I wanted to wait a little while before posting a review of my PCSpecialist laptop because with the levels of child-like excitement I was feeling when I first got this, it would have been impossible to keep it objective!
My specs are:
CPU - i7 9750h
GPU - RTX 2070
Display - 1080p, 144hz IPS panel
RAM - 2x8gb 2666mhz
Storage - 1TB Adata NVME SSD
This is the first high performance laptop I have owned, I've gamed on PCs from the age of 11. I was about to become a father for the first time, and wanted to still be able to indulge my passion for PC gaming without closing myself away in a room. I mainly wanted / needed the flexibility of being able to game anywhere in the apartment, or if we were visiting family etc and this seemed like the perfect solution.
This thing is a complete beast of a laptop, I'm constantly surprised with how well it runs modern AAA titles. I was playing Control on high settings recently and it was super smooth. As a high spec laptop, it runs pretty hot - I'd advise getting a cooling pad with a few fans to help this thing keep cool as it will prolong its lifespan and help stop your CPU from thermal throttling. I've lightly undervolted my CPU and find that I get a stable CPU speed of ~4ghz which blows my mind. You'll also want to use headphones or a headset when you're running a graphically intense game because the fans really ramp up to help dissipate the heat this thing generates. This is also my first experience with using an NVME SSD and good lord the loading times are fast.
The display is brilliant. I'd have loved a gsync display, but you can't have it all! The 144hz refresh rate makes gaming on it an absolute joy, and the viewing angles are great because the display uses an IPS panel. The bezels on the display are REALLY slim, like slimmer than a lot of monitors out there. And despite the narrow bezels they have still been able to implement a webcam that supports Windows Hello - a very nice touch. I've found the 17.3 inch screen to be a solid choice for me. It's pretty big, and it's not light, but it is a machine that I bought to be a mobile gaming station. If you're buying a machine like this with the expectation that it will be as portable as an ultrabook then you've not considered your purchase well!
In terms of upgradeability - upgrading your memory and storage is an absolute breeze, the innards of the laptop are accessible by roughly a dozen screws. The m.2 slots and SODIMM slots are easily accessible. I believe there's also space for a 2.5 inch storage drive too.
There's an absolutely solid offering in terms of the IO as well. You've got three USB type A ports (two of which are USB 3.0 and one is 2.0 I believe), a USB type C port (not thunderbolt sadly - but again, you can't have everything), an SD card reader, ethernet, headphone / microphone jacks, full-size HDMI and two mini display ports!
The overall aesthetic of the laptop is strong - I do like the look of it. It has plenty of vents that don't like super 'gamer-y' and there's no obnoxious logo on the top on top of the shell, which has a pleasant brushed aluminium finish. There is per-key RGB lighting on the keyboard, though I'd recommend having a static lighting effect as the colour transitions aren't smooth, and a subtle RGB light bar in front of the track pad.
To make this a fair review, I do need to touch on the few points that are not quite so positive. The keyboard and trackpad - they're both fine! But fine is all I can really say. The keyboard has a slightly 'mechanical' feel to the keys, there's a chunky tactile bump that is reminiscent of Cherry Brown or Clear switches. I wouldn't want to type out a 10,000 word essay using it, but then that's not my use-case. There's plenty of USB ports to plug in a separate keyboard if needs be. The trackpad is pretty nice, I find the right-click a bit hit-or-miss a lot of the time. It can be disabled when you're using USB mouse by double tapping the top left corner of trackpad - another nice little touch.
The one thing that was really a bit of a disappointment was the battery life. In-game my battery wouldn't last an hour - and I get it! There's a 6 core processor and full fat RTX 2070 in this machine, it's obviously going to be power hungry. It really is the one trade-off with this machine, and it's a completely fair and understandable one. The amount of performance that can be packed in to this machine for the price is INSANE. If I was to try and get something similarly specced from MSI / Razer / Asus etc I'd probably have paid an extra £1000 on top of the cost of this PCSpecialist machine which was ~£1600. And yeah, it might have had a longer battery life, but I'm not a student bringing this to university, I'm not taking it to a coffee shop to work on. I'm using this somewhere in a house where I will always have a socket nearby with which to have this plugged in. So a small battery life has no tangible impact on my experience using it.
If anyone is reading this and is undecided about whether to use PCSpecialist to buy a high-spec laptop - I cannot recommend this company enough.
