With the 17-inch Aspire V 17 Nitro BE out of the way, it’s time to take a closer look at the smaller and more modest 15-inch V 15 Nitro BE. We expect it to perform much like its bigger sibling but also provide a different experience in a few key areas. The hardware is identical so performance-wise the notebook didn’t surprise us but we had different readings on the battery tests, display tests and also some troubles with the cooling capabilities.

But as we said in our previous review, the new Aspire V Nitro lineup takes a different approach. Acer is offering the laptop to a more sophisticated user who needs some extra horsepower on the go without sacrificing portability. Moreover, given the good display quality, we expect some designers and architects to be interested in the model but this year, gaming is surely not the main focus. However, this doesn’t mean that the Core i7-7700HQ and NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 won’t be able to handle some of the latest titles with high graphics settings. But as usual, thin, light and powerful machines all have one thing in common – they all sacrifice something along the way. What will it be this time? Find out in the review below.

You can find the available configurations and their prices here: http://amzn.to/2qZljaY

Contents

Retail package

The laptop comes in a luxurious black box containing all the usual user manuals, the AC adapter and the power cord.

Design and construction

The new Nitro is sticking with the already familiar design concept and build. Just like its predecessor and its bigger sibling from this year, the V 15 Nitro BE is still made of aluminum and plastic using the so-called nanoimprint lithography making that textured surface on the lid. What’s really impressive, though, is the weight, which is around 2.5 kg and the thickness of the device measuring at 22.5 mm. It might not sound as impressive on paper but compared to its direct rival the Lenovo Legion Y720, the numbers put it into the “portable” category.

Let’s start with the lid. It has that iconic textured back that helps with the grip but it’s also a fingerprint magnet. The middle bends a little and causes small ripples to appear on the LCD screen, which shouldn’t be of anyone’s concern although, the hinge design raises uncertainty. Since both hinges are spaced too far from each other, the middle section of the screen remains flexible and twisting the whole screen isn’t too hard either. On the contrary, the hinges provide smooth opening and allow opening the notebook with just one hand. Our overall impression of the lid? A bit too flimsy to be honest. The bottom of the notebook compensates with rock-solid cover with a soft-touch matte finish along with the usual vent openings for the air intake.

The sides, although thin, provide all the usual set of ports and more. On the left, you will see two USB 2.0 connectors (we would have appreciated if one of them as 3.0), and SD card reader and two 3.5 mm audio jacks for an external microphone and a headset. Unfortunately, the right side appears to be a bit overcrowded with the rest of the ports – RJ-45, HDMI, two USB 3.0 and a USB-C 3.1 with Thunderbolt 3 support along with the DC charging connector. With all the cables sticking out on the right, they might get in the way of the working space is scarce.

The interior comes a long way compared to the previous version. Now the area around the keyboard and the touchpad is made of brushed aluminum plate, which is quite robust and doesn’t give in under pressure, with chamfered edges around the trackpad. Speaking of which, it offers relatively good gliding surface, with the exception when your fingers are moist. Anyway, all gestures and swipes are registered correctly and the fingerprint scanner seems to be working well. Unfortunately, though, our unit came with a wobbly trackpad that made some of the mouse clicks inaccurate or awkward. The keyboard, on the other hand, is also pretty comfortable to work with – the keycaps are slightly concaved, the travel distance isn’t long but the tactile clicky feedback makes up for an excellent typing experience. We also liked the keyboard’s illumination, which is quite discreet and still useful in low-light conditions.

Disassembly, maintenance and upgrade options

The 15-inch Nitro BE doesn’t differ from its bigger 17-inch sibling in terms of upgradability and ease of access. Despite not having a dedicated service hatch, all of the hardware is placed under the bottom plate, which is really easy to remove. Just unscrew all the screws around the edges and the center and then pop it open.

Storage upgrades – 2.5-inch HDD/SSD, M.2 SSD

The 2.5-inch drive is easy to remove or swap and luckily, so is the M.2 SSD stick. There’s no need to flip the motherboard around to access the M.2 SSD slot. It can be found next to one of the cooling vents but our testing sample didn’t have an SSD. As you can see from the photos below, the motherboard can hold a 2280 or 2260 M.2 PCIe NVMe SSD while the 2.5-inch HDD is manufactured by Seagate with 1TB capacity.

RAM

The RAM slots are two and in our case, one of them is taken by a Kingston 8GB DDR4-2400 chip.

Other components

The Wi-Fi module is located next to one of the cooling fans and it’s Qualcomm Atheros QCNFA344A.

The battery can be found under the wrist rest area and it’s rated at 69Wh.

Cooling system

The cooling system remains the same as the one we found in the 17-inch alteration. It uses a standard positioning of the cooling fans on each side and a number of heat pipes connecting the heat sinks and the fans. The interesting thing about these cooling fans is that Acer uses the same fan design they implemented in their first Predator laptops – thin metal blades that change angle under heavy load in order to provide as much airflow as possible. However, due to the powerful hardware and the relatively thin chassis, the Aspire V 15 Nitro BE wasn’t able to pass our stress tests. But more on that later.

Display quality

The notebook’s display uses an already known panel also found in the ASUS ROG Strix GL553VE. The IPS panel is BOE NV156FHM-N43 with Full HD (1920×1080) resolution, in a 15.6-inch diagonal making up for a pixel density of 142 ppi and pixel pitch of 0.18 x 0.18 mm. The screen can be considered as “Retina” when viewed from a distance equal or greater than 60 cm.

Viewing angles are good due to the IPS matrix.

