Recoil II Review

[sonik14]

I bought this laptop on July 2018 and I will post my review after these months of usage. The laptop is incredible, but personally I faced a lot of intermittent issues, which caused and cause me a lot of inconvenience. Besides this, I would strongly recommend this laptop, but it needs some serious improvements.

Specifications:
Chassis & Display
Recoil-Serie: 15,6"-Full-HD 144Hz 72% NTSC LED-Widescreen matt (1920 x 1080)
Processor (CPU)
Intel® Core™ i7-Sechskernprozessor 8750H (2,2 GHz, 4,1 GHz Turbo)
Memory (RAM)
16 GB-Corsair 2400 MHz SODIMM DDR4 (2 x 8 GB)
Graphics Card
NVIDIA® GeForce® GTX 1060 – 6,0 GB GDDR5-Video-RAM – DirectX® 12,1
1st Storage Drive
NICHT ERFORDERLICH
1st M.2 SSD Drive
512 GB-ADATA SX6000 PCIe M.2 2280 (1000 MB/R, 800 MB/W)
2nd M.2 SSD Drive
512 GB-SAMSUNG 970 PRO M.2, PCIe NVMe (bis zu 3500 MB/R, 2300 MB/W)
Memory Card Reader
Integrierter 2-in-1-Speicherkartenleser (SD, MMC)
AC Adaptor
1 x 150 W-AC-Adapter
Battery
46 Wh-Lithium-Ionen-Akku der Recoil-II-Series
Power Cable
1 x europäisches Kleeblatt-Kabel, 1 Meter
Thermal Paste
WÄRMELEITPASTE COOLER MASTER MASTERGEL MAKER
Sound Card
2-Kanal High Def. Audio + SoundBlaster™ Cinema 3
Bluetooth & Wireless
GIGABIT-LAN & WIRELESS INTEL® AC-9560 M.2 (1.73 Gbps, 802.11AC) + BT 5.0
USB/Thunderbolt Options
1 x USB 3.1-ANSCHLUSS (Typ C), 2 x USB 3.1-ANSCHLÜSSE, 1 x USB 2.0-ANSCHLUSS
Keyboard Language
HINTERGRUNDBELEUCHTETE US-AMERIKANISCHE MECHANISCHE PER-KEY-RGB-TASTATUR
Operating System
KEIN BETRIEBSSYSTEM ERFORDERLICH
Operating System Language
Griechenland/Elláda – Griechisch
Windows Recovery Media
WIEDERHERSTELLUNGSMEDIEN NICHT ERFORDERLICH
Office Software
KOSTENLOSE 30 Tage-Testversion von Microsoft® Office® 365 (Betriebssystem erforderlich)
Anti-Virus
KEINE ANTIVIRUS-SOFTWARE
Browser
Firefox™
Notebook Mouse
INTEGRIERTE 2-TASTEN-TOUCHPAD-MAUS
Webcam
INTEGRIERTE 1 MP-HD-WEBCAM
Warranty
3 Jahre Silber-Garantie (1 Jahr Abholung und erneute Lieferung, 2 Jahre Teile, 3 Jahre Arbeit)
Dead Pixel Guarantee
1 Jahr Garantie gegen tote Pixel inkl. Arbeits- und Transportkosten
Delivery
DPD-ABHOLUNG – ABHOLUNG IN IHREM LOKALEN GESCHÄFT AB 12 UHR MITTAG
Build Time
Standardmodell – Rund 5 bis 7 Arbeitstage
Promotional Item
FREE Geforce Fortnite bundle w/ select GTX cards
Promotional Item
Get Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 & More w/ select Intel CPUs!
Quantity
1

Price €1.616,00 including VAT and Delivery

Positive:

• - Slim stylish and lightweight design
• - really powerful laptop
• - can handle two pci express ssds
• - good speakers
• - easy to assemble
• - lots of ventilation space
• - beautiful backlit keyboard
• - smart use of gpus (when on ac)
• - amazing display (using eye-care functionality of windows and ubuntu makes it perfect for me)
• - good compatibility with linux with kernel higher than 4.19

Negative:

• - really heavy charger (I 've never seen charger like that for laptops that weight less than 3 kilos)
• - noisy keyboard (difficult to use without external keyboard when at office or a quiet place)
• - while typing cursor moves to the beginning of the sentence/paragraph without having found the reason (I have enabled the functionality the touchpad to remain disabled while I type and for the following second)
• - fans management gets stuck often and used the default settings instead of custom
• - lack of fan management in linux
• - lack of keyboard light management in ubuntu (there is a workaround to turn them completely off though)
• - no firmware management of battery to keep it charged up to 60% or 80% (useful for long term usage in ac)
• - dp and hdmi could be of newer versions
• - webcam could be better
• - really problematic with nvidia drivers and linux (there is workaround - see relevant posts - if I find time to read all the post, I could write things that I may have done and they are not already posted)
• - gpu, mobo and cpu all in one. If something breaks you will need to pay a high amount of money to replace all of them (I don't know though if you could have a light laptop which have this things really discrete).
• - many problems with gpu and firmware management which cause:
  • INSTABILITY FROM A LOT INTERMITTENT issues for which the cause is not spotter easily (NOTE: PROBABLE PERSONAL HARDWARE ISSUES AND NOT GENERAL):
  • 1) when I bought it the screen was flickering -> hardware issue, whose issue could not be spotted (replaced monitor)
  • 2) parts of laptop are getting short circuited (don't work for a reason) often, so I had to unplug and plug them again to work (keyboard, webcam, monitor)
  • 3) incredibly bad management of gpu usage when in battery mode. Sudden cuts off, lags even when just playing videos, because of bad management in switch between intergrated and discrete gpu. (to be investigated)

Summary:
This laptop has huge potentials to be one of the best high-performance lightweight laptops. Nevertheless, it needs a huge improvement in firmware management, compatibility and stability using gpu nvidia 1060 and 144Hz monitor, more robust/stable connectivity of items, remove noise from keyboard, lighter charger, firmware for battery.

PS: If I think of something else, I will edit the review.

 

[sonik14]

Linux Guide (Draft):

For first install you MAY need to run the live usb from usb2, because usb3 had problems.
You also need to press e and then to add acpi=off next to splash, to proceed with the installation.
You also need to have secure boot off (to install third parties and kernels)
After it you can enable it, but remember that if an installation is stuck its because of this.

GPU:
The way to install drivers and graphics is
sudo apt purge nvidia-*
sudo ubuntu-drivers autoinstall
(sudo apt install nvidia-settings --reinstall)

GDM was causing instabilities to my case. I replaced it with lightdm as follows:
sudo service gdm stop
sudo apt install lightdm
sudo dpkg-reconfigure lightdm
choose lightdm as default manager

Keep backup of /home/sonik14/.config/monitors.xml in case external monitor is not recognized anymore and replace it then (has happened after crucial upgrades of system).

Mousepad needs kernel 4.19 and higher to work.
Easier solution to use:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:teejee2008/ppa
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install ukuu

Disable/Enable touchpad
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:atareao/atareao
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install touchpad-indicator

If you want to turn off keyboard lights, turn them off via game center in windows, they will remain turned off in ubuntu too (kernel tested 5.0.1).

in grub in /etc/grub.d/05_debian_theme ADD under echo “ true”, if you want to change colors and they are ignored even if you change them by grub-customizer.

if [ -z "${2}" ] && [ -z "${3}" ]; then
echo " true"
echo " set menu_color_normal=cyan/black"
echo " set menu_color_highlight=yellow/black"
fi