PCSpecialist is my go-to brand for gaming laptops, having bought one myself, borrowed and reviewed a few of their models over the years, have suggested them to various family members, and have largely had a pretty great experience with them in the past. So, with that in mind, I was excited to see that I have one of their new gaming laptops coming in for review. I’m not a laptop gamer myself, but they certainly fill a need in the market for those who don’t have space for a full desktop PC, and of course, who also need something much more portable, making it ideal for taking to work and travel. It’s nice to take the same laptop with you for work and study, but able to pitch it up anywhere and play your favourite games too.
The Ionico Series laptop packs a serious punch when it comes to performance and display. It has a solid processor with the powerful AMD Ryzen 7 8845HS, offering eight cores and sixteen threads with a boost clock of up to 5.1GHz.
This is paired with a generous 32GB of high-speed Corsair DDR5 RAM, ensuring smooth multitasking and responsiveness even under heavy loads. Visuals are handled by the very capable NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060, which should deliver solid frame rates in most modern games and easily accommodate both the laptop’s native QHD+ resolution and the lightning-fast 240Hz refresh rate.
Sure, there are faster CPUs out there, and there are more powerful mobile GPUs too, but let’s not beat around the bush, they simply cost a lot more money. If you want the best gaming laptop in the world, dropping £3000+ isn’t unheard of. However, there’s a balance to be found between what you want and what you need, and I think £1000-1250 is a price range most people are comfortable paying for a gaming laptop. Obviously, if you just need a work laptop with gaming hardware, you can get something for £500 or less.
The 15.3-inch display is a standout feature, offering a crisp 2560×1600 resolution, and full sRGB colour coverage, making it ideal for gaming and creative work. I love a 16:10 aspect ratio too, it’s a shame it pretty much only exists in the laptop market these days. However, 2560×1600 is a great resolution and is going to offer great pixel density on a screen of this size, making your games and media look pretty sharp. It’s not a fancy OLED or anything though, or a pro-colour calibrated titan, but again, I think that’s fairly reflected in the price.
Thanks to a 1TB Solidigm P44 Pro NVMe SSD, storage is lightning fast, boasting read/write speeds of up to 7000/6500 MB/s. However, I must admit I’ve never heard of or tested a Solidigm drive before, so I’m eager to see how that drive performs in this system. Rounding out the package is an upgraded 80WH battery, an RGB backlit keyboard, and Windows 11 Home.
Overall, that’s a pretty potent package, and while you can customise it to your needs, with some more budget-friendly options too, the package we have here today comes in at just £1,299 inc VAT. That is a lot of money, but in terms of gaming laptops, it’s honestly pretty reasonable. I don’t think it’s fair to say this is an entry-level laptop, but there are certainly a lot more expensive options on the market. For comparison you can get a Ryzen 5 7600 and RTX 4060 desktop PC from PCSpecialist for around £1110, so to get a sort-of similar package in a laptop with a high-performance gaming screen built-in, well, that seems like pretty great value for money to me!
Check out this configuration and other products at PCSpecialist here.
There’s a lot of competition in the market for laptops, there are a lot of big names out there, all with similarly priced, similarly equipped products, that are sure to have their strengths and weaknesses, and also some brands have more prestige or coolness than others too. PCSpecialist has a good reputation though, they’ve been doing this for a long time. At this price range, I think it’s pretty fair, and the specification is on par with what I would expect to see from other big-name brands. Of course, as we’ll cover in our conclusion, you can tinker with the configuration a little to help it better fit your budget and requirements too.
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