrating but need to look into it a bit more, when I plug it to an external tv or projector the picture is better. May it's cos I'm using it for editing photgraphs so am looking at the screen in quite a critical way! I need to turn the blue down a touch and a few other parameters, it's quite hard to explain! Think the way forward will be to look at the printed pictures and tune it to look like them, that's the best real test I think! It's noticebly different (not as good at the moment) to my old desktop screen which was just a cheap PC World jobbie.

I'm not too worried about the speakers, usually watching the TV when editing anyway but worth a mention!