We were able to record a maximum brightness of 308 cd/m2 in the middle and 301 cd/m2 as average across the surface with only 11% deviation. The colot temperature is 7000K which is slightly colder than the standard 6500K so colors will appear slightly blue-ish to the trained eye. The contrast ratio is high – 980:1.

The maximum color deviation dE2000 we were able to record compared to the center of the screen is 2.6, which is a good result. Usually, values above 4.0 are unwanted.

Color reproduction

To make sure we are on the same page, we would like to give you a little introduction of the sRGB color gamut and the Adobe RGB. To start, there’s the CIE 1976 Uniform Chromaticity Diagram that represents the visible specter of colors by the human eye, giving you a better perception of the color gamut coverage and the color accuracy.

Inside the black triangle, you will see the standard color gamut (sRGB) that is being used by millions of people in HDTV and on the web. As for the Adobe RGB, this is used in professional cameras, monitors etc for printing. Basically, colors inside the black triangle are used by everyone and this is the essential part of the color quality and color accuracy of a mainstream notebook.

Still, we’ve included other color spaces like the famous DCI-P3 standard used by movie studios, as well as the digital UHD Rec.2020 standard. Rec.2020, however, is still a thing of the future and it’s difficult for today’s displays to cover that well. We’ve also included the so-called Michael Pointer gamut, or Pointer’s gamut, which represents the colors that naturally occur around us every day.

The panel covers 94% of the sRGB coverage which is excellent for multimedia and gaming.

Below you will see practically the same image but with the color circles representing the reference colors and the white circles being the result. You can see main and additional colors with 25%, 50%, 75% and 100% saturation inside the sRGB gamut pre and post calibration.

The “Gaming and Web Design” profile is created at 140 cd/m2 brightness, D65 (6500K) white point and optimal gamma in sRGB mode.

We tested the accuracy of the display with 24 commonly used colors like light and dark human skin, blue sky, green grass, orange etc. You can check out the results at factory condition and also, with the “Gaming and Web Design” profile.

The next figure shows how well the display is able to reproduce really dark parts of an image, which is essential when watching movies or playing games in low ambient light.

The left side of the image represents the display with stock settings, while the right one is with the “Gaming and Web Design” profile activated. On the horizontal axis, you will find the grayscale and on the vertical axis – the luminance of the display. On the two graphs below you can easily check for yourself how your display handles the darkest nuances but keep in mind that this also depends on the settings of your current display, the calibration, the viewing angle and the surrounding light conditions.

Gaming capabilities (Response time)

We test the reaction time of the pixels with the usual “black-to-white” and “white-to-black” method from 10% to 90% and reverse.

We recorded Fall Time + Rise Time = 28ms.

PWM (Screen flickering)

Pulse Width modulation (PWM) is an easy way to control monitor brightness. When you lower the brightness, the light intensity of the backlight is not lowered, but instead turned off and on by the electronics with a frequency indistinguishable to the human eye. In these light impulses the light/no-light time ratio varies, while brightness remains unchanged, which is harmful to your eyes. You can read more about that in our dedicated article on PWM.

Unfortunately, the panel doesn’t use PWM only at 100% screen luminance and for the rest of the brightness levels, the backlight dimming flickers at low frequency and as we know, as lower the frequency the more stress it puts on the user’s eyes.

Blue light emissions

Installing of our Health-Guard profile not only eliminates PWM but also reduces the harmful Blue Light emissions while keeping the colors of the screen perceptually accurate. If you’re not familiar with the Blue light, the TL;DR version is – emissions that negatively affect your eyes, skin, and your whole body. You can find more information about that in our dedicated article on Blue Light.

You can see the levels of emitted blue light on the spectral power distribution (SDP) graph.

Conclusion

The used IPS panel here is excellent – it has high maximum brightness, high contrast, wide sRGB coverage and after installing our profiles, the color accuracy is just great. However, the presence of PWM from 0 to 99% brightness might be a deal-breaker for some although, after installing our Health-Guard profile, you will forget about this issue.

Buy our display profiles

Since our profiles are tailored for each individual display model, this article and its respective profile package is meant for Acer Aspire V 15 Nitro BE (VN7-593G) configurations with 15.6″ BOE NV156FHM-N43 (FHD, 1920 × 1080) IPS screen and the laptop can be found at Amazon: http://amzn.to/2riKTrn

*Should you have problems with downloading the purchased file, try using a different browser to open the link you’ll receive via e-mail. If the download target is a .php file instead of an archive, change the file extension to .zip or contact us at bg.laptopmedia@gmail.com.

Read more about the profiles HERE.

In addition to receiving efficient and health-friendly profiles, by buying LaptopMedia's products you also support the development of our labs, where we test devices in order to produce the most objective reviews possible.

Office Work

Office Work should be used mostly by users who spend most of the time looking at pieces of text, tables or just surfing. This profile aims to deliver better distinctness and clarity by keeping a flat gamma curve (2.20), native color temperature and perceptually accurate colors.

$4.96

Buy Now Checkout Added to cart

Design and Gaming

This profile is aimed at designers who work with colors professionally, and for games and movies as well. Design and Gaming takes display panels to their limits, making them as accurate as possible in the sRGB IEC61966-2-1 standard for Web and HDTV, at white point D65.

$4.97

Buy Now Checkout Added to cart

Health-Guard

THealth-Guard eliminates the harmful Pulse-Width Modulation (PWM) and reduces the negative Blue Light which affects our eyes and body. Since it’s custom tailored for every panel, it manages to keep the colors perceptually accurate. Health-Guard simulates paper so the pressure on the eyes is greatly reduced.

$4.98

Buy Now Checkout Added to cart

$9.99

Buy Now Checkout Added to cart

Sound

The sound quality is good – there’s enough clarity in the low, mid and high frequencies but when the volume is turned to maximum, you will notice slight distortions.

