PC Specialist Vortex IV X780 Laptop Review

PC Specialist Vortex IV X780 Laptop Review  

Introduction

The days of a laptop being something that was mainly useful for checking your email, keeping up with your social media or writing a brief letter whilst on the train are long gone. Modern laptops, whilst not quite up there with desktop performance, are capable of very good gaming performance. We don’t just mean World of Warcraft/Worms performance either, but full on frag-fests with the latest game engines.

We don’t often review laptops here because the majority are designed for the average user. It takes something a little special to pique our interest and one such laptop is the model we have up for review today, the Vortex IV X780 from PC Specialist.

The downside with laptops is usually that they are locked into the performance, and thus can’t go down the incremental upgrade route that most of us take with our desktop machines, and also that the specifications are usually locked down tightly and so you can’t always get the exact model you desire. PC Specialist, however, have an extraordinary customisation procedure, allowing you to pick and choose from a large array of hardware to ensure you get everything you need and nothing that you don’t. Given the high price of a gaming laptop it’s nice to have a company willing to provide you with the best possible value for money.

Technical Specifications

The particular specification of our review sample is heavily biased towards gaming performance with a Haswell i7-4700MQ CPU at the heart of it, and the Mobile variant of the nVidia GTX780 providing all the graphical heft you could ever require. With plenty of storage and a good amount of memory, it should handle anything we throw at it. As you cast your eye down the hardware list, when you reach the bottom and discover that this particular setup is a frankly unbelievable £1449, it’s hard not to find your jaw on the floor. How can they provide such a high specification for such a low price?

 

Vortex IV X780

Display

17.3″ Matte Full HD LED Display (1920 x 1080)

CPU

4th Gen Intel Core i7-4700MQ

GPU

4GB NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780M

RAM

16GB Kingston HyperX 1600MHz

SSD

120GB Kingston V300 SSD

HDD

750GB WD Scorpio Black SATA III (7,200rpm)

ODD

4x BluRay ROM / 8x DVD-RW Combi

Network

Gigabit LAN / Killer 1202 Wireless / Bluetooth

Features

USB 3.0, 2MP WebCam, 9 in 1 MCR, Backlit Keyboard, Display Port

Warranty

3 Year Silver

Price

£1449.00 inc VAT & Delivery