Rodpad
Member
Here's my little review of the PC Specialist Inferno 11.6", based on the Clevo W110ER.
The important specs are:
i7-3630QM
8GB Memory
Nvidia GT 650m
120GB SSD
The textured rubber feel of the casing is very unique and prevents the laptop from slipping off surfaces or your lap. The smallish keys were fine to type on, even for my large hands. The Trackpad isn't brilliant, but I think it's more down to the included software. I'm sure I could probably find a third party solution to make the trackpad behave more like other notebooks.
Temperature-wise the machine will idle at the desktop at around 50c and reach a maximum of 80c (even when throttling is disabled). The machine doesn't have the cooling for the CPU to go into Turboboost mode, but that's to be expected. From all the tests I did the games were bottlenecked by the GPU and not the CPU.
Acoustics are silent when at the desktop, rising to a slight whisper when not on a flat surface or doing light work. During gaming the fan was no louder than my old desktop Nvidia GTX 560. I imagine quite a few people will use headphones, however the volume was loud enough to drown out the more than tolerable fan noise. Once gaming has finished the fans go all the way to silent again in under 15 seconds which is pretty remarkable.
Sound quality out of the box was average, however with some tweaking in the included THX utility I was able to get a much more acceptable sound. I put Surround to 40% (which basically just gives better stereo separation from the stereo speakers), and the "Speaker" setting (essentially bass as far as I could tell) to 90%. I turned off all other adjustments.
The screen is excellent. I much prefer the ever so slight "dusty" look you get with a matte screen compared to mass reflections on a glossy screen. The only minor point I will say is that out of the box the colours were rather dull and the gamma was a touch too high. I simply changed the Saturation to +10 and Gamma to 0.9 and the image was much more on par with my usual 24" gaming monitor. There was no input lag or ghosting.
Performance was fantastic for such a small and light device. I used Nvidia Inspector to force Adaptive Vsync since for some reason it's missing in the Nvidia control panel for the mobile 6xx series.
In Borderlands 2 with most settings on maximum I was getting highs of 60 and lows of 30 during intense firefights. I'd say at an average I get around 45fps. This is still much more than the consoles and looks much nicer.
Diablo 3 was always 60fps, never dropping.
Sonic and All Stars Racing Transformed was always 60fps, never dropping.
Sadly I don't have a great camera, so I'll simply just include these photos that I think show how nice the build and screen are. This was taken in typical home lighting. Any glaring, over saturation and colour bleeding will be due to my poor camera. The screen looks much nicer than this in person.
Here is also a direct recording from Sonic and All Stars Racing Transformed through MSI Afterburner. All settings are at maximum.
This was captured at the native resolution of 1366x768 on the laptop itself. I included the Rivatuner/MSI/HWinfo64 OSD so you can see temperatures, framerates and workloads. Pretty impressive stuff considering it's rendering the game, the movie capture and writing to the SSD all at the same time.
Note that the second number on CPU Usage is just the maximum recorded. The first number is the important current CPU Usage.
[video=youtube;eDICYIqHpvw]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eDICYIqHpvw&feature=youtu.be[/video]
If anybody would like to ask any questions about build, features or performance, please feel free to ask and I'll be happy to answer.
The important specs are:
i7-3630QM
8GB Memory
Nvidia GT 650m
120GB SSD
The textured rubber feel of the casing is very unique and prevents the laptop from slipping off surfaces or your lap. The smallish keys were fine to type on, even for my large hands. The Trackpad isn't brilliant, but I think it's more down to the included software. I'm sure I could probably find a third party solution to make the trackpad behave more like other notebooks.
Temperature-wise the machine will idle at the desktop at around 50c and reach a maximum of 80c (even when throttling is disabled). The machine doesn't have the cooling for the CPU to go into Turboboost mode, but that's to be expected. From all the tests I did the games were bottlenecked by the GPU and not the CPU.
Acoustics are silent when at the desktop, rising to a slight whisper when not on a flat surface or doing light work. During gaming the fan was no louder than my old desktop Nvidia GTX 560. I imagine quite a few people will use headphones, however the volume was loud enough to drown out the more than tolerable fan noise. Once gaming has finished the fans go all the way to silent again in under 15 seconds which is pretty remarkable.
Sound quality out of the box was average, however with some tweaking in the included THX utility I was able to get a much more acceptable sound. I put Surround to 40% (which basically just gives better stereo separation from the stereo speakers), and the "Speaker" setting (essentially bass as far as I could tell) to 90%. I turned off all other adjustments.
The screen is excellent. I much prefer the ever so slight "dusty" look you get with a matte screen compared to mass reflections on a glossy screen. The only minor point I will say is that out of the box the colours were rather dull and the gamma was a touch too high. I simply changed the Saturation to +10 and Gamma to 0.9 and the image was much more on par with my usual 24" gaming monitor. There was no input lag or ghosting.
Performance was fantastic for such a small and light device. I used Nvidia Inspector to force Adaptive Vsync since for some reason it's missing in the Nvidia control panel for the mobile 6xx series.
In Borderlands 2 with most settings on maximum I was getting highs of 60 and lows of 30 during intense firefights. I'd say at an average I get around 45fps. This is still much more than the consoles and looks much nicer.
Diablo 3 was always 60fps, never dropping.
Sonic and All Stars Racing Transformed was always 60fps, never dropping.
Sadly I don't have a great camera, so I'll simply just include these photos that I think show how nice the build and screen are. This was taken in typical home lighting. Any glaring, over saturation and colour bleeding will be due to my poor camera. The screen looks much nicer than this in person.
Here is also a direct recording from Sonic and All Stars Racing Transformed through MSI Afterburner. All settings are at maximum.
This was captured at the native resolution of 1366x768 on the laptop itself. I included the Rivatuner/MSI/HWinfo64 OSD so you can see temperatures, framerates and workloads. Pretty impressive stuff considering it's rendering the game, the movie capture and writing to the SSD all at the same time.
Note that the second number on CPU Usage is just the maximum recorded. The first number is the important current CPU Usage.
[video=youtube;eDICYIqHpvw]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eDICYIqHpvw&feature=youtu.be[/video]
If anybody would like to ask any questions about build, features or performance, please feel free to ask and I'll be happy to answer.
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