Octane Series: 17.3" Laptop Review

[JDA1982]

I've had my new 17.3" Octane III for a few days now and thought it was time to post a review.

First of all I'd like to thank all the helpful people on these forums for their help and advice including everyone who has already posted a review of this model. Particularly Oussebon and The_Scotster, you were both very helpful in my making the decision to take the plunge and in choosing the spec.

The spec is:

Chassis & Display
Octane Series: 17.3" Matte Full HD IPS LED Widescreen (1920x1080)
Processor (CPU)
Intel® Core™i7 Quad Core Processor i7-6700k (4.0GHz) 8MB Cache
Memory (RAM)
16GB HyperX IMPACT 2400MHz SODIMM DDR4 (1 x 16GB)
Graphics Card
NVIDIA® GeForce® GTX 1080 - 8.0GB GDDR5 Video RAM - DirectX® 12.1, G-SYNC
1st Hard Disk
2TB SERIAL ATA II 2.5" HARD DRIVE WITH 32MB CACHE (5,400rpm)
2nd Hard Disk
2TB SERIAL ATA II 2.5" HARD DRIVE WITH 32MB CACHE (5,400rpm)
M.2 SSD Drive
512GB SAMSUNG SM961 M.2, PCIe NVMe (up to 3100MB/R, 1400MB/W)
1st DVD/BLU-RAY Drive
NOT REQUIRED
Memory Card Reader
Integrated 6 in 1 Card Reader (SD /Mini SD/ SDHC / SDXC / MMC / RSMMC)
Power Supply
1 x 330W AC Adaptor
Power Cable
1 x 1 Metre European Power Cable (Kettle Lead)
Thermal Paste
ARCTIC MX-4 EXTREME THERMAL CONDUCTIVITY COMPOUND
Sound Card
Intel 2 Channel High Definition Audio + MIC/Headphone Jack
Wireless/Wired Networking
GIGABIT LAN & KILLER™ WIRELESS-AC 1535 M.2 GAMING 802.11AC + BLUETOOTH 4.1
USB Options
4 x USB 3.0 Ports + 2 x USB 3.1 Type C Ports
Battery
Octane Series 8 Cell Lithium Ion Battery (82WH)
Keyboard Language
OCTANE SERIES BACKLIT UK KEYBOARD WITH NUMBER PAD
Operating System
Genuine Windows 10 Home 64 Bit - inc DVD & Licence
Operating System Language
United Kingdom - English Language
DVD Recovery Media
Windows 10 (64-bit) Home DVD with paper sleeve
Office Software
NO OFFICE SOFTWARE
Anti-Virus
NO ANTI-VIRUS SOFTWARE
Browser
Microsoft® Edge (Windows 10 Only)
Mouse
ROCCAT™ Kone Pure Gaming Mouse
Webcam
INTEGRATED 2.0 MP FULL HD WEBCAM
Warranty
3 Year Silver Warranty (1 Year Collect & Return, 1 Year Parts, 3 Year Labour)
Insurance
1 Month Free Laptop Insurance inc. Accidental Damage & Theft
Delivery
DPD PICKUP - COLLECT FROM YOUR LOCAL SHOP FROM 12 NOON (UK MAINLAND)

And on to the review. The first part of the process was ordering from PCS which was simple, painless and I have absolutely no complaints. There was a hiccup with DPD on the delivery where I had selected for them to deliver to a local DPD Pickup Centre, but on the morning of the delivery date they emailed to say that they couldn't deliver there and would deliver to my home address instead. There was a reason I chose the Pickup Centre, and that was because I was in work, so not too pleased with DPD at this point.

I did get the laptop but I had to take time out of work and walk across town to be home in the time slot given, so as to avoid them leaving it round the back on a wet day or me having to drive to Warrington after work to collect from their depot. No explanation why they couldn't deliver to my chosen place, it was open, but I did get the laptop in the end and the box was undamaged and in good condition.

So PCS, very good, DPD not quite as impressed but I don't think they're any worse than most couriers in general.

The laptop itself is a beast, I've been using it mostly for gaming, perhaps the most taxing game I’ve tested is GTA V which it sails through with settings maxed. No slowdowns or stutters anywhere. It also powers through Football Manager 2016, set it to a large database with all countries selected and playable and it’s much faster than my old Dell was even with half the countries not selected.

It’s not practical if you intend to carry it around with you, when I say it’s a beast I mean in size as well as performance. It can sit on your lap when being used, but it’s not very portable (I didn’t expect it to be when I ordered it).

The screen is crisp and bright, there’s some light bleed around the edges when the screen is black but it’s so minor it’s not proving to be an issue. The laptop hasn’t felt hot at any point so far. I was planning on undervoltng and then overclocking the CPU to control heat as I know that’s been an issue for some users, but it’s been absolutely fine with mine so I might leave that alone for now until I start running anything more intensive (which will happen). It hit 73 degrees playing GTA V but that’s the highest I’ve noticed it reach so far.

From powering on to being logged into Windows (using the fingerprint sensor) takes around 15 seconds, all of my main programs and the OS which launch on startup are saved onto my M2 SSD and the speed really shows compared to a SATA HDD. I have a lot of games saved to the SATA drives as I’m less concerned with the loading times for most of them. Some of the newer ones are going on the M2 SSD though.

The keyboard feels sturdy, I’m sure there are better keyboards out there but this one has a nice feel to it. The laptop case itself is nicely understated and the matt finish hides fingerprints well. The fingerprint sensor was easy to set up and works well (better than my Samsung Galaxy phone) and the trackpad works (I use a mouse almost all the time so I can’t really elaborate on that).

I did have a problem with connecting to my NAS drives, I had to turn all the network settings to off and then uninstall and reinstall the Network drivers, then turn the setting back on, took all of 60 seconds, and everything is working fine after that.

Overall I’m thrilled with the laptop, I don’t imagine anything will push it for a while (a while in technology and gaming terms at least) and I hope I can get maybe 5 years out of it before I start lowering settings too much to bear. We’ll see. If you can afford one, and you don’t intend to lug it around with you all the time, I’d absolutely recommend one and PCS as well.

I’ll try to post some pictures later today or tomorrow.

 

[Scott]

Congrats on the purchase, glad to see you happy with it.

Regarding the temps, go into GTA V and turn everything to max.... even the settings that don't default to max when the max setting is selected. I can't remember which one it is that causes the crazy CPU intensive processing but there is one in particular (16x or something maybe?) that will drive your CPU usage through the roof. Also remember to turn off V-Sync to get the maximum FPS out of it.

If you can then run GTA-V at 73°C then you are onto an absolute winner. I think I saw 95°C completely vanilla with that setup. I don't run the game normally like that, as the particular setting didn't seem to make any difference for me, but it made a huge difference to temps

Have fun with it, get some firestrike scores up etc

 

[Neo]

Nice. How are you finding the mouse? Are you able to disable the trackpad at all once you have the mouse plugged in? (been having probs doing that on mine).

 

[JDA1982]

I'll try to that setting later and post some scores up.

I've not tried disabling the track pad yet either, but I'll take a look tonight as well and see how I get on.

 

[Scott]

The trackpad disable works if you re-install the hotkey driver. Just uninstall it then re-install it and it will work. It happened with me too. The Clevo software seems quite fickle with what order it needs to be installed in

 

[Neo]

I'll give that a try when I get home, Thanks! Whats the name of the hotkey driver or is it obvious?

 

[SpyderTracks]

I'll give that a try when I get home, Thanks! Whats the name of the hotkey driver or is it obvious?

Either hotkey or control center.

