Vortex 3 15 Inch with I5 Review

forbiddenloli

Active member
Chassis & Display Vortex Series: 15.6" Glossy Full HD LED Widescreen (1920x1080)
Processor (CPU) Intel® Core™i5 Dual Core Mobile Processor i5-3210M (2.50GHz) 3MB
Memory (RAM) 2GB SAMSUNG 1333MHz SODIMM DDR3 MEMORY (1 x 2GB)
Graphics Card NVIDIA® GeForce® GTX 675M - 2.0GB DDR5 Video RAM - DirectX® 11
Memory - 1st Hard Disk 250GB SERIAL ATA II 2.5" HARD DRIVE WITH 8MB CACHE (5,400rpm)
1st DVD/BLU-RAY Drive 8x SATA DVD±R/RW/Dual Layer (+ 24x CD-RW)
Thermal Paste ARCTIC MX-4 EXTREME THERMAL CONDUCTIVITY COMPOUND (£9)
Network Facilities GIGABIT LAN & WIRELESS INTEL® ULTIMATE-N 6300 (450Mbps)
Power Lead & Adaptor 1 x UK Power Lead & 180W AC Adaptor
Operating System NO OPERATING SYSTEM REQUIRED
Warranty 3 Year Silver Warranty (1 Year Collect & Return, 1 Year Parts, 3 Year Labour) (£5)
Price (excluding VAT) £771.67
Price £926.00

Processed Date 12-09-2012
Pre-Production Date 18-09-2012
Build Date 24-09-2012
Test Date 25-09-2012
Awaiting Dispatch Date 25-09-2012
Dispatch Date 25-09-2012

THis is my first proper review of anything so forgive me if it is bad

The vortex 3 is literally my new favorite thing I own - and is MILES ahead of my old Dell 1545 dinosaur....

Performance wise it is perfect all things considered - Once I enabled the Nvidia gpu in the settings I easily managed to play Battlefield 3 and borderlands 2 at very respectable FPS (With both of them using a custom graphics setup) - As far as i can tell there is no bottleneck formed by using an I5 over a I7 meaning it is a good way to reduce the cost of this laptop without hindering performance - though if you get a 680m, just shell out for an I7 :) - I have installed 8GB 1600 mhz ram which chews through all tasks I give it. The only letdown this laptop has is the hard drive, but I chose the cheapest one to get it built ASAP, so no fault of PCS or the laptop

The laptop physically is VERY appealing with little to no advertisement stickers (the only 2 being the THX and HDMI stickers which I will remove soon). all ports are easy to reach/well placed, with all display ports at the back and all major connections on the right. The keyboard has to be the BEST thing about this laptop though - it is very responsive, looks great and the backlighting is beautiful (I have it set as a nice green)

The screen is beautiful even though I went for the glossy - it is fully vibrant and vastly better than my old laptop. This comes at a slight cost since everything is now smaller due to the higher resolution - That'll take some getting used to. I may even see about buying the matte screen at a later point if PCS is willing to have a step by step guide/video

All things have bad sides however and this is no exception - for some reason the right speaker seems stronger than the left, causing even youtube videos to distort slightly, it may be a setting needing changed. Also the loudest thing has to be the disk drive - I don't know how but even when installing the drivers, all I could hear was the disk spinning round and round and round. I wouldn't mind as much but it was louder than my old dell.....

Overall the laptop is very good for its price and I am likely to be upgrading the CPU and GPU at a later date simply because I cannot believe it can get better
I will add a bit later on after I install the momentus XT I will be buying next week just to talk about the performance increase


Hope this helps anyone who was wondering about this laptop
 
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