Specs sheet

The current specs sheet refers to this particular model – configurations may differ depending on your region.

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Processor	Intel Core i7-7700HQ (4-core, 2.80 – 3.80 GHz, 6MB cache)
RAM	8GB (1x 8096MB) – DDR4, 2400MHz
Graphics card	NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 (6GB GDDR5)
HDD/SSD	1TB HDD (5400rpm)
Display	15.6-inch Full HD (1920×1080) IPS, matte
Optical drive	–
Connectivity	LAN 10/100/1000 Mbps, Wi-Fi 802.11ac, Bluetooth
Other features	2x USB 3.0 2x USB 2.0 1x USB-C 3.1 (Gen 2 with Thunderbolt 3 support) 2x 3.5 mm jacks for headset and external microphone HDMI RJ-45 SD card reader keyboard LED backlight
Battery	69Wh
Thickness	22.5 mm (0.89″)
Weight	2.5 kg (5.5 lbs)

Software

We used the pre-installed Windows 10 (64-bit) for the writing of this review but if you wish to perform a clean install of the OS without the bloatware, we suggest downloading all of the latest drivers from Acer’s official support page.

Battery

Although the battery on this model is huge – 69Wh, the results from our battery test don’t show any record-breaking scores. Still, the web browsing runtime is pretty good for a laptop with a Full HD IPS panel and a 45W quad-core CPU like the Core i7-7700HQ. We found the endurance rating to be slightly above average.

As usual, the settings for the battery tests are as follows: Wi-Fi turned on, Windows battery saving feature turned on and screen brightness set to 120 cd/m2.

Web browsing

In order to simulate real-life conditions, we used our own script for automatic web browsing through over 70 websites.

A bit above average web browsing runtime – 408 minutes (6 hours and 48 minutes).

Video playback

For every test like this, we use the same video in HD.

Considerably lower but still a good result – 330 minutes (5 hours and 30 minutes).

Gaming

We recently started using F1 2015’s built-in benchmark on loop in order to simulate real-life gaming.

It’s quite unlikely that you will start a gaming session without being close to a power source, but it’s good to know that you can play for more than an hour – 69 minutes (1 hour and 9 minutes).

CPU – Intel Core i7-7700HQ

The Core i7-7700HQ is Kaby Lake’s top-shelf direct successor of the Skylake Core i7-6700HQ offering slightly higher clock speeds on the almost identical architecture and TDP. While Intel markets Kaby Lake’s architecture as “14nm+”, the Core i7-7700HQ is still on the same 14nm node with the only significant update being in the iGPU department. That’s why the slightly altered clock speeds (2.8 – 3.8 GHz vs 2.6 – 3.5 GHz) bring not more than 10% increase in performance compared to the Core i7-6700HQ. We still have the supported Hyper-Threading technology with 4/8 – core/thread design, the same 45W TDP and 6MB cache.

However, the Kaby Lake generation boasts an updated video engine for the iGPU, although, its performance is just about the same. Branded as Intel HD Graphics 630, the GPU offers slightly higher clock speeds (350 – 1100 MHz vs 350 – 1050 MHz) compared to the Intel HD Graphics 530 and support for H265/HEVC Main10 profile at 10-bit color depth and the VP9 codec for full hardware acceleration. In addition, the HDCP 2.2 is also supported allowing Netflix’s 4K video streaming.

You can browse through our top CPUs ranking: http://laptopmedia.com/top-laptop-cpu-ranking/

Here you will find other useful information and every notebook we’ve tested with this processor: http://laptopmedia.com/processor/intel-core-i7-7700hq/

Fritz

Fritz is a chess benchmark that tests the computing capabilities of the CPU with various chess moves. The Intel Core i7-7700HQ managed to get 13.405 million moves per second. For comparison, one of the most powerful computers, Deep(er) Blue, was able to squeeze out 200 million moves per second. In 1997 Deep(er) Blue even beat the famous Garry Kasparov with 3.5 to 2.5.

GPU – NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 (6GB GDDR5)

NIVIDIA’s GeForce GTX 1060 GPU aims to be the mid-tier graphics card from the Pascal generation offering similar or even better performance than last year’s flagship models like the GTX 970M and 980M. However, the GPU will be used in high-end laptop configurations.

The graphics card is based on the GP106 chip built on the 16nm FinFET manufacturing process from TSMC paired with up to 6GB GDDR5 VRAM clocked at 8000 MHz effective on a 192-bit interface. The GPU also features the same amount of CUDA cores as its desktop counterpart (1280) and it’s clocked at slightly lower frequencies – 1404 – 1670 MHz.

Depending on the cooling solution, the GPU can be found in large 17 and 15-inch notebooks but some slimmed-down 14-inch notebooks are also an option. The TDP of the GPU is somewhat lower than the last generation GTX 970M.

You can browse through our top GPUs ranking: http://laptopmedia.com/top-laptop-graphics-ranking/

Here you will find other useful information and every notebook we’ve tested with this GPU: http://laptopmedia.com/video-card/nvidia-geforce-gtx-1060-6gb-gddr5/

Gaming tests

Temperatures

The stress tests that we perform do not represent real-life use because rarely can anyone reach 100% CPU and 100% GPU load, especially for such long periods of time but it remains as the best way to determine the overall stability and effectiveness of the cooling system.

During the first hour of CPU stress testing, the machine was able to utilize the maximum clock speeds of the Core i7-7700HQ but then started fluctuating between 2.8 GHz and 3.4 GHz. Just like its bigger sibling, the V 17 Nitro BE, the 15-inch version also ran at higher than usual temperatures but fortunately, no thermal throttling occurred.

