Parramatta
Silver Level Poster
This month I ordered an Octane II 17.3" 970M laptop with 16GB RAM, i7 6700 CPU and a 512GB Samsung SM951 NVMe boot drive.
I ordered via phone, fast-track (five working days) and it came the next week i.e. Ordered Tuesday, arrived Monday via courier with a one-hour delivery slot.
The ordering service was fine (not rude or rushed, but not overly chatty either). Cost was 1617 pounds with a credit card surcharge.
There were some items I wanted, but PCS didn't have, so I ordered them from AMAZON i.e. a Samsung 2TB 850 PRO SSD (for speed & capacity & reliability), a USB 3.0 Blu-Ray ROM/DVD external optical drive, a Spinpoint 5400rpm 9.5mm 2TB drive for storage, and a USB 3.1 4-port hub (shared with Thunderbolt port connection).
The laptop came on time and well packaged. It turned on first go and booted up with all the Windows Set-Up screens. However it just happened that a MAJOR (1511) Windows 10 update was rolled out over the weekend, so that took about an hour to come down and install.
Installing the two hard drives was a cinch - no drivers needed. The external blu-ray also worked first time.
No USB3 ports are at the back - there are 3 on the left and one on the right and another 3.1 connector (shared with thunderbolt). I would have liked some USB ports at the back.
The laptop runs quiet - fans are off for most of the time. When they do run, they're not noisy. The keyboard is very nice to use - responsive, not loud, high quality.
It boots fast - just 10-15 seconds from start to desktop. Everything opens pretty much instantly. And transfers between drives or memory sticks are never less than 100-odd MB/s. Very fast, considering I was upgrading from a 2008 HP HDX18T which was pre-i7 era.
My only grievance is with Windows 10 x64- it's still full of bugs, even after the extensive 1511 update. For example, a USB 3 stick plugged in will be lost every 10-15 minutes, requiring me to unplug and replug it. Most annoying. I've disabled power management settings in Control Panel (for USB) and in Device Manager, but that doesn't solve the problem. Hopefully new Microsoft updates or Clevo drivers will address it in the next few months. At the moment, it seems the most recent Clevo drivers are still dated 1st October. I'm finding BIOS updates difficult to sort through, and don't want to muck around with this (no Clevo utilities were installed).
So if you're wedded to Windows 7, you might like to remain with it when ordering a new laptop and perhaps upgrade to Windows 10 in mid-2016 when (hopefully) Microsoft will sort out the many bugs remaining in their OS.
Temperatures for the 4 CPU cores are around 40-50 degrees in low-load/idle, which is fine. No fans kick in. For moderate-heavy use (e.g. format conversions), they max out at about 50-60 degrees (4Ghz)
Haven't checked battery life as it's always plugged in. Probably not much - 90 minutes or something wouldn't surprise me.
Screen is bright and crisp. Chassis feels well built. That's all really.
In summary, I recommend PCS for their prompt service, customisable products, and reasonable prices.
I ordered via phone, fast-track (five working days) and it came the next week i.e. Ordered Tuesday, arrived Monday via courier with a one-hour delivery slot.
The ordering service was fine (not rude or rushed, but not overly chatty either). Cost was 1617 pounds with a credit card surcharge.
There were some items I wanted, but PCS didn't have, so I ordered them from AMAZON i.e. a Samsung 2TB 850 PRO SSD (for speed & capacity & reliability), a USB 3.0 Blu-Ray ROM/DVD external optical drive, a Spinpoint 5400rpm 9.5mm 2TB drive for storage, and a USB 3.1 4-port hub (shared with Thunderbolt port connection).
The laptop came on time and well packaged. It turned on first go and booted up with all the Windows Set-Up screens. However it just happened that a MAJOR (1511) Windows 10 update was rolled out over the weekend, so that took about an hour to come down and install.
Installing the two hard drives was a cinch - no drivers needed. The external blu-ray also worked first time.
No USB3 ports are at the back - there are 3 on the left and one on the right and another 3.1 connector (shared with thunderbolt). I would have liked some USB ports at the back.
The laptop runs quiet - fans are off for most of the time. When they do run, they're not noisy. The keyboard is very nice to use - responsive, not loud, high quality.
It boots fast - just 10-15 seconds from start to desktop. Everything opens pretty much instantly. And transfers between drives or memory sticks are never less than 100-odd MB/s. Very fast, considering I was upgrading from a 2008 HP HDX18T which was pre-i7 era.
My only grievance is with Windows 10 x64- it's still full of bugs, even after the extensive 1511 update. For example, a USB 3 stick plugged in will be lost every 10-15 minutes, requiring me to unplug and replug it. Most annoying. I've disabled power management settings in Control Panel (for USB) and in Device Manager, but that doesn't solve the problem. Hopefully new Microsoft updates or Clevo drivers will address it in the next few months. At the moment, it seems the most recent Clevo drivers are still dated 1st October. I'm finding BIOS updates difficult to sort through, and don't want to muck around with this (no Clevo utilities were installed).
So if you're wedded to Windows 7, you might like to remain with it when ordering a new laptop and perhaps upgrade to Windows 10 in mid-2016 when (hopefully) Microsoft will sort out the many bugs remaining in their OS.
Temperatures for the 4 CPU cores are around 40-50 degrees in low-load/idle, which is fine. No fans kick in. For moderate-heavy use (e.g. format conversions), they max out at about 50-60 degrees (4Ghz)
Haven't checked battery life as it's always plugged in. Probably not much - 90 minutes or something wouldn't surprise me.
Screen is bright and crisp. Chassis feels well built. That's all really.
In summary, I recommend PCS for their prompt service, customisable products, and reasonable prices.