Octane II

[mikesaa309]

This is my Octane II. It's a brilliant laptop and only downsides to it are that it's heavy so not very suitable to take to work or college etc though I reckon you would get used to it after a while and battery life isn't great I reckon 4 hours at the most but I've never really properly checked and I have the power profile set to high performance so might be better with it in power saving mode. Other than that I can't fault it screen took a while to get used to as it has lots of contrast but after using my old laptop to copy some files over which I though my old laptops screen was good, I realized that my old laptop the screen is terrible in comparison.

Keyboard feels good to type on though the space bar is a little squeaky for some reason but I'm used to it and doesn't really bother me much, track pad feels smooth and again my old laptops track pad feels bad compared to the Octane even though I thought it was good when I used it daily. Finger print scanner is also pretty good not super fast and can sometimes take a few swipes for it to recognize your finger print but once you get the hang of it, it's fine.

The specs I have are as follows:
Octane II 15" 1080p model
Intel I5 6600K 3.5 Ghz CPU
Nvidia GTX 970m 6Gb Vram
120GB SAMSUNG 650 SSD primary drive
1TB SERIAL ATA II 2.5" HDD secondary drive
GIGABIT LAN & KILLER™ 1535-AC M.2 WIRELESS GAMING 802.11AC + BLUETOOTH 4.0
Genuine Windows 10 Home 64 Bit

Sadly couldn't push the budget for the 980m gpu but 970m is fine for most games. At max graphics on Gta 5 for example I'm getting 45-60 fps depending on the area and whether there are explosions going off etc. Most of the time it stays around 50-55 fps which considering the best fps I've played gta 5 at prior is 12-20 fps on my old laptop with normal graphics settings 45 fps+ feels buttery smooth to me and don't notice any fps drop unless I look at the fps counter. Most other games it's the same situation some games like minecraft it easily gets 60+ fps on max settings. Cooling is pretty good too. I have it sitting on a cooler master U2 though I've had the cooler master for ages and the fans have broken so jut using it as a way to keep the laptop elevated and so far it's never put the fans on max rpm unless I toggle it with the keyboard shortcut. Fans are fairly quiet too even at max rpm the fan noise is mostly drowned out by the games sound anyway especially with earphones in.

Sound quality is amazing considering it's laptop speakers we're talking about here. Never experienced surround sound from a laptop before and I'm baffled at how it does it as there is only the speakers at the front in between the screen hinges yet it makes sound seem like it's coming directly from the left or right and even behind me as well. Could do with a little more bass though if you go for the 17" model Octane I do believe it has a built in sub-woofer but in all considering it's a laptop after all the speakers on the Octane are pretty good and listening to music on it is great and doesn't sound tinny at all.

I can defiantly recommend the Octane II as it is one of the most powerful gaming laptops out there especially if you go for the gtx 980m gpu which in all fairness the gou and cpu are a socket connection so can easily upgrade to the 980m in the future but 970m is fine for most games. Start up times are amazing with an SSD (obviously) out of curiosity I timed my old laptops boot up time and it booted in 1 minute 40 seconds, my Octane II booted in 30 seconds and was all loaded ready to go didn't have to wait for background services etc to load up either.

 

[Parramatta]

Great review. Very encouraging. I just ordered a 17" Octane II 970M just an hour ago with the i7 6700 CPU and the Samsung 512GB SM951 M.2 NVMe SSD.

They were out of the Defiance II 970M versions with the 6820HK CPU, so I went with the Octane.

I guess for the extra money you get G Sync, 5 x USB 3 ports and a desktop CPU that runs at 3.4Ghz.

Any issues with waking up from sleep, or drivers, or anything else?

 

[mikesaa309]

You won't be disappointed I did look at the defiance laptops but Octane looked a better choice with the desktop cpu's. Would have gotten the 17" Octane but was pushing the budget a bit with the specs I wanted and can hook it up to a monitor or tv if needed but would have defiantly gone for the 17" if I had the money to.

No issues at all from waking up from sleep etc. Drivers a bit annoying to install as with the 15" you don't get an optical drive (i think the 17" does but might be wrong) and so had to download everything from PC Specialist so was just tedious with some drivers taking 5-10 minutes to download but once that was done they were easy to install and had no issues with install either and so far everything is working as expected.

The only "issue" I had with it was that the screen didn't look very bright compared to my old laptop but after tinkering with Nvidia's control center I got it looking bright again though I think most of it was because I was used to crappy monitors and screens and wasn't used to the high contrast and vibrancy of the Octane's screen. Is a gorgeous screen though. Another reason why it looked odd was because that desktop picture I took of my bike on my phone then edited it in photoshop on my old laptop so it looked good on my old laptop but didn't look right on a decent screen so had to reedit the photo on my Octane to get it looking right which was just contrast and brightness adjustments and it help me adjust the screen better because I'd get the desktop image looking great then I'd go into Chrome and it'll look too bright and then If I lowered the brightness for chrome my desktop image looked too dark. Editing the image helped a lot but other than that no issues at all really.

 

[Donnylink]

I have ordered similar spec, Can you tell me what temperatures you are experiencing and on what surface you play games as in table, lap, floor lol

 

[mikesaa309]

I'm getting temperatures of around 50-70 degrees Celsius maybe 80 max haven't looked for a while but have never had the cooling fans get very loud and they certainly haven't hit full speed unless I toggle it with the keyboard key combo (Fn + 1). Normally I play games on my lap though I have a old-ish cooler master cooling stand with 2 cooling fans though they broke ages ago so just use it as a stand to keep the vents cleared just to be on the safe side but the times I have used it without the stand it still seems to keep itself cool. Table should be completely fine with this laptop, the cooling on it is pretty damn good and even at max speed the fans aren't overly loud and will easily be drowned out by the speakers.