Defiance III 17.3 Laptop Review

[bullets]

A good friend of mine recommended PCspecialist which I had never heard of before, when I looked at the webpage I was amazed at the good value spec wise when you compared it to the likes of commercial webpages like Dell etc. No way could Dell or other website match the price vs spec that PCS can supply.

After reading lots of reviews I decided to Purchase the 17.3" version of the Defiance III.
I was going to go for the Octane Laptop which I was told had a Desktop I7 processor but in the end
for heat reasons I decided to stick with the Defiance series laptop.

I went for the 17" version over the 15" version as I was planning on using it for processing photos.
Since Macro photography is my hobby it was extremely important to me to have no dead pixels and
no back light bleed. I heard from a few different reviews that this series of Laptop's screens suffered from back light bleed. This was a deal breaker for me. Thankfully the screen was perfect without any issues.


The laptop is heavy, thin and feels metallic to touch. The Surface of the chassy is a fingerprint magnet and I guess thats why it came with a lint free cloth. The touch pad is extra large much larger than other laptops I've used. The keyboard it lovely and can have 3 sections of it programmed to backlight a range of colours.

The outer box it came had lots of protection An external box first and then the internal laptop box was floating on airbed of packaging. The laptop box itself had extra protection internally.

The Power supply is much larger than a normal powersupply.

The laptop did not come with a Windows Activation sticker /product key in the paperwork and
when I first booted up it did not recognize as being activated. I soon learned that the Activation Key
was "injected" into a chip on the motherboard so you would never need the activation key.

When I started installing basic apps like Steam/Bluestacks/Photoshop the laptop randomly locked up
for no reason which was worrying. Mouse and everything stopped responding and I could not alt-tab so I was forced to force boot. This happened a few times which was worrying.

Another worrying thing was a few times when I had an external USB HD plugged in and I was copying data from it to the D drive (C: was an SSD and D: was a physical drive) it stopped responding. It seems the physical secondary drive appears to power down quickly and takes a while to spin up which is Odd for me.

A very very very annoying thing was the Realtek audio. It worked fine for speakers but when I plugged in my headphones and it recognized that I was plugging them in it would not output any sound to them.
I googled this problem to death and tried lots of different potential solutions but nothing fixed this.
I tried reinstalling drivers, uninstalling drivers, using windows generic drivers, all settings and levels, turning on and off prompt...anything that was done before I tried and nothing made a difference, I eventually found that if I left my headphones plugged in and rebooted after the reboot they would work fine, (normal 3.5mm jack) Sometimes when booting the Laptop this issue would go away but later comeback if the laptop went into power saving mode or at random times. I've no solution at time of writing.

Physically the body of the laptop is very nice however the Screen itself is the weak point in the laptop.
Its very thin and if you hold it with two hands you can see the surface of the LCD bend/move. The outer screen cover does not offer much protection and is flexible.

The fingerprint reader I've not tried but I've heard its crap.

I paid extra to get the Killer wireless adapter which was newer tech even though I've 120mb broadband at home when I connected the Laptop to my wireless network I was only getting 19mbs download.

I got 32gb of ram with mine as I will be mainly using it for photo editing with the ram and the 256gb SSD as the primary drive the start up boot time is amazing and processing photos is a dream. (almost faster than my gaming desktop rig) This is exactly what I wanted.

Gaming. I installed civilization VI which is a turn based game. For some reason the Fans turn on pretty loud and it generates a little heat. (its a turn based game so not really putting too much strain on the GPU!)

I also tried Guildwars2 and even though I had the GTX 1060 6gb of GDDR5 memory it autodetected low settings which was disappointing as its an old game. With the game loaded and left idle ie not doing anything in came the fans on the laptop came on full blast and a huge amount of heat was generated through the exhaust ports. I limited the FPS to 30fps which helped a lot. As I normally only game with my Desktop gaming rig I'm not used to gaming laptops so I dont know if this crazy loud fan noise and lots of heat is normal or not.