When we turned on the GPU stress test, however, things didn’t go too well. The CPU’s frequency dropped under the 2.8 GHz mark and sometimes dipped under 2.0 GHz. The GPU, on the other hand, was able to run at its base 1404 MHz frequency for a while but shortly after, dropped down to 1189 MHz while being exceptionally hot at 90 °C. Pretty much like the V 17 although, the 17-inch variant’s GTX 1060 didn’t throttle.

Temperatures on the surface were also pretty high but only after extended and heavy workload, which was kind of expected. In any case, the results from our tests further confirm our suspicion of the cooling system’s effectiveness in the long run. Usually, laptops with powerful hardware as this one are able to handle our stress tests with much lower inner and outer temperatures. Take the Lenovo Legion Y720, for example. It incorporates the same hardware but runs way cooler than the new Aspire V 15 Nitro BE and more importantly, the GPU doesn’t throttle at all. Another thing that we noticed in our unit is the fan control. Even when idle or when we are just doing normal office work or just browsing, the fans constantly spin. This will irritate some of the users and will find it uncomfortable, so keep that in mind.

Verdict

It seems that the 15-inch variant of the notebook isn’t much different from the Aspire V 17 Nitro BE in terms of overall usability. The performance, build quality, input devices and image quality (speaking of the Full HD versions, of course) remain the same. We are left, however, with mixed feelings about the touchpad since the unit we reviewed, which isn’t a pre-production sample, had a wobbly and unstable touchpad. We think that this won’t be present in all units. We can still give a solid score in this department due to the overall good build quality, excellent keyboard and portable chassis.

The screen quality is excellent with wide sRGB coverage, high maximum brightness and high contrast. The only problem in this regard is the presence of PWM from 0 to 99% brightness, which can be eliminated by our Health-Guard profile. So consider this as an upgrade when buying the laptop. Also, battery life isn’t as bad as we expected – web browsing runtimes appeared to be above average for this type of notebooks.

And the last thing we want to address is the cooling solution. Although the Aspire V 15 Nitro BE can handle gaming with ease, during heavy workload the CPU and GPU start to throttle. The inner and outer temperatures reach high values that are usually unwanted and suggest of limited airflow – something that needs to be considered when buying a laptop in long term. We also didn’t like the fact that the cooling fans spin even when the notebook isn’t under load.

With a price tag of around $1 200, the laptop competes with ASUS’ FX502VM, which doesn’t hold any grudge against Acer’s 15-inch solution, and Lenovo’s latest Legion Y720. The latter is a smart choice if you consider the audio quality and cooling of great importance but if portability and image quality are at the top of your list, there’s no room for hesitation – the Acer Aspire V 15 Nitro BE (VN7-593G) will suit your needs.

You can find the available configurations and their prices here: http://amzn.to/2qZljaY

Remember the Acer Aspire S 13? Well, the Acer Swift 5 is basically the same notebook that costs a little bit more but also offers more in return. Or in other words, a good upgrade over the Aspire S 13. We have the new generation Core i7-7500U rocking under the hood, good choice of materials, robust construction, extremely portable and also accommodates a 14-inch screen in a 13-inch form factor thanks to the super thin bezels.

Back at IFA 2016, the Swift 5 was outshined by the Acer Swift 7 but in our opinion, if the luxurious design isn’t your top priority, the Swift 5 will be a much better fit for your daily needs. It offers all the features the Swift 7 can’t give you and costs considerably less than its thinner sibling. See what else, in the review below.

You can find the available models and their prices here: http://amzn.to/2qj3EWL

Contents

Retail package

The notebook comes in a standard black box containing the usual user manuals, AC adapter, power cord and the laptop itself.

Design and construction

The Swift 5 borrows the design concept of the Aspire S 13, which also looks quite similar the famous Aspire V 15 and V 17 Nitro laptops with patterned plastic finish on the lid but there’s more than it meets the eye. The Swift 5’s construction uses the same nanoimprint lithography process for the construction infusing aluminum sheets below the plastic surface giving extra rigidity without sacrificing weight. This method has worked for a few generations and a number of other Acer notebooks, so we are happy to see it in the Swift 5 as well. Another noticeable similarity is the brushed aluminum interior and the silver accent of the hinge caps.

Anyway, as we already mentioned, the lid uses a plastic finish with stripe patterns while the aluminum beneath aids for better rigidity. And trust us, it’s no gimmick because pressing the center of the lid doesn’t cause the plate to sink in easily. It feels quite stable and it isn’t susceptible to flexing either. The hinge feels good at the beginning of the travel and requires only one hand but after you reach 1/4 of the movement, a second hand is required to hold the base. Hinges feel a bit overly tightened. As for the 14-inch screen, it uses glossy finish and super thin side bezels. Only the chin stands out and kudos to the engineers over at Acer being able to cram up the webcam on the top bezel. There’s a handful of users complaining about the awkward positioning of the webcam in the XPS 13 and XPS 15 notebooks from Dell, which is also famous for their extremely thin screen bezels. The bottom of the base uses soft-touch matte plastic that feels exceptionally nice and integrates the usual vent openings for extra airflow.

The sides are just 14.5 mm thin but that doesn’t mean that the ultrabook skips on the essential connectors. The left side comes with an USB 3.0 port, SD card reader and 3.5 mm audio jack while the right side holds another USB 3.0 port along with a full-sized HDMI and USB-C 3.1 Gen 1 with up to 5 Gbps transfer speeds. The back side of the machine offers two fairly big vent openings for better cooling.