Cheers guys!
My specs are:
CPU - i7 9750h
GPU - RTX 2070
Display - 1080p, 144hz IPS panel
RAM - 2x8gb 2666mhz
Storage - 1TB Adata NVME SSD
This is the first high performance laptop I have owned, I've gamed on PCs from the age of 11. I was about to become a father for the first time, and wanted to still be able to indulge my passion for PC gaming without closing myself away in a room. I mainly wanted / needed the flexibility of being able to game anywhere in the apartment, or if we were visiting family etc and this seemed like the perfect solution.
This thing is a complete beast of a laptop, I'm constantly surprised with how well it runs modern AAA titles. I was playing Control on high settings recently and it was super smooth. As a high spec laptop, it runs pretty hot - I'd advise getting a cooling pad with a few fans to help this thing keep cool as it will prolong its lifespan and help stop your CPU from thermal throttling. I've lightly undervolted my CPU and find that I get a stable CPU speed of ~4ghz which blows my mind. You'll also want to use headphones or a headset when you're running a graphically intense game because the fans really ramp up to help dissipate the heat this thing generates. This is also my first experience with using an NVME SSD and good lord the loading times are fast.
The display is brilliant. I'd have loved a gsync display, but you can't have it all! The 144hz refresh rate makes gaming on it an absolute joy, and the viewing angles are great because the display uses an IPS panel. The bezels on the display are REALLY slim, like slimmer than a lot of monitors out there. And despite the narrow bezels they have still been able to implement a webcam that supports Windows Hello - a very nice touch. I've found the 17.3 inch screen to be a solid choice for me. It's pretty big, and it's not light, but it is a machine that I bought to be a mobile gaming station. If you're buying a machine like this with the expectation that it will be as portable as an ultrabook then you've not considered your purchase well!
In terms of upgradeability - upgrading your memory and storage is an absolute breeze, the innards of the laptop are accessible by roughly a dozen screws. The m.2 slots and SODIMM slots are easily accessible. I believe there's also space for a 2.5 inch storage drive too.
There's an absolutely solid offering in terms of the IO as well. You've got three USB type A ports (two of which are USB 3.0 and one is 2.0 I believe), a USB type C port (not thunderbolt sadly - but again, you can't have everything), an SD card reader, ethernet, headphone / microphone jacks, full-size HDMI and two mini display ports!
The overall aesthetic of the laptop is strong - I do like the look of it. It has plenty of vents that don't like super 'gamer-y' and there's no obnoxious logo on the top on top of the shell, which has a pleasant brushed aluminium finish. There is per-key RGB lighting on the keyboard, though I'd recommend having a static lighting effect as the colour transitions aren't smooth, and a subtle RGB light bar in front of the track pad.
To make this a fair review, I do need to touch on the few points that are not quite so positive. The keyboard and trackpad - they're both fine! But fine is all I can really say. The keyboard has a slightly 'mechanical' feel to the keys, there's a chunky tactile bump that is reminiscent of Cherry Brown or Clear switches. I wouldn't want to type out a 10,000 word essay using it, but then that's not my use-case. There's plenty of USB ports to plug in a separate keyboard if needs be. The trackpad is pretty nice, I find the right-click a bit hit-or-miss a lot of the time. It can be disabled when you're using USB mouse by double tapping the top left corner of trackpad - another nice little touch.
The one thing that was really a bit of a disappointment was the battery life. In-game my battery wouldn't last an hour - and I get it! There's a 6 core processor and full fat RTX 2070 in this machine, it's obviously going to be power hungry. It really is the one trade-off with this machine, and it's a completely fair and understandable one. The amount of performance that can be packed in to this machine for the price is INSANE. If I was to try and get something similarly specced from MSI / Razer / Asus etc I'd probably have paid an extra £1000 on top of the cost of this PCSpecialist machine which was ~£1600. And yeah, it might have had a longer battery life, but I'm not a student bringing this to university, I'm not taking it to a coffee shop to work on. I'm using this somewhere in a house where I will always have a socket nearby with which to have this plugged in. So a small battery life has no tangible impact on my experience using it.
If anyone is reading this and is undecided about whether to use PCSpecialist to buy a high-spec laptop - I cannot recommend this company enough.
Cheers guys!
