Laptop Spec:
CPU: Intel Dual Core i3-5010U (2.1 GHz)
RAM: 8 GB RAM at 1600 MHz
Graphics: Intel HD Graphics 5500 (23 EU at 900 MHz)
Storage: 240GB KINGSTON V300 SSD
Wireless: INTEL AC-3160 M.2 (433Mbps, 802.11AC) + Bluetooth
Operating System: No Operating System (installed Windows 7 myself)
Price: £451
Link - http://www.pcspecialist.co.uk/quotes/lafite/mx0GFHQJx4/
The Review
I bought this for my girlfriend as a birthday present as she needed a small, light laptop with good battery life for work and study. It is a very attractive looking laptop and is amazingly light, comparable to a 13" Macbook Air. For the price I think it was an excellent buy, though I did purchase a Windows 7 license for much less than it would of cost through PC Specialist off a friend.
Packaging and Delivery
The laptop arrived in a rather large box, delivered by DPD. Inside was a much smaller box that had been wrapped well in some rather fancy bubble wrap that would cushion the package very well in the event of a drop. Once I managed to get into the laptop box, the laptop was supported by polystyrene and was neatly packaged with the included power supply, PC Specialist booklet and a Windows 8 Driver disk which I'll be holding on to for another PC I plan to build in the future. All in all, excellent packaging and the delivery driver was great too.
Aesthetics & Usability
The Lafité is a very nice looking laptop and definitely evokes a Macbook Air (I was comparing my Dad's to this all the time). The key parts are aluminium but there is also some grey/silver plastic as well in the hinge and I think on the inside of the screen bezel but it is not noticeable unless you're looking for it. The keyboard I found to be excellent with a decent amount of travel and the keys weren't too cramped. I was happily typing away on it and setting up various software installs and browsing with no issues with the keyboard.
The track pad is a different story however. I own an UltraNote II (also from PC Specialist) and that track pad is excellent with two finger scrolling and I barely need to tap it to select things on screen. The track pad on the Lafité is nowhere near as good. You have to press fairly hard to get it to select anything on screen and even moving it around the screen it doesn't quite seem to register what you want to do. Playing with the sensitivity settings fixed this somewhat but clicking is still fairly horrible and I am pretty disappointed. Definitely the weakest point of this otherwise superb laptop.
Weight and size wise this is a good laptop - at about 1.5 Kg (excluding the power cable) it is very portable and does not take up a whole lot of space. It is also quite a bit more powerful than my tablet so if I were keeping it I would probably swap over to lugging the laptop around in the future - alas it is not mine to keep!
Performance
Considering I picked the i3-5010U processor, it is still extremely quick doing anything requiring light work. At no point has the laptop kept me waiting to do something. As a browsing machine it is very quick. With the Kingston SSD everything loads lightning quick - I am at the start screen in under 10 seconds after turning it on! Documents load quickly and even running a virus scan takes very little time (admittedly because there isn't a lot on the disk yet). I stuck with the basic AC wireless adapter which is more than fast enough to keep up with my 20 Mb connection and is probably overkill anyway.
For gaming it is also pretty respectable - I chucked on a few games to see how it would perform. League of Legends, Hearthstone and XCOM: Enemy Unknown all played well at Low Settings at 1080p resolution which was surprising and through the fan does spin up a bit to cool the system it was very playable and not too distracting. One of the reasons I picked the i3 over the Pentium is that the i3 gets 23 EUs (Execution Units) for it's graphics as opposed to the Pentium which gets only 12 EUs - so nearly double the potential performance. The i3 also has HyperThreading compared to the Pentium which ups the CPU performance a bit as well.
Display
The 13.3" IPS 1080p display is great! Not the most amazing screen ever, but it has good colours, gets fairly bright and has very good viewing angles. Text looks great on it and I didn't feel the need to scale the text size up or down. Personally 1080p on a 13.3" makes perfect sense to me and is worth every penny over a horrible 768p screen. Websites display well (if a tiny bit smaller than usual) and documents look great. The girlfriend says it's the best laptop she's every owned and I think it will last her a few years at least which is a bonus.
For film watching (I had a test 1080p video sample) it looked great as well. While there is sadly no disc drive on this laptop, if you rip Blu-Rays as I do it will make for a great film watching device for those long plane flights. Blacks are not very black however - more of a dark grey (I find this to be common with LED displays).
Battery Life
The laptop is rated for about 7 hours - I got it to go to 7.5 hours with some causal browsing and setting the screen to low-ish. Gaming will kill the battery fairly quickly - I got about 2.5 - 3 hours playing Hearthstone which isn't a particularly intensive game. For what it does it has a very respectable battery life - though does not compare to a 13" Macbook Air's 12 hours obviously. I do wonder if installing Windows 8.1 / 10 on the laptop instead would increase this but I don't have a spare copy to try. On a side note, charging this laptop does seem to take a long time, so it's better to leave it charging over night!
Conclusion
If you want a short summary...
