My specs:
Chassis & Display
Optimus II: 17.3" Glossy Full HD LED Widescreen (1920x1080)
Processor (CPU)
Intel® Core™i7 Quad Core Mobile Processor i7-2670QM (2.20GHz) 6MB
Memory (RAM)
4GB SAMSUNG 1333MHz SODIMM DDR3 MEMORY (2 x 2GB)
Graphics Card
nVIDIA® GeForce® GT 555M - 2GB DDR3 Video RAM - DirectX® 11
Memory - Hard Disk
500GB SEAGATE MOMENTUS XT HYBRID, SATA 3 Gb/s, 32MB CACHE (7200 rpm)
DVD/BLU-RAY Drive
8x SATA DVD±R/RW/Dual Layer (+ 24x CD-RW)
Memory Card Reader
Internal 9 in 1 Card Reader (MMC/RSMMC/SD: Mini, XC & HC/MS: Pro & Duo)
Thermal Paste
ARCTIC COOLING MX-3 HIGH THERMAL CONDUCTIVITY COMPOUND (£9)
Sound Card
Intel 2 Channel High Definition Audio + MIC/Headphone Jack
Bluetooth & Wireless
GIGABIT LAN & WIRELESS 802.11N CARD INC. BLUETOOTH 3.0
USB Options
2 x USB 3.0 PORTS + 2 x USB 2.0 PORTS AS STANDARD
Battery
Upgrade to 62.16WH 6 Cell Lithium-ION Battery (£39)
Power Lead & Adaptor
1 x UK Power Lead & 90W Adaptor (GT 540M) / 120W Adaptor (GT 555M)
Operating System
NO OPERATING SYSTEM REQUIRED
Office Software
NO OFFICE SOFTWARE
Anti-Virus
NO ANTI-VIRUS SOFTWARE
Notebook 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)
Dead Pixel Guarantee
30 Day Dead Pixel Guarantee Inc. Labour & Carriage Costs (£12)
Insurance
1 Month Free Laptop Insurance inc. Accidental Damage & Theft
Delivery
STANDARD INSURED DELIVERY TO UK MAINLAND (MON-FRI)
Build Time
Standard Build - Approximately 5 to 7 working days
Quantity
1
Price: £895.00 including VAT and delivery.
The price was about a hundred pounds cheaper when it was ordered - this seems to be down to a big increase in the cost of that particular hard drive.
Screen - really happy with this. I was on a creaky old Dell 19" 1280x1024 so you can imagine how much of an improvement this is. The gloss can be distracting in sunlight but the image quality is very good and the 17" size lets the 1080p really shine without any increase in DPI.
Chassis - it's mostly plain matte black with some brushed surfaces on the top and around the touchpad. It feels sturdy despite the plastic and the clean unbranded surface looks great. There is a THX sticker but this is easily removed. The power buttons and other hotkeys do need too much pressure to register though.
Touchpad - the best touchpad I have ever seen is on a Macbook and this doesn't quite measure up. The surface is rougher and a little smaller, and the buttons take too much pressure to press and make an unpleasant loud noise when pushed in. The multi touch gestures are poor (though this seems to be unpolished software/drivers); the two-finger gesture to scroll is unreliable and the three-finger swipe to navigate web pages only works half the time. A two finger tap to right click would have been useful to avoid having to use the right mouse button but there is no option in the Synaptics driver for this.
Keyboard - much better than the touchpad. The keys are isolated and feel good to push. The layout avoids many laptop pitfalls by putting the Ctrl key to the left of Fn and having a full sized enter key (the pictures on the web page show a one-row enter key, oddly). There is a good deal of space to the left and right that should have been used to give the numpad the full 4 columns instead of 3. The capslock and numlock lights should be placed nearer or on their keys instead of the front left of the laptop as well. Overall this is a good and usuable keyboard for typing and gaming.
Noise/heat - the laptop is silent during normal use apart from the whirring of the hard drive, however when gaming the single fan can get very loud. Idling on a wooden desk the temperatures are about 50 - 60 degrees C and they go up to 80 degrees when gaming. Coming from a desktop where I rarely saw temps go above 60 this worries me, and I wonder whether these things are capable of handling the extra heat over long periods of time. The 'Optimus' feature allows for the switching off of the graphics card when you need the extra battery life but I'm not a fan of the dialogue box that shows every time the hotkey is pushed.
Gaming - this handles TF2 on 1080p without a hitch, and games like AC:B and BFBC2 on high settings at about 40+ fps. I turn down the resolution from 1920x1080 to 1366x768 on more demanding games and I notice a big performance boost with almost no discernable difference in visual quality.
Other things - the volume controls are activated by holding FN+F5/F6. Annoyingly the onscreen graphic that appears causes fullscreen games to minimize, which is a real pain for games that can't handle alt-tabbing well. Is there a way to assign a volume hotkey to something else?
Some of the included software seems like unnecessary baggage - the THX audio software in particular, which has all sorts of 'helpful' features like muting a Youtube video when a Steam chat notification sound plays.
The 'Upgrade to 62.16WH' battery option was a little misleading (in a good way) - I thought I'd get one battery at the higher capacity, but I actually got the original 48Wh battery *and* the 62WH. It was a nice surprise but this wasn't clear in the drop down menu's wording. Maybe add 'as standard' to the first option, then put a '+' sign instead of 'upgrade to' for the 62WH.
The processor menu order seems a little illogical as well. I ignored all of the i7 options at first on the basis that the 2640M was just over my budget, and assumed that the processors listed below it would be more expensive until I clicked on the 2670M by mistake and found it was actually cheaper.
