Chassis & Display Enigma IV: 15.6" AUO Matte 95% Gamut LED Widescreen (1920x1080) (£79)
Processor (CPU) Intel® Core™i7 Quad Core Mobile Processor i7-3630QM (2.40GHz) 6MB
Memory (RAM) 8GB KINGSTON HYPER-X GENESIS 1600MHz SODIMM DDR3 (2 x 4GB)
Graphics Card NVIDIA® GeForce® GT 650M - 2.0GB DDR3 Video RAM - DirectX® 11
Memory - 1st Hard Disk 240GB INTEL® 335 SERIES SSD, SATA 6 Gb/s (upto 500MB/sR | 450MB/sW)
1st Hard Disk Partitions 80GB, 40GB, 120GB
1st DVD/BLU-RAY Drive SONY BC-5550H 4x BLURAY COMBO DRIVE & CYBERLINK SOFTWARE
Memory Card Reader Integrated 3 in 1 Memory Card Reader (SD, MMC, MS)
Sound Card Intel 2 Channel High Definition Audio + MIC/Headphone Jack
Network Facilities GIGABIT LAN & WIRELESS INTEL® N135 802.11N (150Mbps) + BLUETOOTH
USB Options 2 x USB 3.0 PORTS + 1 x USB 2.0 PORT AS STANDARD
Battery Enigma Series 6 Cell Lithium Ion Battery (5,200 mAH)
Power Lead & Adaptor 1 x UK Power Lead & 90W AC Adaptor
Operating System Genuine Windows 8 Professional 64 Bit - inc DVD & Licence (£109)
Laptop Cooling Stands Zalman ZM-NC3500 Ultra-Quiet Laptop Cooler, upto 17.3 inch (£39)
Keyboard & Mouse INTEGRATED UK KEYBOARD WITH NUMBER PAD
Mouse INTEGRATED 2 BUTTON TOUCHPAD MOUSE
Webcam INTEGRATED 1.3 MEGAPIXEL WEBCAM
Warranty 3 Year Silver Warranty (1 Year Collect & Return, 1 Year Parts, 3 Year Labour) (£5)
I've had my Enigma IV laptop for a couple of weeks now, so I thought I'd post a review of sorts...
Chassis / Keyboard / Trackpad etc
It's a smart looking laptop, althoug the first thing people notice about it seem to be what isn't there - namely the complete lack of any logos anywhere on it! The keyboard is quite nice, though I personally perfer contoured keys to the flat style keys. However, the keyboard layout is good, with ctrl, alt, fn keys in sensible locations (eg no swapping of fn and ctrl keys as on some laptops). Also, the numeric keypad is welcome, though the decimal point is in an odd location (top rather than bottom of the numeric keypad) so I find I can't touch type on it yet.
The trackpad is perfectly acceptable, though I'm not a big fan of the textured feeling, and the right-hand side scroll seems to be a bit unforgiving if your finger deviates to the left or right. Port placement is sensible, although for my use I'd have preferred some USB ports on the back rather than on both sides. I find cables plugged into USB2 ones on the right hand side get in the way of the optical drive tray.
The only other slight issue I have with the chassis for my use is the placement of the intake for the processor fan; this is a little further over to the left hand side than is ideal for the laptop cooler I purchased. I have to put the laptop over as far to the right as possible in order to get the external cooling fan to have maximum effect.
None of these are in any way major issues, or even annoyances - just comments which may be relevant to some people.
Screen
I went for the wide gamut 1920x1080 screen, and I am very impressed with it. Text is sharp and clear, viewing angles are good in the horizontal plane, though not so good in the vertical plane - it's certainly better than other laptop screens I've used. I understand that wide gamut screens should be properly calibrated - I haven't done so since I haven't got the necessary hardware, and I think that it's probably tending to over-saturation, but photos do look very natural so perhaps not. I do find that it's a bit uncomfortable to look at for long periods without turning down the brightness though - particularly reds and pinks are very bright!.
