Recent content by Retron

It's interesting - I've had several PCS Clevo laptops before (Vortex II, Defiance, Octane III and now this Octane VI) and all aside from the Octane VI have worked fine, fan-wise, out of the box (as in, they don't need the Control Centre installed, the BIOS defaults work fine). As it happened I...

Last week my latest PCS laptop arrived - it's the fourth one I've had over the past decade. My previous laptop was an Octane III with an i7-6700K and a GeForce 1080. It's served me well, but I fancied the greater performance on offer from today's systems - the i9-9900K (yes, despite the heat)...

A couple of years I bought a Defiance (Clevo P650SG) from PC Specialist. It was my second laptop from them and has served me well. However, it was only ever meant as a stopgap for me due to the screen - I really wanted a 4K 17" screen, but they simply didn't exist. I ordered a 4K 15" model...

Yup, now says 19th, so another 5 working days at a minimum before building starts. At this rate it may take longer than last time (ironically the same thing happened with the 4K Defiance I ordered... however, that was a blessing in disguise as while I was waiting for the 4K chassis to arrive in...

Three and a half years ago I bought a 17" Vortex II gaming laptop from PC Specialist. Although the processor has held up well, the graphics card (a GTX 560M) feels decidedly old - it struggles with modern games. The machine has been trouble-free and thus I ended up back at PC Specialist for a...

Indeed, it struggles - but it would, considering they're using 4x MSAA! It's utterly pointless on a tiny display (relatively speaking). Computationally cheaper antialiasing modes provide as good an experience IMO. Here's a screenshot of WoW running at 4K (which even with CSAA turned on, still...

Back in July 2011 I was in need of a laptop, as the one I was using (a Clevo C720 from the now-defunct Evesham) was becoming unuseable due to its Geforce 7900 dying. (It turns out this particular chip has a problem with its solder and I wasn't brave enough to try the oven trick!) Dodgy GPU...