So far I'm very happy with the laptop and with PCspecialist's service. If anyone's got any questions or wants some benchmarks run I'd be happy to help
Chassis & Display
Optimus II: 17.3" Glossy Full HD LED Widescreen (1920x1080)
Processor (CPU)
Intel® Core™i7 Quad Core Mobile Processor i7-2670QM (2.20GHz) 6MB
Memory (RAM)
4GB SAMSUNG 1333MHz SODIMM DDR3 MEMORY (2 x 2GB)
Graphics Card
nVIDIA® GeForce® GT 555M - 2GB DDR3 Video RAM - DirectX® 11
Memory - Hard Disk
500GB SEAGATE MOMENTUS XT HYBRID, SATA 3 Gb/s, 32MB CACHE (7200 rpm)
DVD/BLU-RAY Drive
8x SATA DVD±R/RW/Dual Layer (+ 24x CD-RW)
Memory Card Reader
Internal 9 in 1 Card Reader (MMC/RSMMC/SD: Mini, XC & HC/MS: Pro & Duo)
Thermal Paste
ARCTIC COOLING MX-3 HIGH THERMAL CONDUCTIVITY COMPOUND (£9)
Sound Card
Intel 2 Channel High Definition Audio + MIC/Headphone Jack
Bluetooth & Wireless
GIGABIT LAN & WIRELESS 802.11N CARD INC. BLUETOOTH 3.0
USB Options
2 x USB 3.0 PORTS + 2 x USB 2.0 PORTS AS STANDARD
Battery
Upgrade to 62.16WH 6 Cell Lithium-ION Battery (£39)
Power Lead & Adaptor
1 x UK Power Lead & 90W Adaptor (GT 540M) / 120W Adaptor (GT 555M)
Operating System
NO OPERATING SYSTEM REQUIRED
Office Software
NO OFFICE SOFTWARE
Anti-Virus
NO ANTI-VIRUS SOFTWARE
Notebook 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)
Dead Pixel Guarantee
30 Day Dead Pixel Guarantee Inc. Labour & Carriage Costs (£12)
Insurance
1 Month Free Laptop Insurance inc. Accidental Damage & Theft
Delivery
STANDARD INSURED DELIVERY TO UK MAINLAND (MON-FRI)
Build Time
Standard Build - Approximately 5 to 7 working days
Quantity
1
Price: £895.00 including VAT and delivery.
The price was about a hundred pounds cheaper when it was ordered - this seems to be down to a big increase in the cost of that particular hard drive.
Screen - really happy with this. I was on a creaky old Dell 19" 1280x1024 so you can imagine how much of an improvement this is. The gloss can be distracting in sunlight but the image quality is very good and the 17" size lets the 1080p really shine without any increase in DPI.
Chassis - it's mostly plain matte black with some brushed surfaces on the top and around the touchpad. It feels sturdy despite the plastic and the clean unbranded surface looks great. There is a THX sticker but this is easily removed. The power buttons and other hotkeys do need too much pressure to register though.
Touchpad - the best touchpad I have ever seen is on a Macbook and this doesn't quite measure up. The surface is rougher and a little smaller, and the buttons take too much pressure to press and make an unpleasant loud noise when pushed in. The multi touch gestures are poor (though this seems to be unpolished software/drivers); the two-finger gesture to scroll is unreliable and the three-finger swipe to navigate web pages only works half the time. A two finger tap to right click would have been useful to avoid having to use the right mouse button but there is no option in the Synaptics driver for this.
Keyboard - much better than the touchpad. The keys are isolated and feel good to push. The layout avoids many laptop pitfalls by putting the Ctrl key to the left of Fn and having a full sized enter key (the pictures on the web page show a one-row enter key, oddly). There is a good deal of space to the left and right that should have been used to give the numpad the full 4 columns instead of 3. The capslock and numlock lights should be placed nearer or on their keys instead of the front left of the laptop as well. Overall this is a good and usuable keyboard for typing and gaming.
Noise/heat - the laptop is silent during normal use apart from the whirring of the hard drive, however when gaming the single fan can get very loud. Idling on a wooden desk the temperatures are about 50 - 60 degrees C and they go up to 80 degrees when gaming. Coming from a desktop where I rarely saw temps go above 60 this worries me, and I wonder whether these things are capable of handling the extra heat over long periods of time. The 'Optimus' feature allows for the switching off of the graphics card when you need the extra battery life but I'm not a fan of the dialogue box that shows every time the hotkey is pushed.
Gaming - this handles TF2 on 1080p without a hitch, and games like AC:B and BFBC2 on high settings at about 40+ fps. I turn down the resolution from 1920x1080 to 1366x768 on more demanding games and I notice a big performance boost with almost no discernable difference in visual quality.
Other things - the volume controls are activated by holding FN+F5/F6. Annoyingly the onscreen graphic that appears causes fullscreen games to minimize, which is a real pain for games that can't handle alt-tabbing well. Is there a way to assign a volume hotkey to something else?
Some of the included software seems like unnecessary baggage - the THX audio software in particular, which has all sorts of 'helpful' features like muting a Youtube video when a Steam chat notification sound plays.
The 'Upgrade to 62.16WH' battery option was a little misleading (in a good way) - I thought I'd get one battery at the higher capacity, but I actually got the original 48Wh battery *and* the 62WH. It was a nice surprise but this wasn't clear in the drop down menu's wording. Maybe add 'as standard' to the first option, then put a '+' sign instead of 'upgrade to' for the 62WH.
The processor menu order seems a little illogical as well. I ignored all of the i7 options at first on the basis that the 2640M was just over my budget, and assumed that the processors listed below it would be more expensive until I clicked on the 2670M by mistake and found it was actually cheaper.
So far I'm very happy with the laptop and with PCspecialist's service. If anyone's got any questions or wants some benchmarks run I'd be happy to help
Last edited:
