I'm going to start off by saying that I am not a professional reviewer, and thus this review will simply consist of my impressions of the laptop so far. I am an engineering student and I use this laptop primarily for university work (CAD, work etc) a well as media consumption. I'm a light gamer, and I haven't had the chance to play any games on this laptop yet.
Specs: i7-7700HQ, 8GB DDR4 2133MHz RAM, 128GB ssd + 1TB HDD, Geforce GTX 1060 (6GB GDDR5 VRAM), EK-Tim thermal paste
The build quality of this laptop is incredible. There is no flex at all in the keyboard area or palm rests, and the screen is relatively sturdy. The laptop itself is incredibly thin compared the average gaming laptop (e.g. the Dell Inspirion 7577) and is much easier to carry around as a result. Despite its relative slimness, this laptop is dense, and by dense I mean that it is deceptively heavy. This doesn't mean that it's difficult to carry around (it's pretty easy actually), the weight is just a bit of a surprise when picking the laptop up off a desk.
I love the design of this laptop. The lack of red accents on the laptop is a huge plus - it doesn't look like a 5 year's old toy. The "V" on the laptop lid lights up when the laptop is on and I personally like it.
I am not a touch typist, but my impressions of the keyboard so far are extremely positive. The keys are large and have lots of travel, which makes it a pleasure to type on, unlike those awful "butterfly" MacBook keyboards. The trackpad is good and the dedicated left and right mouse buttons makes it very easy to drag and drop things in Windows. My favorite feature of this laptop has to the fingerprint sensor. It is very quick and accurate and saves me from having to enter my password every time I login
.
This laptop performs exactly as a you would expect any laptop with a i7 7700HQ and a GTX 1060 to perform. The CPU doesn't throttle under load and neither does the GPU. CPU temperatures out of the box are not great - they can easily exceed 90C. This is easily remedied by undervolting the CPU by -100mv and lifting the laptop off a desk by using a stand. The results of these tweaks are quire incredible; for me they dropped CPU temperatures by 30C to 60C while running prime95! This is probably because of the extensive air vents at the bottom of the laptop which do a really good job of maximizing air flow. I haven't had a chance to stress test the GPU yet.
My one reservation about this laptop is the screen. It may be a 120Hz screen, but the colours on this screen are not good. Out of the box, everything has a really horrible bluish tint which hurt my eyes to look at. Thankfully, I fixed this by a applying a icc profile to the screen. Compared to a good IPS screen like the one on my phone, the difference between the two becomes really apparent when watching videos. The contrast is OK, but not great, and the viewing angles are much better than a TN panel, but inferior to an IPS panel. If you are not really a gamer, or you don't play fps titles, ask PCspecialist to swap this screen for a good 1080p IPS screen.
As I mentioned before, I do a lot of CAD with SolidWorks on this laptop. It runs SolidWorks very well, and I've had no crashes in the time I've had this laptop. If you are planning on doing CAD on this laptop, I would really recommend on you setting the display scaling setting to 100% instead of the default 125% because it gives you a lot more screen real estate to work with. I tend to work with small assemblies with less than 100 parts, so I use the iGPU to run SolidWorks as this means that fans will run a lot quieter and the battery will last longer.
The battery lasts about 4 hours on a full charge, with the screen set to 50% brightness and browsing the web in Chrome. The speakers are not good - they are quiet and have almost no bass. This doesn't really bother me, as I use headphones.
More reviews:
[links removed, though these are the same Clevo chassis they are not PCS builds]
Specs: i7-7700HQ, 8GB DDR4 2133MHz RAM, 128GB ssd + 1TB HDD, Geforce GTX 1060 (6GB GDDR5 VRAM), EK-Tim thermal paste
The build quality of this laptop is incredible. There is no flex at all in the keyboard area or palm rests, and the screen is relatively sturdy. The laptop itself is incredibly thin compared the average gaming laptop (e.g. the Dell Inspirion 7577) and is much easier to carry around as a result. Despite its relative slimness, this laptop is dense, and by dense I mean that it is deceptively heavy. This doesn't mean that it's difficult to carry around (it's pretty easy actually), the weight is just a bit of a surprise when picking the laptop up off a desk.
I love the design of this laptop. The lack of red accents on the laptop is a huge plus - it doesn't look like a 5 year's old toy. The "V" on the laptop lid lights up when the laptop is on and I personally like it.
I am not a touch typist, but my impressions of the keyboard so far are extremely positive. The keys are large and have lots of travel, which makes it a pleasure to type on, unlike those awful "butterfly" MacBook keyboards. The trackpad is good and the dedicated left and right mouse buttons makes it very easy to drag and drop things in Windows. My favorite feature of this laptop has to the fingerprint sensor. It is very quick and accurate and saves me from having to enter my password every time I login
.This laptop performs exactly as a you would expect any laptop with a i7 7700HQ and a GTX 1060 to perform. The CPU doesn't throttle under load and neither does the GPU. CPU temperatures out of the box are not great - they can easily exceed 90C. This is easily remedied by undervolting the CPU by -100mv and lifting the laptop off a desk by using a stand. The results of these tweaks are quire incredible; for me they dropped CPU temperatures by 30C to 60C while running prime95! This is probably because of the extensive air vents at the bottom of the laptop which do a really good job of maximizing air flow. I haven't had a chance to stress test the GPU yet.
My one reservation about this laptop is the screen. It may be a 120Hz screen, but the colours on this screen are not good. Out of the box, everything has a really horrible bluish tint which hurt my eyes to look at. Thankfully, I fixed this by a applying a icc profile to the screen. Compared to a good IPS screen like the one on my phone, the difference between the two becomes really apparent when watching videos. The contrast is OK, but not great, and the viewing angles are much better than a TN panel, but inferior to an IPS panel. If you are not really a gamer, or you don't play fps titles, ask PCspecialist to swap this screen for a good 1080p IPS screen.
As I mentioned before, I do a lot of CAD with SolidWorks on this laptop. It runs SolidWorks very well, and I've had no crashes in the time I've had this laptop. If you are planning on doing CAD on this laptop, I would really recommend on you setting the display scaling setting to 100% instead of the default 125% because it gives you a lot more screen real estate to work with. I tend to work with small assemblies with less than 100 parts, so I use the iGPU to run SolidWorks as this means that fans will run a lot quieter and the battery will last longer.
The battery lasts about 4 hours on a full charge, with the screen set to 50% brightness and browsing the web in Chrome. The speakers are not good - they are quiet and have almost no bass. This doesn't really bother me, as I use headphones.
More reviews:
[links removed, though these are the same Clevo chassis they are not PCS builds]
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