Octane Series: 15.6" Matte Full HD IPS LED Widescreen (1920x1080)

[cavedw]

Spec:
Chassis & Display Octane Series: 15.6" Matte Full HD IPS LED Widescreen (1920x1080)
Processor (CPU) Intel® Core™i7 Quad Core Processor i7-6700k (4.0GHz) 8MB Cache
Memory (RAM) 32GB HyperX IMPACT 2133MHz SODIMM DDR4 (2 x 16GB)
Graphics Card NVIDIA® GeForce® GTX 1060 - 6.0GB GDDR5 Video RAM - DirectX® 12.1, G-SYNC
Memory - Hard Disk 2TB Samsung 850 EVO 2.5" SSD, SATA 6Gb/s (upto 540MB/sR | 520MB/sW)
M.2 SSD Drive: 256GB SAMSUNG SM961 M.2, PCIe NVMe (up to 3100MB/R, 1400MB/W)
Memory Card Reader Integrated 6 in 1 Card Reader (SD /Mini SD/ SDHC / SDXC / MMC / RSMMC)
Thermal Paste ARCTIC MX-4 EXTREME THERMAL CONDUCTIVITY COMPOUND
Sound Card Intel 2 Channel High Definition Audio + MIC/Headphone Jack
Bluetooth & Wireless GIGABIT LAN & KILLER™ WIRELESS-AC 1535 M.2 GAMING 802.11AC + BLUETOOTH 4.1

I am pleased with the Octane I bought.

Its completely setup now, and performing very well. Backlit keyboard means working into the night is a breeze.

With complete black displayed on screen there is a little bit of backlight leak. But to me its never been of a concern.

Running temperatures for this Octane are 36 degrees idle, with the CPU ticking over at ~1.2ghz.
As can be seen from pictures, with a dx9 game running at 1920x1080 with everything, everything, set to maximum, the machine is effortless. The fans rise a little, but at 46 degrees I am not complaining.

Under normal web browsing use and document writing use, the machine is silent. Its only when load is thrown at it does it respond by firing up the fans. Dont be disheartened. The fan noise never rises above comfortably volume game playing. Its there when the action gets going, but its not intrusive. When compiling code the fans are also reigning in the temps and can be heard working. I find it reassuring that they are there and doing their job. You can have silent machines - but they wont ever be as powerful as this. Its when its carving into this code that the fans are the loudest. In development mode I just want the work done, and dont care how much noise it takes to get there.


I have owned about 5 Laptops now, from various places. They pale in comparison to this, but then you get what you pay for to be fair to them.

I waited 2 weeks for this beast. It was worth the wait.

 

[cavedw]

I have decided to stick with windows 8.1 Pro on this machine.

I never thought I would say this, but its better than 7. But only when ALL those horrific tiled apps (metro) are completely removed and a proper start menu is put back in place, Classic Start Menu.

Its actually using a lot less RAM than 7.

I thought about updating the BIOS too, but having seen the threads here - I will not be doing that.

I remember ASUS boards having 2 BIOS areas on them, for a 2-phase type approach to BIOS flashing. Not sure if thats the norm now ?

The highest temperature I have seen here is about 75 degrees. It never sustained and only peaks at that level. It wasnt a game that did it, but compiling down FFMPEG libraries.
These will force the CPU to max out for a sustained period.

I have elected to keep the UEFI boot now I know how to, eh hem, hack UEFI boot media together. Its actually simpler than trying to write 4 bytes of data in a specific place on a USB or CD or DVD - the world of boot sectors and the like.

Thats enough from me.

As a thank you to the community for excellent advice, I am offering to help out technically for those who feel they need it....

Over and out.