The interior continues the already known design concept with brushed aluminum surface, chamfered edges and the familiar silver-colored plastic element on the screen hinges with the Swift 5 branding on it. It definitely feels nice and premium but attracts smudges and fingerprints. The keyboard tray appears to be stable and doesn’t give in under pressure. The keyboard, on the other hand, feels slightly mushy and shallow. There’s a clicky feedback to each key press that compensates to some extent but we’ve definitely seen better from Acer. As for the touchpad, it feels very stable, accurate, responsive and offers light and delightful mouse clicks. There’s also an integrated fingerprint reader located in the upper-left corner of the trackpad area. The size of the touchpad is satisfactory.

Acer has once again proved that not all affordable ultrabooks have to be cheaply made. The Swift 5 comes at a refreshingly low price while offering excellent build quality and choice of material. The chassis is robust, lightweight and thin while offering a 14-inch Full HD IPS screen in the usual 13-inch form factor. The only letdown here is the shallow keyboard.

Disassembly, maintenance and upgrade options

As every ultrabook out there, the Acer Swift 5 doesn’t have a dedicated service cover for maintenance and upgrades but its bottom piece comes off easily. You just have to remove all the screws and pop the bottom plate open.

Storage upgrades – M.2 SSD

The motherboard supports M.2 PCIe NVMe SSDs in 2280 sizes but the unit we reviewed came with an M.2 SATA drive manufactured by Lite-On with 256GB capacity.

RAM

Unfortunately, the memory isn’t available for an upgrade since it’s soldered to the motherboard. It’s 8GB LPDDR3-1600 of RAM and should be plenty for office work, multimedia and everyday tasks.

Other components

The Wi-Fi module is located next to one of the cooling fans and it’s Qualcomm Atheros QCNFA344A.

The battery can be found under the wrist rest area and it’s rated at 53.9Wh.

Cooling system

The cooling system is quite simple and consists of one small cooling fan and a single heat pipe connected to the CPU’s heatsink. Our temperature tests show excellent cooling performance even under continuous and heavy workload.

Display quality

The display uses an AU Optronics B140HAN03.2 IPS panel with Full HD (1920×1080) resolution in a 14-inch diagonal. This means that the pixel density is 157 ppi and the pixel pitch is 0.16 x 0.16 mm. The screen can be considered as “Retina” when viewed from a distance equal or greater than 55 cm.

The Swif 5’s display has comfortable viewing angles due to the IPS panel.

The maximum brightness is pretty high – 354 cd/m2 in the middle and 331 cd/m2 as average across the surface with 12% deviation. The color temperature is 6600K and it’s pretty close to the optimal 6500K. The contrast ratio is exceptional – 1400:1.

We’ve also measured the dE2000 color deviation across the surface of the screen and the maximum value was 3.0. It’s not bad conisdering that usually anything above 4.0 is unwanted.

Color reproduction

To make sure we are on the same page, we would like to give you a little introduction of the sRGB color gamut and the Adobe RGB. To start, there’s the CIE 1976 Uniform Chromaticity Diagram that represents the visible specter of colors by the human eye, giving you a better perception of the color gamut coverage and the color accuracy.

Inside the black triangle, you will see the standard color gamut (sRGB) that is being used by millions of people in HDTV and on the web. As for the Adobe RGB, this is used in professional cameras, monitors etc for printing. Basically, colors inside the black triangle are used by everyone and this is the essential part of the color quality and color accuracy of a mainstream notebook.

Still, we’ve included other color spaces like the famous DCI-P3 standard used by movie studios, as well as the digital UHD Rec.2020 standard. Rec.2020, however, is still a thing of the future and it’s difficult for today’s displays to cover that well. We’ve also included the so-called Michael Pointer gamut, or Pointer’s gamut, which represents the colors that naturally occur around us every day.

The display covers 93% of the sRGB color space making it ideal for office work and even multimedia.

Below you will see practically the same image but with the color circles representing the reference colors and the white circles being the result. You can see main and additional colors with 25%, 50%, 75% and 100% saturation inside the sRGB gamut pre and post calibration.

The “Gaming and Web Design” profile is created at 140 cd/m2 brightness, D65 (6500K) white point and optimal gamma in sRGB mode.

We tested the accuracy of the display with 24 commonly used colors like light and dark human skin, blue sky, green grass, orange etc. You can check out the results at factory condition and also, with the “Gaming and Web Design” profile.

The next figure shows how well the display is able to reproduce really dark parts of an image, which is essential when watching movies or playing games in low ambient light.

The left side of the image represents the display with stock settings, while the right one is with the “Gaming and Web Design” profile activated. On the horizontal axis, you will find the grayscale and on the vertical axis – the luminance of the display. On the two graphs below you can easily check for yourself how your display handles the darkest nuances but keep in mind that this also depends on the settings of your current display, the calibration, the viewing angle and the surrounding light conditions.

Response time

We test the reaction time of the pixels with the usual “black-to-white” and “white-to-black” method from 10% to 90% and reverse.

We recorded Fall Time + Rise Time = 26ms.

PWM (Screen flickering)

Pulse Width modulation (PWM) is an easy way to control monitor brightness. When you lower the brightness, the light intensity of the backlight is not lowered, but instead turned off and on by the electronics with a frequency indistinguishable to the human eye. In these light impulses the light/no-light time ratio varies, while brightness remains unchanged, which is harmful to your eyes. You can read more about that in our dedicated article on PWM.

We have good news for users with sensitive to PWM eyes – the screen doesn’t flicker at any brightness level making it comfortable for long hours of use.