Other than the Audio issue when plugging in head phones I gotta say I am delighted with this laptop.
The staff at PCS answered any queries I had. Tracking the order and frequent updates were fantastic I could even see the names of the people doing the QA and Build of the machine (and then go facebook stalk them! to see what they looked like! set your profiles to private guys!! )

(Trying to upload photos but the Photo uploader on this website seems to hate me and does not want to playball)

 

[Oussebon]

Gaming. I installed civilization VI which is a turn based game. For some reason the Fans turn on pretty loud and it generates a little head. (its a turn based game so not really putting too much strain on the GPU!)

It is actually very intensive on the GPU:
http://www.pcinvasion.com/civilization-vi-technical-review
https://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/Performance_Analysis/Civilization_6/4.html

The High and Very High presets are identical except for the Shadow Resolution, which increases from 4096x4096 to 8192x8192 - but that alone is enough to knock a further ~10fps off. And that's on my GTX 970, which is ~10% more powerful than a laptop GTX 1060. The game will frequently experience brief drops to below 60fps (which isn't really a problem in turn based strategy) on my 970 on the High Preset.

The heat you get at the exhaust ports of a laptop is fairly normal during gaming (it's why it's never a good idea to game with a laptop on your lap unless you like cooking yourself!). You may want to run a program like Realtemp and have it record your CPU and GPU temperatures: https://www.techpowerup.com/realtemp/

This will let you make sure the components aren't running too warm.

 

[ubuysa]

Thanks for excellent review, +rep deserved and given.

Regarding the screen flexing, this is pretty common on all Clevo laptops I think. Obviously one of the aims when creating a new chassis is to keep it thin and the weight down, the easiest way to do that is to make the screen and lid only as thick as they need be. It would be wise to always open it up at the centre of the screen, never at the corners.

The audio issues might well be Windows 10 related. There have been other posts on here about audio problems, especially since the Windows 10 Anniversary upgrade. You can expect these issues to be resolved in time.

The freezing issues are unusual and they would worry me. That just should not happen. Since it's new top you I think I'd be tempted to do a clean reinstall of Windows so that I was certain it was installed properly. With Windows 10 it seems best to allow Windows Update to install all the drivers it can, Windows 10 driver support does seem to be streets ahead of that in earlier versions of Windows. Only manually install drivers if Windows Update does not find any.

WiFi is often troublesome because it uses a public frequency range that a bunch of other devices also use. It's also known to be affected by fluorescent lights and even old (and sparking) light switches. You might want to try moving around with the laptop to see whether you get better reception elsewhere at home. Put it next to the router as a test for example.

If you continue to get freezing issues, and especially if they happen after a clean reinstall, give PCS a call (don't email, it's not a priority for them). Their after sales service is just as good...

 

[bullets]

The freezes mostly happened my first day so windows may have still being running updates in the background (I never thought of checking at the time)
while I was installing stuff. After that so far I've not had too much issues.

I did get a lot of non-responding issues when using Nikons Viewnx-i software when I was using it to sort/review and delete lots of Raw image files while I had
a portable hard drive connected via usb3 but the software itself is very buggy. Lightroom and blender software seem to work very zippy.

The Wi-fi I was expecting a lot slower speeds so was not sure what the normal speed wise as I'm usually gaming with the desktop with the cable directly connected to the router.
Have 2 phones and a tablet which were idle at the time but still connected to the wifi so that may have contributed.
At my place of work when I brought the laptop in with me and connected it upto the company's guest Wifi I was getting 136Mbps down and 112 Mps up with a ping of 30ms which was nice.

On my desktop I was happily using it away with Windows 7 until Microsoft decided to force update itself, and I've never had so many issues and ended up doing a clean install.
I really did not want to be running windows 10 but in the end said feck it will probably have to go that way sooner or later so went with it. And tried to turn off as much annoying features as possible.

One think that I'm still not used to or sure about on this laptop is the Graphics Card settings. I'm used to ATI based cards on the desk top which tend to ignore the integrated graphics. On the laptop its showing both the Integrated HD530 and also the Nvidia GTX 1060 on the device manager. From the desktop when I goto the advanced display options and go to the display adapter properties it shows the Intel integrated HD530 when I would have expected to see the Nvidia card listed.