Performance
There are 3 main uses for the laptop; home office use, programming/software development and occasional HD video editing. For the first 2 uses, the laptop is beautifully responsive. Boot times into Windows 8 are ~10s (I think that might be cheating slightly as I think Win8 hibernates). Booting into Linux Mint 14 takes about the same time, and that's definitely a full system boot. I haven't done much video editing so far, though as a test I did try recoding some 1080p50 in Handbrake under linux which managed to max out all 8 'cores'/threads. A video-only recode (audio copy) seems to run at a shade over 20fps. That's about 50% faster than my old desktop machine (Core 2 Duo 1.8GHz) could manage to recode SD video.
I don't really do any gaming, so I'm not sure how good the graphics card is. I haven't tried using the video decode acceleration either as I'm mainly running under linux, and I haven't installed the necessary drivers yet. I will probably do this though, as although the CPU is perfectly capable of doing HD video decode, I do get tearing which using the VPU might eliminate.
OS
I decided to go for Windows 8 Pro, mainly becuase Win8 Pro OEM also includes a licence to allow downgrade to Win7 Pro. So far I've only used Win8 briefly, and everything seems to take much longer than it used to. There's a lot more having to move the mouse into specific locations of the screen to find things. Using a trackpad with a 1920x1080 screen I found this frustrating, since moving the mouse from one side of the screen to another to activate hot corners takes longer than necessary. I may yet decide to ditch Win8 and install Win7 instead.
However, so far I've not been using Windows at all. I've set the laptop up to dual boot Linux Mint 14 64bit Cinnamon edition. I'll include my experiences of doing this here, since laptops often cause problems for linux installs due to lack of drivers.
Firstly I downloaded the dvd ISO downloaded from www.linuxmint.com, and used the installer from www.pendrivelinux.com to install the iso on a bootable USB stick. Putting the USB stick in the laptop and using the boot selection menu in the bios (F10 I think) allowed me to run the live USB edition and everything seemed to work well (wifi etc worked perfectly). I then told it to install, selecting the 40GB secondary partition on the HDD (which pcspecialist configured for me as requested). About 10mins later it had finished and I rebooted. However the system just went straight back to Windows 8. I did this a couple more times, before I finally realised that the BIOS boot selection menu showed the USB stick twice... once in EFI mode (the first option on the list) and once in non-EFI mode. When I booted from the USB stick in non-EFI mode, the install went fine, and I got a dual-boot grub menu as expected on reboot. It's a good job the install was so speedy, or this could have been very tedious!
When I booted into Linux Mint 14, I then came across a second issue. After logging in, I was immediately returned to the login screen. Eventually I discovered that I could boot the system if I chose to boot gnome classic rather than cinnamon. I was then able to install the (proprietary) nvidia drivers, and on reboot I was able to log in to cinnamon. This seems to be a Cinnamon installer bug for Linux Mint 14.
Once that was working everything else seemed to work well. The wifi password had even been transferred from the live USB by the installer. Webcam and sound works fine. The only thing which wasn't working was the backlight was staying on full brightness all the time - as noted above, this was somewhat annoying, as the screen is uncomfortably bright at times. However, this is easily fixed by following the instructions here; http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?f=208&t=106557&p=640205&hilit=brightness+control#p602113
So far, I'm very happy with the system running Linux Mint 14. Everything seems to be so much less hassle than on Windows 8, so I haven't booted that in over a week.
Laptop Cooler
Given that one of my uses is for video editing, which can stress even a quad core i7, I thought I'd also get a laptop cooler. Also, since this has an integrated USB hub, it acts as a kind of docking station (in that mouse/keyboard can stay plugged into it on the desk where the laptop is mainly used). I haven't performed any scientific tests on this yet, though it does seem that when doing a video encode using all cores, the average core temperature seemed to reduce from ~84 degrees to around 80 degrees. That may not sound much, but it also seemed to mean that the laptop fan didn't go to it's fastest/loudest setting. In general use (browsing etc) with the cores running at 1.2GHz rather than 2.4, I see the temperature averaging about 38 degrees with the cooler, and a little higher than that without. Again, it seems that the laptop fan needs to kick up to a higher speed more often when running without the cooler turned on. Although the cooler is audible, it's fan noise is much more pleasant than the laptop fan. And it's much quiter than the desktop machine the laptop is replacing.
Conclusion
Overall I'm very happy with the purchase. The laptop works very well for my requirements, and given that I could tailor it to my requirements, I was able to get something with everything I needed for a good price, rather than compromising or paying over the odds for something with features I don't need (high-end graphics card etc). The service from pcspecialist was very good, and I'd definitely recommend it to others.