Blue light emissions

Installing of our Health-Guard profile not only eliminates PWM but also reduces the harmful Blue Light emissions while keeping the colors of the screen perceptually accurate. If you’re not familiar with the Blue light, the TL;DR version is – emissions that negatively affect your eyes, skin, and your whole body. You can find more information about that in our dedicated article on Blue Light.

You can see the levels of emitted blue light on the spectral power distribution (SDP) graph.

Buy our display profiles

Since our profiles are tailored for each individual display model, this article and its respective profile package is meant for Acer Swift 5 configurations with 14″ AUO B140HAN03.2 (FHD, 1920 × 1080) IPS screen and the laptop can be found at Amazon: http://amzn.to/2rdutRr

*Should you have problems with downloading the purchased file, try using a different browser to open the link you’ll receive via e-mail. If the download target is a .php file instead of an archive, change the file extension to .zip or contact us at bg.laptopmedia@gmail.com.

Read more about the profiles HERE.

In addition to receiving efficient and health-friendly profiles, by buying LaptopMedia's products you also support the development of our labs, where we test devices in order to produce the most objective reviews possible.

Office Work

Office Work should be used mostly by users who spend most of the time looking at pieces of text, tables or just surfing. This profile aims to deliver better distinctness and clarity by keeping a flat gamma curve (2.20), native color temperature and perceptually accurate colors.

$4.96

Buy Now Checkout Added to cart

Design and Gaming

This profile is aimed at designers who work with colors professionally, and for games and movies as well. Design and Gaming takes display panels to their limits, making them as accurate as possible in the sRGB IEC61966-2-1 standard for Web and HDTV, at white point D65.

$4.97

Buy Now Checkout Added to cart

Health-Guard

THealth-Guard eliminates the harmful Pulse-Width Modulation (PWM) and reduces the negative Blue Light which affects our eyes and body. Since it’s custom tailored for every panel, it manages to keep the colors perceptually accurate. Health-Guard simulates paper so the pressure on the eyes is greatly reduced.

$4.98

Buy Now Checkout Added to cart

$9.99

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Conclusion

The presented IPS panel has literally no flaws for the asking price, of course. The sRGB coverage is wide, the contrast ratio is excellent, the maximum brightness should be enough for outdoor use, which is pretty important considering the form factor of the laptop and we didn’t detect any flickering across all brightness levels making it safe to use for long periods of time regarding PWM. In any case, if you want to make the most out of this display, we suggest purchasing our profiles as they improve visibility in dim areas of the image and deliver considerably better color reproduction. The Health-Guard profile, on the other hand, will reduce the negative blue light emissions and preserve color accuracy as much as possible.

Sound

The sound quality of the laptop’s built-in speakers is pretty good and should satisfy the average user. The clarity is definitely above average for an ultrabook.

Specs sheet

The current specs sheet refers to this particular model – configurations may differ depending on your region.

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Processor	Intel Core i7-7500U (2-core, 2.70 – 3.50 GHz, 4MB cache)
RAM	8GB (1x 8096MB) – LPDDR3, 1600MHz
Graphics card	Intel HD Graphics 620
HDD/SSD	256GB M.2 SATA SSD
Display	14-inch Full HD (1920×1080) IPS, matte
Optical drive	–
Connectivity	Wi-Fi 802.11ac, Bluetooth 4.0
Other features	2x USB 3.0 1x USB-C 3.1 (Gen 1) 3.5 mm audio jack HDMI RJ-45 SD card reader keyboard LED backlight
Battery	53.9Wh
Thickness	14.6 mm (0.57″)
Weight	1.35 kg (2.98 lbs)

Software

We used the pre-installed Windows 10 (64-bit) for the writing of this review but if you want to perform a clean install of the OS without the bloatware, we suggest downloading all of the latest drivers from Acer’s official website.

Battery

Despite the thin and light chassis, the engineers over at Acer were able to cram inside a big 53.9Wh battery unit that’s the main reason for the excellent endurance. We are really impressed by the web browsing and video playback scores of the laptop. It’s just a few minutes shy of the current record holder the ASUS ZenBook UX303UB, which sports a similar battery, CPU and screen size. Interestingly enough, both laptops – the Swift 5 and ZenBook UX303UB – score identically when it comes to video playback. This is downright superb battery performance so it’s definitely one of the key selling points of the Swift 5.

All tests were performed with the same settings as always – Wi-Fi constantly running, Windows battery saving feature turned on and screen brightness set to 120 cd/m2.

Web browsing

In order to simulate real-life conditions, we used our own script for automatic web browsing through over 70 websites.

One of the most impressive scores we’ve seen – 713 minutes (11 hours and 53 minutes).

Video playback

For every test like this, we use the same video in HD.

Considerably lower but still an excellent result – 550 minutes (9 hours and 10 minutes).

Gaming

We recently started using F1 2015’s built-in benchmark on loop in order to simulate real-life gaming.

Of course, the laptop isn’t made for gaming but it’s good to know that it can last more than three hours under heavy load – 192 minutes (3 hours and 12 minutes).

CPU – Intel Core i7-7500U

The Core i7-7500U is part of the latest Intel Kaby Lake generation of CPUs built upon 14nm manufacturing process – or 14nm+ as the company markets – and should offer marginal performance gains over the Skylake generation while improving overall power efficiency. It’s a direct successor to the Core i7-6500U (Skylake) and Core i7-5500 (Broadwell) but opposed to previous architecture refreshes, the Kaby Lake Core i7-7500U is bringing much higher clock rates. Now the chip is clocked at 2.7 – 3.5 GHz (compared to the 2.5 – 3.1 GHz on the Skylake Core i7-6500U) and still adopting the 2/4 core/thread count using the HyperThreading technology with a maximum 4MB cache.