 

[Scott]

I was pretty sure there was a hotkey software or driver but I can't find it on the clevo site. To that end it must be the control centre. My guess is that you won't be able to get the OC utility open either, which seems to be part of the same corruption. The easy way around that is to uninstall the control panel and then re-install it. I believe there's a new version out too.

I'll keep looking to see why I had hotkey in my head also

 

[Scott]

I think I've found the reason. If you go to the PCS home page then log in and look down the left hand side you will see "tech support". Under that will be downloads, if you click on that then click on "Win 10" next to your order you will see the hotkey part 1 and part 2 downloads.

It IS just the control centre v71 download though so if you already have that just uninstall it, reboot then reinstall it to see if that helps. If it still doesn't work, change your default language and everything else to US English then try again. It seems that there are language issues with the install.

 

[Neo]

I think I've found the reason. If you go to the PCS home page then log in and look down the left hand side you will see "tech support". Under that will be downloads, if you click on that then click on "Win 10" next to your order you will see the hotkey part 1 and part 2 downloads.

It IS just the control centre v71 download though so if you already have that just uninstall it, reboot then reinstall it to see if that helps. If it still doesn't work, change your default language and everything else to US English then try again. It seems that there are language issues with the install.

Great, this will be the first thing I do when I walk in the door at about 8pm. I really appreciate the help and will add some rep. Cheers.

 

[Neo]

Ok, so I had to spend a little while on this one last night. I uninstalled control centre; restarted and reinstalled - this resulted in the OC apps now working (you were right about that Scotster!) but the trackpad could still not be disabled. I then uninstalled CC set all my language/region settings to US, restarted, reinstalled and this produced the same effect as the last attempt so still no trackpad disable.

I then decided to uninstall the Synaptics touchpad device driver and reinstall that (using a download from the technical support bit on the PCS website)... and that worked! Yay! I was very relieved to have full functionality back.

JDA - you can stand down, no need to test yours for me now.

Cheers all.

 

[JDA1982]

Haha, I was going to say I wasn't able to disable it but I'm going to try what you've done tonight or tomorrow.

Not had chance to get Firestrike scores yet, spent too long actually gaming instead. Will get them up soon though.

 

[Scott]

Ok, so I had to spend a little while on this one last night. I uninstalled control centre; restarted and reinstalled - this resulted in the OC apps now working (you were right about that Scotster!) but the trackpad could still not be disabled. I then uninstalled CC set all my language/region settings to US, restarted, reinstalled and this produced the same effect as the last attempt so still no trackpad disable.

I then decided to uninstall the Synaptics touchpad device driver and reinstall that (using a download from the technical support bit on the PCS website)... and that worked! Yay! I was very relieved to have full functionality back.

JDA - you can stand down, no need to test yours for me now.

Cheers all.

Unfortunately my memory sucks. That's exactly what I did to get the touchpad working too

Completely went out of my head. I think the reason I inadvertently fixed the issue was due to me hounding around the various manufacturers for the latest drivers. Often Clevo and resellers can take a while to come out with the latest versions (Such as for the GPU, etc) so I went to Intel, Synaptics, Nvidia, etc to get the latest versions of everything that I could

 

[JDA1982]

Ok I've got the touchpad working so it is disabled when I pres Fn and F1. I can't download the hotkeys part 1 and 2 at the moment though, clicking the download link just takes me to a page of gibberish and nothing downloads. I'll try again tomorrow and then play around with overclocking.

Here's a stock Firestrike Ultra benchmark without changing any of the settings, no overclock and the control centre set to quiet and a Firestrike benchmark, same stock settings.

 

[Scott]

Regular Firestrike is better to compare as most others tend to use it. That's a brilliant score mate, right up where it should be. You can easily get over the 17000 mark if you up to 4.2GHz, not a lot to worry about when dropping over 16.5k from a laptop though

 

[JDA1982]

Thought I'd share a brief update, I'm currently running my Octane III at 4.3ghz with a -130mhz undervolt. Got around 17200 on Firestrike last night with max temps in the 70's.