Processor (CPU) Intel® Core™i7 Quad Core Mobile Processor i7-3630QM (2.40GHz) 6MB
Memory (RAM) 8GB KINGSTON HYPER-X GENESIS 1600MHz SODIMM DDR3 (2 x 4GB)
Graphics Card NVIDIA® GeForce® GT 650M - 2.0GB DDR3 Video RAM - DirectX® 11
Memory - 1st Hard Disk 240GB INTEL® 335 SERIES SSD, SATA 6 Gb/s (upto 500MB/sR | 450MB/sW)
1st Hard Disk Partitions 80GB, 40GB, 120GB
1st DVD/BLU-RAY Drive SONY BC-5550H 4x BLURAY COMBO DRIVE & CYBERLINK SOFTWARE
Memory Card Reader Integrated 3 in 1 Memory Card Reader (SD, MMC, MS)
Sound Card Intel 2 Channel High Definition Audio + MIC/Headphone Jack
Network Facilities GIGABIT LAN & WIRELESS INTEL® N135 802.11N (150Mbps) + BLUETOOTH
USB Options 2 x USB 3.0 PORTS + 1 x USB 2.0 PORT AS STANDARD
Battery Enigma Series 6 Cell Lithium Ion Battery (5,200 mAH)
Power Lead & Adaptor 1 x UK Power Lead & 90W AC Adaptor
Operating System Genuine Windows 8 Professional 64 Bit - inc DVD & Licence (£109)
Laptop Cooling Stands Zalman ZM-NC3500 Ultra-Quiet Laptop Cooler, upto 17.3 inch (£39)
Keyboard & Mouse INTEGRATED UK KEYBOARD WITH NUMBER PAD
Mouse INTEGRATED 2 BUTTON TOUCHPAD MOUSE
Webcam INTEGRATED 1.3 MEGAPIXEL WEBCAM
Warranty 3 Year Silver Warranty (1 Year Collect & Return, 1 Year Parts, 3 Year Labour) (£5)
I've had my Enigma IV laptop for a couple of weeks now, so I thought I'd post a review of sorts...
Chassis / Keyboard / Trackpad etc
It's a smart looking laptop, althoug the first thing people notice about it seem to be what isn't there - namely the complete lack of any logos anywhere on it! The keyboard is quite nice, though I personally perfer contoured keys to the flat style keys. However, the keyboard layout is good, with ctrl, alt, fn keys in sensible locations (eg no swapping of fn and ctrl keys as on some laptops). Also, the numeric keypad is welcome, though the decimal point is in an odd location (top rather than bottom of the numeric keypad) so I find I can't touch type on it yet.
The trackpad is perfectly acceptable, though I'm not a big fan of the textured feeling, and the right-hand side scroll seems to be a bit unforgiving if your finger deviates to the left or right. Port placement is sensible, although for my use I'd have preferred some USB ports on the back rather than on both sides. I find cables plugged into USB2 ones on the right hand side get in the way of the optical drive tray.
The only other slight issue I have with the chassis for my use is the placement of the intake for the processor fan; this is a little further over to the left hand side than is ideal for the laptop cooler I purchased. I have to put the laptop over as far to the right as possible in order to get the external cooling fan to have maximum effect.
None of these are in any way major issues, or even annoyances - just comments which may be relevant to some people.
Screen
I went for the wide gamut 1920x1080 screen, and I am very impressed with it. Text is sharp and clear, viewing angles are good in the horizontal plane, though not so good in the vertical plane - it's certainly better than other laptop screens I've used. I understand that wide gamut screens should be properly calibrated - I haven't done so since I haven't got the necessary hardware, and I think that it's probably tending to over-saturation, but photos do look very natural so perhaps not. I do find that it's a bit uncomfortable to look at for long periods without turning down the brightness though - particularly reds and pinks are very bright!.
Performance
There are 3 main uses for the laptop; home office use, programming/software development and occasional HD video editing. For the first 2 uses, the laptop is beautifully responsive. Boot times into Windows 8 are ~10s (I think that might be cheating slightly as I think Win8 hibernates). Booting into Linux Mint 14 takes about the same time, and that's definitely a full system boot. I haven't done much video editing so far, though as a test I did try recoding some 1080p50 in Handbrake under linux which managed to max out all 8 'cores'/threads. A video-only recode (audio copy) seems to run at a shade over 20fps. That's about 50% faster than my old desktop machine (Core 2 Duo 1.8GHz) could manage to recode SD video.
