I've recently received my new laptop with the following specs:
First I'd like to say that I do not regret buying this laptop at all. It works wonderfully with anything I throw at it. Video and photo processing, games, etc - everything works perfectly so far. It is exactly what I needed and expected in terms of performance. Thermals are good too (GPU always runs cool; CPU needs a bit of Control Centre tinkering when playing games).
That being said, the negative:
I previously had a 15.6" Vortex from 2014, which I thoroughly enjoyed using. Compared to the Vortex, the Recoil has a really nice chassis (the Vortex was made of hard plastic - tough but a bit ugly). The screen looks great as well. There are only two things I think the Vortex did better: the keyboard and the webcam. The Recoil keyboard is sadly just not very good. It's a mechanical keyboard, but the keys are a bit wobbly and just don't feel as nice; also, sometimes you feel the feedback from the key, but the key press only registers if you press it a tiny little bit further, which every now and then results in typos. Re: the camera, it's just worse. Lower resolution, blurry image at the best of times but specially in the dark, seems to have a little bit of a delay, longer than I'm used to.
When you double tap the top left corner of the touchpad, you disable it, which is very useful - what is not useful is that it indicates it's off by turning a little light on. This would be good except this light is VERY bright! Annoyingly so. It's much brighter than the keyboard LEDs. I circumvent this by always leaving the touchpad on (i.e. light off) and telling Windows not to use the touchpad while a mouse is connected. On a related note: the touchpad is very good! Miles ahead of the Vortex touchpad.
If this matters to you, the power brick is a bit heavier than the Vortex's, and the cables are thicker. The laptop itself is lighter, though.
PCSpecialist also sent me the laptop without configuring the audio properly. There was no audio at all at first (both the Realtek and the THX drivers were installed, but they were not "talking" to each other). When I reinstalled them, the Realtek device then started talking to THX and was able to be configured via its utility. I really disliked the THX utiliy though, for one important reason: it automatically detects whether you are using speakers or headphones and applies different profiles to them. This wouldn't be so bad if the speakers profile didn't apply a lowpass filter to the audio, with no way to turn this off! It literally greyed out the EQ sliders under 200 Hz or so. This is not because the speakers can't handle it: after I uninstalled THX and left only the Realtek drivers, the speakers (which sound pretty good for a laptop, btw!) instantly sounded fuller. It's a shame that by doing this I'm missing out on the other THX features, but I don't really need them.
Finally, I've been having trouble with sleep mode. 90% of the time, the laptop freezes after waking up from sleep mode, and the severity of the freeze depends on how long it's been asleep for. If it goes to sleep for just a couple of seconds, it usually comes back without issues. If it goes to sleep for 30-60 seconds, when it comes back I can move the cursor around, but I can't click anything (and then I get a BSOD after about 20 seconds). If it goes to sleep for 60+ seconds, then the screen turns on but remains black, and then after about 20 seconds it simply restarts (no BSOD). I have not yet been able to fix this. The BSOD flashes on the screen for a split of second, and the event logs say Windows failed at creating a memory dump.
I actually need some advice here: I don't care about sleep mode (setting windows to only turn off the screen is fine). Since everything else seems to be working perfectly, would you advise against turning sleep mode off and forgetting about it? I don't care if it doesn't work, I just don't want to ignore possible hardware problems that might get worse down the road.
First I'd like to say that I do not regret buying this laptop at all. It works wonderfully with anything I throw at it. Video and photo processing, games, etc - everything works perfectly so far. It is exactly what I needed and expected in terms of performance. Thermals are good too (GPU always runs cool; CPU needs a bit of Control Centre tinkering when playing games).
That being said, the negative:
I previously had a 15.6" Vortex from 2014, which I thoroughly enjoyed using. Compared to the Vortex, the Recoil has a really nice chassis (the Vortex was made of hard plastic - tough but a bit ugly). The screen looks great as well. There are only two things I think the Vortex did better: the keyboard and the webcam. The Recoil keyboard is sadly just not very good. It's a mechanical keyboard, but the keys are a bit wobbly and just don't feel as nice; also, sometimes you feel the feedback from the key, but the key press only registers if you press it a tiny little bit further, which every now and then results in typos. Re: the camera, it's just worse. Lower resolution, blurry image at the best of times but specially in the dark, seems to have a little bit of a delay, longer than I'm used to.
When you double tap the top left corner of the touchpad, you disable it, which is very useful - what is not useful is that it indicates it's off by turning a little light on. This would be good except this light is VERY bright! Annoyingly so. It's much brighter than the keyboard LEDs. I circumvent this by always leaving the touchpad on (i.e. light off) and telling Windows not to use the touchpad while a mouse is connected. On a related note: the touchpad is very good! Miles ahead of the Vortex touchpad.
If this matters to you, the power brick is a bit heavier than the Vortex's, and the cables are thicker. The laptop itself is lighter, though.
PCSpecialist also sent me the laptop without configuring the audio properly. There was no audio at all at first (both the Realtek and the THX drivers were installed, but they were not "talking" to each other). When I reinstalled them, the Realtek device then started talking to THX and was able to be configured via its utility. I really disliked the THX utiliy though, for one important reason: it automatically detects whether you are using speakers or headphones and applies different profiles to them. This wouldn't be so bad if the speakers profile didn't apply a lowpass filter to the audio, with no way to turn this off! It literally greyed out the EQ sliders under 200 Hz or so. This is not because the speakers can't handle it: after I uninstalled THX and left only the Realtek drivers, the speakers (which sound pretty good for a laptop, btw!) instantly sounded fuller. It's a shame that by doing this I'm missing out on the other THX features, but I don't really need them.
Finally, I've been having trouble with sleep mode. 90% of the time, the laptop freezes after waking up from sleep mode, and the severity of the freeze depends on how long it's been asleep for. If it goes to sleep for just a couple of seconds, it usually comes back without issues. If it goes to sleep for 30-60 seconds, when it comes back I can move the cursor around, but I can't click anything (and then I get a BSOD after about 20 seconds). If it goes to sleep for 60+ seconds, then the screen turns on but remains black, and then after about 20 seconds it simply restarts (no BSOD). I have not yet been able to fix this. The BSOD flashes on the screen for a split of second, and the event logs say Windows failed at creating a memory dump.
I actually need some advice here: I don't care about sleep mode (setting windows to only turn off the screen is fine). Since everything else seems to be working perfectly, would you advise against turning sleep mode off and forgetting about it? I don't care if it doesn't work, I just don't want to ignore possible hardware problems that might get worse down the road.
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