However, the Core i7-7500U’s TDP is still rated at 15W including the iGPU and dual-channel memory controller that supports DDR4-2133, LPDDR3-1866 and DDR3L-1600. And as far as the iGPU is concerned, it integrates a slightly improved Intel HD Graphics 620 clocked at 300 – 1050 MHz, which is slightly higher than the iGPU on the Core i5-7200U (300 – 1000 MHz).

You can browse through our top CPUs ranking: http://laptopmedia.com/top-laptop-cpu-ranking/

Here you will find other useful information and every notebook we’ve tested with this processor: http://laptopmedia.com/processor/intel-core-i7-7500u/

Fritz is a chess benchmark that tests the computing capabilities of the CPU with various chess moves. The Intel Core i7-7500U scored 6.891 million moves per second. In comparison, one of the most powerful chess computers, Deep(er) Blue, was able to squeeze out 200 million moves per second. In 1997 Deep(er) Blue even beat the famous Garry Kasparov with 3.5 to 2.5.

GPU – Intel HD Graphics 620

Intel’s HD Graphics 620 is a direct successor to the integrated HD Graphics 520. The latter is found in ULV (ultra-low voltage) processors from the 6th Generation (Skylake) of chips while the former is in the 7th (Kaby Lake) generation of CPUs.

Intel’s HD Graphics 620 uses the GT2 version of the graphics chip with 24 EUs (Execution Units) reaching as high as 1050 MHz and it has a base frequency of 300 MHz. However, the maximum operating frequency depends on the CPU, whether it’s the Core i3-7100U or the Core i5-7200U or the Core i7-7500U. Since the iGPU doesn’t have a dedicated memory – or eDRAM for that matter – it uses the available RAM on the system which is 2x 64-bit DDR3 or DDR4.

The TDP depends on the CPU model but it’s usually equipped with a SoC rated at 15W including the memory controller. Its performance should be enough for multimedia activities, light applications and gaming on really low resolution and minimum graphics settings.

You can browse through our top GPUs ranking: http://laptopmedia.com/top-laptop-graphics-ranking/

Here you will find other useful information and every notebook with this GPU that we’ve tested: http://laptopmedia.com/video-card/intel-hd-graphics-620/

Temperatures

We perform a long stress test on the CPU and GPU to see how the cooling design handles heavy loads and assess the overall stability of the system in the long run. However, it’s not a representation of real life usage, especially considering the nature of the Acer Swift 5 ultrabook.

The one hour CPU stress test revealed that the system is able to utilize the full performance of the CPU for a short period of time (3.5 GHz) and then gradually goes down to 2.8-2.9 GHz while keeping relatively low temperatures considering the nature of the test and the size of the chassis.

Before finishing up, we turned on the GPU stress test as well. Nothing unexpected occurred during the torture test – the CPU’s frequency went down so it can give enough headroom for the iGPU to perform while temperatures dropped by a tad.

Interestingly, even after extended heavy workload, the surface of the interior didn’t get hot at all. Yes, slightly warm in some areas but it’s nowhere near to what we are used to seeing in today’s ultrabooks. This suggests of stable and efficient cooling system that shouldn’t cause any trouble in the long run.

Verdict

The Swift 5 is a demonstration of what Acer does best – good set of features and great specs at a relatively affordable price. The Swift 5 has almost none of the drawbacks a standard ultrabook would have. The build quality is good, the choice of materials give it a bit of a premium feel while the overall portability of the chassis is excellent. The input devices are a mixed bag for us, though, because the keyboard is slightly mushy and has short key travel. At least the touchpad compensates for the lacking keyboard.

Performance-wise, the laptop will do just fine for everyday tasks, multimedia and office work. If you are looking for something more powerful, the new ASUS ZenBook UX410UQ, which we will review pretty soon, is a nice choice since it has a dedicated graphics card – GeForce 940MX, which handles graphically-intensive tasks quite well. Another thing we can add to the cons list is the storage. Although, the notebook supports PCIe NVMe SSDs, most of the units ship with an M.2 SATA SSD. We really would have appreciated at least a generic PCIe NVMe drive rather than a Lite-On SATA SSD.

Finally, the key selling points of the Swift 5 are the screen and battery life. Both are superb and should deliver excellent user experience on the go. But if you still want the best out of the best out of the AUO IPS panel, we suggest purchasing our custom profiles that will improve overall image clarity, color accuracy and reduce the negative blue light emissions when needed.

You can find the available models and their prices here: http://amzn.to/2qj3EWL

We haven’t done a lot of reviews of laptops for professional workstations suitable for CAD, DCC and CGI applications and there are probably a lot of people out there wondering if it’s really worth spending so much money on NVIDIA Quadro-powered system or should they stick to the mainstream GeForce graphics solutions. We explore the pros and cons of such laptop, in this case, the Dell Precision 3520, and see what this laptop is capable of. Do you really need to spend so much money for good performance in CAD and DCC software and will the Precision 3520 fit another profile as well?

If you don’t know what CAD, DCC and CGI means, then you can skip this review and look for something more mainstream because the Precision 3520 packs some serious power under the hood thanks to the Intel Core i5-7440HQ, which is a slightly more powerful version of the Core i5-7300HQ plus all the Intel vPro features that are essential to some business users, an NVIDIA Quadro M620 (2GB GDDR5) GPU, a big 68Wh battery, 16GB of DDR4-2400 memory and, of course, support for M.2 PCIe NVMe SSDs. Practically, that’s all you need from a mobile workstation but the biggest downside of the laptop remains the screen. Dell has included a washed out Full HD TN display instead of IPS as a default option. Even a budget IPS panel would have been greatly appreciated. We know that most of the time the laptop will be used with an external monitor but considering the price point of the Precision 3520, it’s still a big miss. Anyway, we grabbed the IPS configuration as we think it might be the most sought after despite being pricier. We honestly think that anyone willing to spend so much money on a high-end mobile workstation like this will also opt for the model with a better display.