I don't really do any gaming, so I'm not sure how good the graphics card is. I haven't tried using the video decode acceleration either as I'm mainly running under linux, and I haven't installed the necessary drivers yet. I will probably do this though, as although the CPU is perfectly capable of doing HD video decode, I do get tearing which using the VPU might eliminate.
OS
I decided to go for Windows 8 Pro, mainly becuase Win8 Pro OEM also includes a licence to allow downgrade to Win7 Pro. So far I've only used Win8 briefly, and everything seems to take much longer than it used to. There's a lot more having to move the mouse into specific locations of the screen to find things. Using a trackpad with a 1920x1080 screen I found this frustrating, since moving the mouse from one side of the screen to another to activate hot corners takes longer than necessary. I may yet decide to ditch Win8 and install Win7 instead.
However, so far I've not been using Windows at all. I've set the laptop up to dual boot Linux Mint 14 64bit Cinnamon edition. I'll include my experiences of doing this here, since laptops often cause problems for linux installs due to lack of drivers.
Firstly I downloaded the dvd ISO downloaded from www.linuxmint.com, and used the installer from www.pendrivelinux.com to install the iso on a bootable USB stick. Putting the USB stick in the laptop and using the boot selection menu in the bios (F10 I think) allowed me to run the live USB edition and everything seemed to work well (wifi etc worked perfectly). I then told it to install, selecting the 40GB secondary partition on the HDD (which pcspecialist configured for me as requested). About 10mins later it had finished and I rebooted. However the system just went straight back to Windows 8. I did this a couple more times, before I finally realised that the BIOS boot selection menu showed the USB stick twice... once in EFI mode (the first option on the list) and once in non-EFI mode. When I booted from the USB stick in non-EFI mode, the install went fine, and I got a dual-boot grub menu as expected on reboot. It's a good job the install was so speedy, or this could have been very tedious!
When I booted into Linux Mint 14, I then came across a second issue. After logging in, I was immediately returned to the login screen. Eventually I discovered that I could boot the system if I chose to boot gnome classic rather than cinnamon. I was then able to install the (proprietary) nvidia drivers, and on reboot I was able to log in to cinnamon. This seems to be a Cinnamon installer bug for Linux Mint 14.
Once that was working everything else seemed to work well. The wifi password had even been transferred from the live USB by the installer. Webcam and sound works fine. The only thing which wasn't working was the backlight was staying on full brightness all the time - as noted above, this was somewhat annoying, as the screen is uncomfortably bright at times. However, this is easily fixed by following the instructions here; http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?f=208&t=106557&p=640205&hilit=brightness+control#p602113
So far, I'm very happy with the system running Linux Mint 14. Everything seems to be so much less hassle than on Windows 8, so I haven't booted that in over a week.
Laptop Cooler
Given that one of my uses is for video editing, which can stress even a quad core i7, I thought I'd also get a laptop cooler. Also, since this has an integrated USB hub, it acts as a kind of docking station (in that mouse/keyboard can stay plugged into it on the desk where the laptop is mainly used). I haven't performed any scientific tests on this yet, though it does seem that when doing a video encode using all cores, the average core temperature seemed to reduce from ~84 degrees to around 80 degrees. That may not sound much, but it also seemed to mean that the laptop fan didn't go to it's fastest/loudest setting. In general use (browsing etc) with the cores running at 1.2GHz rather than 2.4, I see the temperature averaging about 38 degrees with the cooler, and a little higher than that without. Again, it seems that the laptop fan needs to kick up to a higher speed more often when running without the cooler turned on. Although the cooler is audible, it's fan noise is much more pleasant than the laptop fan. And it's much quiter than the desktop machine the laptop is replacing.
Conclusion
Overall I'm very happy with the purchase. The laptop works very well for my requirements, and given that I could tailor it to my requirements, I was able to get something with everything I needed for a good price, rather than compromising or paying over the odds for something with features I don't need (high-end graphics card etc). The service from pcspecialist was very good, and I'd definitely recommend it to others.
