I have had this laptop for over a week now, and my experience has been excellent. Here are the specs
Intel® Core™ i5 Quad Core Processor i5-10210U (1.6GHz, 4.2GHz Turbo)
16GB Corsair 2666MHz SODIMM DDR4
NVIDIA® GeForce® MX250
1TB SAMSUNG 970 EVO PLUS M.2, PCIe NVMe
No Operating System (I installed Ubuntu 19.10)
Price when bought: £893.00
I needed a portable but powerful Linux laptop for software development/academic work. I also wanted a discrete graphics card for speeding up (and learning about) parallel computations. My only qualm about the specs is the single slot of memory, both because it is single channel (I think) and I would I have preferred 32GB. I struggled to find any laptops with a similar spec anywhere near this price point, especially ones with 10th gen Intel and a discrete graphics card. I must admit, I was initially nervous about ordering this laptop because of a lack of reviews online and the massive gulf in price between this and the other laptops I was considering (mainly the XPS 15). However, I am not disappointed.
I had Ubuntu 19.10 installed in less than an hour and it works very well. The only hiccup during installation was that I needed to boot into graphics safe mode due to the Nvidia graphics card. The spectre of driver issues gave me considerably unease before buying, but the only issue to materialise is that the keypad occasionally stops working. Although it can be brought back by putting the laptop in standby. Ubuntu 20.04 is just around the corner, my hope is that it will be solved by then. Installing the Nvidia drivers along with CUDA was surprisingly easy, I was playing around on the GPU in the Julia REPL in around 5 minutes.
Firstly, the chassis is made from a lovely matte dark grey/black metal and is thin, light and solid. The hinge is just the right stiffness, easy to lift with very little flex, but doesn't flop around when you move the base. There are odd hints of the laptop's origin as coming from a gaming oriented company, but they are more charming than garish. Generally, build quality and style is excellent and does not betray its relatively moderate price.
The LED screen has excellent colour and appears to have a good dynamic range. Sadly I lack the tools to be more quantitative, but it can be dark enough to work in bed or bright enough to work outside, all while looking vibrant throughout. The speakers (located along the back) manage a surprising amount of bass and volume. This laptop is perfect for watching the odd movie and does not struggle to fill a room with sound.
The keyboard and keypad are decent, but probably the weakest point of the laptop. It may just be modern laptops but the keys (especially the space bar) feel a little flimsy. Hopefully it stands up to many years of typing. On the plus side, the keypad is reasonably sized and the keyboard has a lovely backlight.
Performance wise, I cannot fault the laptop, . I haven't run any benchmarks but the specs speak for themselves.
I haven't properly measured the battery life, but, for my use case of working on the train/in the evenings, the enormous 91 kWh battery has given me no range anxiety. If I had to estimate, the battery lasts at least 8 hours with moderate use. For a laptop with a discrete graphics card and cooling, the battery life is nothing short of incredible. It should also be noted that as far as I know, Ubuntu is not as effective at power management as other operating systems.
The connectivity is excellent, bucking the trend of removing connections, with 4 USB slots (one is USB-C), a full size HDMI, ethernet, a micro-SD reader and even a headphone jack.
One caveat is that my review should be taken with some scepticism. My last laptop was around 7 years old, and was cheap even when bought. But, from what I can tell from other laptops I have tried, is that this laptop punches FAR above its price.
In summary, this laptop has wrapped my perfect specs in a solid and attractive chassis, all at an unbeatable and almost unbelievable price. I would wholeheartedly recommend.
Intel® Core™ i5 Quad Core Processor i5-10210U (1.6GHz, 4.2GHz Turbo)
16GB Corsair 2666MHz SODIMM DDR4
NVIDIA® GeForce® MX250
1TB SAMSUNG 970 EVO PLUS M.2, PCIe NVMe
No Operating System (I installed Ubuntu 19.10)
Price when bought: £893.00
I needed a portable but powerful Linux laptop for software development/academic work. I also wanted a discrete graphics card for speeding up (and learning about) parallel computations. My only qualm about the specs is the single slot of memory, both because it is single channel (I think) and I would I have preferred 32GB. I struggled to find any laptops with a similar spec anywhere near this price point, especially ones with 10th gen Intel and a discrete graphics card. I must admit, I was initially nervous about ordering this laptop because of a lack of reviews online and the massive gulf in price between this and the other laptops I was considering (mainly the XPS 15). However, I am not disappointed.
I had Ubuntu 19.10 installed in less than an hour and it works very well. The only hiccup during installation was that I needed to boot into graphics safe mode due to the Nvidia graphics card. The spectre of driver issues gave me considerably unease before buying, but the only issue to materialise is that the keypad occasionally stops working. Although it can be brought back by putting the laptop in standby. Ubuntu 20.04 is just around the corner, my hope is that it will be solved by then. Installing the Nvidia drivers along with CUDA was surprisingly easy, I was playing around on the GPU in the Julia REPL in around 5 minutes.
Firstly, the chassis is made from a lovely matte dark grey/black metal and is thin, light and solid. The hinge is just the right stiffness, easy to lift with very little flex, but doesn't flop around when you move the base. There are odd hints of the laptop's origin as coming from a gaming oriented company, but they are more charming than garish. Generally, build quality and style is excellent and does not betray its relatively moderate price.
The LED screen has excellent colour and appears to have a good dynamic range. Sadly I lack the tools to be more quantitative, but it can be dark enough to work in bed or bright enough to work outside, all while looking vibrant throughout. The speakers (located along the back) manage a surprising amount of bass and volume. This laptop is perfect for watching the odd movie and does not struggle to fill a room with sound.
The keyboard and keypad are decent, but probably the weakest point of the laptop. It may just be modern laptops but the keys (especially the space bar) feel a little flimsy. Hopefully it stands up to many years of typing. On the plus side, the keypad is reasonably sized and the keyboard has a lovely backlight.
Performance wise, I cannot fault the laptop, . I haven't run any benchmarks but the specs speak for themselves.
I haven't properly measured the battery life, but, for my use case of working on the train/in the evenings, the enormous 91 kWh battery has given me no range anxiety. If I had to estimate, the battery lasts at least 8 hours with moderate use. For a laptop with a discrete graphics card and cooling, the battery life is nothing short of incredible. It should also be noted that as far as I know, Ubuntu is not as effective at power management as other operating systems.
The connectivity is excellent, bucking the trend of removing connections, with 4 USB slots (one is USB-C), a full size HDMI, ethernet, a micro-SD reader and even a headphone jack.
One caveat is that my review should be taken with some scepticism. My last laptop was around 7 years old, and was cheap even when bought. But, from what I can tell from other laptops I have tried, is that this laptop punches FAR above its price.
In summary, this laptop has wrapped my perfect specs in a solid and attractive chassis, all at an unbeatable and almost unbelievable price. I would wholeheartedly recommend.