When I goto the Nvidia control panel under 3d settings I have the option of picking the preferred GPU and I've selected the Nvidia GPU.
I'm hoping that this is all I need to do to ensure that Programs use the Nvida instead of the Intel integrated graphics.
I was going to dis-able the Intel ingratiated graphics from the device manager but said I would not jinx things in case for some reason the Laptop was set up to use both adapters together in some hybrid form. (sorry if this sounds stupid! once upon a time I used to build and repair PC's about 20 years ago but I moved away from that field so my knowledge is completely out of date so Kinda lost on how things work nowadays!)

~B

 

[ubuysa]

The freezes mostly happened my first day so windows may have still being running updates in the background (I never thought of checking at the time)
while I was installing stuff. After that so far I've not had too much issues.

I did get a lot of non-responding issues when using Nikons Viewnx-i software when I was using it to sort/review and delete lots of Raw image files while I had
a portable hard drive connected via usb3 but the software itself is very buggy. Lightroom and blender software seem to work very zippy.

That all sounds reasonable, fingers crossed for you.

The Wi-fi I was expecting a lot slower speeds so was not sure what the normal speed wise as I'm usually gaming with the desktop with the cable directly connected to the router.
Have 2 phones and a tablet which were idle at the time but still connected to the wifi so that may have contributed.
At my place of work when I brought the laptop in with me and connected it upto the company's guest Wifi I was getting 136Mbps down and 112 Mps up with a ping of 30ms which was nice.

WiFi is going to be slower than Ethernet (unless you're using one of the newer 802.11ac routers and wifi cards). Since it worked so well at your work it's most likely interference at home (or a router issue of course).

On my desktop I was happily using it away with Windows 7 until Microsoft decided to force update itself, and I've never had so many issues and ended up doing a clean install.
I really did not want to be running windows 10 but in the end said feck it will probably have to go that way sooner or later so went with it. And tried to turn off as much annoying features as possible.

I think many of us were wary of Windows 10 after the Windows 8 debacle, but it really is a different kettle of fish. It's still a work in progress and at times you can see the joins but overall I like Windows 10 and it is the way forward as you say. Sticking with 7 (or 8/8.1) is just putting off the inevitable IMO.

One think that I'm still not used to or sure about on this laptop is the Graphics Card settings. I'm used to ATI based cards on the desk top which tend to ignore the integrated graphics. On the laptop its showing both the Integrated HD530 and also the Nvidia GTX 1060 on the device manager. From the desktop when I goto the advanced display options and go to the display adapter properties it shows the Intel integrated HD530 when I would have expected to see the Nvidia card listed.

When I goto the Nvidia control panel under 3d settings I have the option of picking the preferred GPU and I've selected the Nvidia GPU.
I'm hoping that this is all I need to do to ensure that Programs use the Nvida instead of the Intel integrated graphics.
I was going to dis-able the Intel ingratiated graphics from the device manager but said I would not jinx things in case for some reason the Laptop was set up to use both adapters together in some hybrid form. (sorry if this sounds stupid! once upon a time I used to build and repair PC's about 20 years ago but I moved away from that field so my knowledge is completely out of date so Kinda lost on how things work nowadays!)

~B

I'm not an expert in this area, but I do know that the NVIDIA card uses some features of the on-board GPU and you cannot simply disable it. Having separate control panels for each GPU is common, my Optimus IV has that too. If you've set the NVIDIA card as the system default in the NVIDIA control panel then you should be using it all the time, except for those applications that can't use it.

NIVDIA use a technology called Optimus which is really a power saving feature. Using the NVIDIA GPU all the time will shorten battery life, the idea behind the Optimus technology is that you can tell the NVIDIA GPU which applications you specifically need it for and the others will use the on-board GPU (and less power). I don't know that the Defiance III uses Optimus technology but I suspect it does.

I'm also not a hardware tech, though others on here are. I've spent my life working with system software, so modern hardware is pretty new to me too!