Good Points:
Bad Points:
CPU: Intel Dual Core i3-5010U (2.1 GHz)
RAM: 8 GB RAM at 1600 MHz
Graphics: Intel HD Graphics 5500 (23 EU at 900 MHz)
Storage: 240GB KINGSTON V300 SSD
Wireless: INTEL AC-3160 M.2 (433Mbps, 802.11AC) + Bluetooth
Operating System: No Operating System (installed Windows 7 myself)
Price: £451
Link - http://www.pcspecialist.co.uk/quotes/lafite/mx0GFHQJx4/
The Review
I bought this for my girlfriend as a birthday present as she needed a small, light laptop with good battery life for work and study. It is a very attractive looking laptop and is amazingly light, comparable to a 13" Macbook Air. For the price I think it was an excellent buy, though I did purchase a Windows 7 license for much less than it would of cost through PC Specialist off a friend.
Packaging and Delivery
The laptop arrived in a rather large box, delivered by DPD. Inside was a much smaller box that had been wrapped well in some rather fancy bubble wrap that would cushion the package very well in the event of a drop. Once I managed to get into the laptop box, the laptop was supported by polystyrene and was neatly packaged with the included power supply, PC Specialist booklet and a Windows 8 Driver disk which I'll be holding on to for another PC I plan to build in the future. All in all, excellent packaging and the delivery driver was great too.
Aesthetics & Usability
The Lafité is a very nice looking laptop and definitely evokes a Macbook Air (I was comparing my Dad's to this all the time). The key parts are aluminium but there is also some grey/silver plastic as well in the hinge and I think on the inside of the screen bezel but it is not noticeable unless you're looking for it. The keyboard I found to be excellent with a decent amount of travel and the keys weren't too cramped. I was happily typing away on it and setting up various software installs and browsing with no issues with the keyboard.
The track pad is a different story however. I own an UltraNote II (also from PC Specialist) and that track pad is excellent with two finger scrolling and I barely need to tap it to select things on screen. The track pad on the Lafité is nowhere near as good. You have to press fairly hard to get it to select anything on screen and even moving it around the screen it doesn't quite seem to register what you want to do. Playing with the sensitivity settings fixed this somewhat but clicking is still fairly horrible and I am pretty disappointed. Definitely the weakest point of this otherwise superb laptop.
Weight and size wise this is a good laptop - at about 1.5 Kg (excluding the power cable) it is very portable and does not take up a whole lot of space. It is also quite a bit more powerful than my tablet so if I were keeping it I would probably swap over to lugging the laptop around in the future - alas it is not mine to keep!
Performance
Considering I picked the i3-5010U processor, it is still extremely quick doing anything requiring light work. At no point has the laptop kept me waiting to do something. As a browsing machine it is very quick. With the Kingston SSD everything loads lightning quick - I am at the start screen in under 10 seconds after turning it on! Documents load quickly and even running a virus scan takes very little time (admittedly because there isn't a lot on the disk yet). I stuck with the basic AC wireless adapter which is more than fast enough to keep up with my 20 Mb connection and is probably overkill anyway.
For gaming it is also pretty respectable - I chucked on a few games to see how it would perform. League of Legends, Hearthstone and XCOM: Enemy Unknown all played well at Low Settings at 1080p resolution which was surprising and through the fan does spin up a bit to cool the system it was very playable and not too distracting. One of the reasons I picked the i3 over the Pentium is that the i3 gets 23 EUs (Execution Units) for it's graphics as opposed to the Pentium which gets only 12 EUs - so nearly double the potential performance. The i3 also has HyperThreading compared to the Pentium which ups the CPU performance a bit as well.
Display
The 13.3" IPS 1080p display is great! Not the most amazing screen ever, but it has good colours, gets fairly bright and has very good viewing angles. Text looks great on it and I didn't feel the need to scale the text size up or down. Personally 1080p on a 13.3" makes perfect sense to me and is worth every penny over a horrible 768p screen. Websites display well (if a tiny bit smaller than usual) and documents look great. The girlfriend says it's the best laptop she's every owned and I think it will last her a few years at least which is a bonus.
For film watching (I had a test 1080p video sample) it looked great as well. While there is sadly no disc drive on this laptop, if you rip Blu-Rays as I do it will make for a great film watching device for those long plane flights. Blacks are not very black however - more of a dark grey (I find this to be common with LED displays).
Battery Life
The laptop is rated for about 7 hours - I got it to go to 7.5 hours with some causal browsing and setting the screen to low-ish. Gaming will kill the battery fairly quickly - I got about 2.5 - 3 hours playing Hearthstone which isn't a particularly intensive game. For what it does it has a very respectable battery life - though does not compare to a 13" Macbook Air's 12 hours obviously. I do wonder if installing Windows 8.1 / 10 on the laptop instead would increase this but I don't have a spare copy to try. On a side note, charging this laptop does seem to take a long time, so it's better to leave it charging over night!
Conclusion
If you want a short summary...
Good Points:
- Excellent Design
- Excellent Screen
- Excellent Performance
- Good Keyboard
- Good Battery Life
- Great Price (as configured)
Bad Points:
- Track Pad
- Charge Time
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