PC Specialist Vortex IV X780 Gaming Notebook Review

Introduction

Gaming away from home is definitely becoming more and more popular, with eSPORTS rising up and consumers living in a mobile lifestyle, and this is a perfect place for a desktop replacement notebook that allows you to play some of the most extreme games on the planet, while on the move.

Generally speaking, if you want to play extreme games like Crysis 3 and Metro Last Light, then you’d be restricted to a fully fledged desktop system with enough power to deal with anything that you throw at it, but this has all changed over the past couple of years. More notebooks are being released that can rival these power hungry systems and still incorporating powerful processing power and extreme GPU performance.

The new notebooks that are hitting the market are making the divide between desktops and notebooks in terms of performance so fine that they are now overlapping by quite a margin with many of today’s laptops being produced having far more power than some of their desktop counterparts. Because of this overlap in performance and the number of users who want a compact system to take to gaming events such as iSeries (the UK biggest gaming festival) growing, its more and more common to see people attending these events with desktop replacements as their primary system.

PC Specialist are one of the UKs leading system integrators and since 2002 they have seen multiple awards across many publications for their systems, including the Vanquish X200 Gaming Rig that Peter had a look at a few months ago. The companies dedication towards selecting the best components for each build and the option to customise each and every system they have available with a whole hopst of options means that there are hundreds of ways in which a particular system can be configured. This means that there is with out a doubt a system for every persons needs out there.

After having a look at one of PC Specialists desktop systems, we want to see what their top end laptops have to offer to the table so let’s take a look at the specifications as this system arrived with us:

• Name: Vortex IV X780
• CPU: Intel Core i7 4700MQ
• RAM: 16GB Kingston HyperX Genesis 1600MHz (2x8GB)
• SSD: 120GB Kingston SSDnow V300
• HDD: 750GB Western Digital Scorpio Black SATA (7200RPM)
• GPU: Nvidia GTX 780M 4GB
• ODD: 4x BluRay ROM/8x DVD-RW Combo Drive
• Network:  Killer Wireless-N 1202 Dual Band/Gigabit LAN/Bluetooth 4.0
• Warranty: 3 Year Silver (1 year collect & return, 1 year parts, 3 years labour)
• Price: £1,449 inc VAT + Delivery

Click here to buy this laptop with the above spec for the offer price of £1449 inc VAT and delivery

The specifications listed above – even for a desktop system – is highly impressive so to see such a top level of performance packed into a 17.3″ laptop chassis with room to spare is even more impressive. The custom system features components from Western Digital, Kingston, NVIDIA, BigFoot Networks and Intel

Looking at the box that the laptop is shipped in, first impressions are that there is nothing over the top hiding inside, but this is far from the truth as inside is one mammoth laptop that – on paper- can pack one hell of a punch.

Inside the box alongside the laptop, PC Specialist include a driver CD, cleaning cloth, multi-lingual user manual and a PC Specialist welcome booklet. On top of this there is also an 8 cell, 5200mAh/76.96WHr battery and a whopping 230W AC adaptor.