After my ASUS ROG STRIX G713Q gave up the ghost unexpectedly after just 3.5 years (mobo issue for which they asked more than 1300€ to replace) I decided it was a good excuse to get a new laptop instead.
Really wanted 16GB VRAM so I could run larger AI models locally, so the RTX 4090 was the only choice. After a lot of investigation, the Recoil 16 looked like the best choice, with the watercooling being able to really squeeze the performance of the graphic card when at home without making the laptop a monster to take around in general when needing portability. In the past I have had eGPU for this, now I see the watercooler as a kind of eGPU
I ordered with just 8GB ram and the cheapest 256gb SSD as I wanted to get those components myself - would have liked if it was possible to order without them at all. But I understand they do hardware and stability testing before sending the laptop and I guess they need these components to do so.
The watercooler was a quite noisy at first, to the point I thought something was wrong with it. But eventually (and after a lot of angling the watercooler in every possible way to make sure all air bubbles were out) it seems to be quiet enough to not bother too much.
All in all very happy with the laptop so far. I love that it has a full keyboard including numpad and full-size enter key, using the whole width of the body, with no wasted space. I really don't get current laptops with keyboards without numpads even on 17'' bodies (new HP Omens, I'm looking at you...)
Coming from 17'' 16:9 I found the 16'' 16:10 to be quite OK, specially with the very thin bezels of the screen. Doesn't feel cramped. And the portability increase is significant. I also like the included IR camera for Windows Hello, was a nice surprise!
I was also pleasantly surprised that my USB-C Thunderbolt hub worked perfectly fine, including 2 external monitors. With the ASUS laptop, sometimes the third monitor was losing signal, or screens were flickering. I thought it was a hub issue. But with this laptop, it has not happened, so I guess it was the laptop!
My only problem was installing Windows (I ordered without OS), the wifi didn't work out of the box during Windows installation (no drivers), so I had to plug it to ethernet to be able to complete the install. If for any reason I didn't have ethernet access, I would have been in a big problem. Also once Windows was installed, a lot of devices drivers were not detected automatically, so had to manually install them after downloading the drivers from PCSpecialist. It was like 15 different drivers so it took quite a bit of time. But once everything is configured, it all works fine.
Really wanted 16GB VRAM so I could run larger AI models locally, so the RTX 4090 was the only choice. After a lot of investigation, the Recoil 16 looked like the best choice, with the watercooling being able to really squeeze the performance of the graphic card when at home without making the laptop a monster to take around in general when needing portability. In the past I have had eGPU for this, now I see the watercooler as a kind of eGPU
I ordered with just 8GB ram and the cheapest 256gb SSD as I wanted to get those components myself - would have liked if it was possible to order without them at all. But I understand they do hardware and stability testing before sending the laptop and I guess they need these components to do so.
The watercooler was a quite noisy at first, to the point I thought something was wrong with it. But eventually (and after a lot of angling the watercooler in every possible way to make sure all air bubbles were out) it seems to be quiet enough to not bother too much.
All in all very happy with the laptop so far. I love that it has a full keyboard including numpad and full-size enter key, using the whole width of the body, with no wasted space. I really don't get current laptops with keyboards without numpads even on 17'' bodies (new HP Omens, I'm looking at you...)
Coming from 17'' 16:9 I found the 16'' 16:10 to be quite OK, specially with the very thin bezels of the screen. Doesn't feel cramped. And the portability increase is significant. I also like the included IR camera for Windows Hello, was a nice surprise!
I was also pleasantly surprised that my USB-C Thunderbolt hub worked perfectly fine, including 2 external monitors. With the ASUS laptop, sometimes the third monitor was losing signal, or screens were flickering. I thought it was a hub issue. But with this laptop, it has not happened, so I guess it was the laptop!
My only problem was installing Windows (I ordered without OS), the wifi didn't work out of the box during Windows installation (no drivers), so I had to plug it to ethernet to be able to complete the install. If for any reason I didn't have ethernet access, I would have been in a big problem. Also once Windows was installed, a lot of devices drivers were not detected automatically, so had to manually install them after downloading the drivers from PCSpecialist. It was like 15 different drivers so it took quite a bit of time. But once everything is configured, it all works fine.