You can find the available configurations and their prices here: http://amzn.to/2rcztTi

Contents

Retail package

The laptop comes in a standard box containing all the usual user manuals, AC adapter and power cord.

Design and construction

The design of the Precision 3520 is quite similar to the modern Dell Latitude series and it’s understandable. Both lineups fall into the business category and it’s only logical that they share the same design approach. We’ve got strictly black, robust and simplistic chassis with fairly compact dimensions and surprisingly low weight of around 2.23 kg.

Let’s start with the lid. It’s made of robust plastic material with a slightly rubberized coating on top providing excellent grip for carrying around but fingerprints and smudges remain visible. The center of the lid, where Dell’s logo is located, feels a bit flexible only under moderate to high pressure, although the lid isn’t susceptible to twisting and bending and ripples don’t appear on the LCD screen when pushing the back of the lid. It may be due to the well-designed metal hinges leaving no room for rocking and sway. Our only complaint towards the hinges is that they are too tightened and leave no choice but to use both hands when opening the notebook. The bottom retains the rigidity we liked so far but the use of slightly roughened plastic that feels cheap just doesn’t fit the whole profile.

Anyway, the relatively thin 25 mm thick sides accommodate all the needed connectors and I/Os. The left side holds the USB Type-C 3.1 connector supporting Thunderbolt 3, the SD card reader and a standard USB 3.0. The right side holds the SIM card tray, a 3.5 mm audio jack, another USB 3.0 port and, quite surprisingly, VGA for an external monitor. It really makes us wonder who is still using a monitor with VGA connectivity but we guess it’s better to have it on a business-centric machine. And as we’ve seen in numerous other Dell laptops, some of the connectors are placed on the back so they don’t get in the way when the working space is small. The back holds the RJ-45 for LAN connectivity, an HDMI, another USB 3.0 and the DC charging port. We can definitely say the port distribution is more than good and we doubt that cables will get in the way while working.

Opening the laptop reveals another well-known aspect of Dell’s high-end business-grade machines – standard keyboard layout with slightly concaved keycaps, well-integrated LED backlight, long key travel and satisfying clicky feedback. In the middle of the keyboard, you will find Dell’s own version of the TrackPoint, which in our opinion, is ergonomically better than the one on the ThinkPads but we didn’t quite like the dedicated mouse buttons. Due to the concaved keyboard tray, the mouse buttons aren’t sticking out enough and it’s hard to feel them with your thumb. If they are protruding more than the edge of the palm rest area, we would have been perfect. The touchpad, on the other hand, is ideal. The gliding surface feels nice, the mouse buttons are well-placed with long travel and nice and soft tactile feedback. While all of this seems great, we did notice something strange about the whole interior. At first glance, the base feels pretty solid but we found some weak spots. For example, the wrist rest area and the surface between the hinges is rock-solid but the center of the keyboard and the spot around the space bar is a bit flexible. It’s strange considering the high price of the product, however, this doesn’t affect the user experience one bit.

In the end, the Precision 3520 delivers what we’ve expected from the beginning – robust construction (with few and barely noticeable exceptions), fairly light and portable chassis, simplistic design, excellent keyboard and good touchpad experience. Basically, things you’d normally expect from a high-end business workstation.

Disassembly, maintenance and upgrade options

Luckily, the notebook offers a big service lid that gives access to all of the hardware including the cooling system. You can easily change the Wi-Fi card if needed, upgrade the storage and memory as well. Just remove the screws on the bottom and pry up the bottom piece.

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Storage upgrades – 2.5-inch HDD/SSD, M.2 SSD

Although the motherboard supports both – an M.2 PCIe NVMe SSD and a standard 2.5-inch HDD, the positioning of the M.2 slot obstructs the 2.5-inch drive and vice versa. This means that your configuration can benefit only from a standard 2.5-inch drive or an M.2 drive at a time. This is a considerable drawback for a number of business users that want the performance of a fast SSD and the big storage the HDD provides.

Anyway, our unit came with an M.2 PCIe NVMe Toshiba SSD with 512GB capacity and in 2280 size.

RAM

The motherboard comes with two RAM slots and in our case one of them was taken by a single 8GB DDR4-2400 chip from SK Hynix.

Other components

The Wi-Fi card can be found next to the BIOS battery and it’s Intel 8265NGW.

The chassis fits a huge 68Wh battery under the wrist rest area, which is the main reason for the great battery runtimes on the Precision 3520.

Cooling system

The cooling system consists of a single cooling fan connected via two heat pipes going across the CPU and GPU heatsinks. It might be enough for the quad-core 45W CPU but our stress tests show it struggles to keep both, the CPU and GPU, running without throttling under heavy workload.

Display quality

None of the software we used was able to detect the exact model of the IPS panel but judging by the results we got, we are pretty sure it’s the LG LP156WF6-SPP1 manufactured by LG. The same panel can be found in the new Acer Predator 15 with GTX 1070. The display has Full HD (1920×1080) resolution, offers 142 ppi pixel density and 0.18 x 0.18 mm pixel pitch. The screen can be considered as “Retina” when viewed from a distance equal or greater than 60 cm.

Viewing angles are excellent.

The maximum brightness we’ve recorded in the center of the screen is 316 cd/m2 and 297 cd/m2 as average across the surface with a maximum deviation of 12% in the lower right corner of the panel. The color temperature is exactly 6500K making it optimal. The contrat ratio is 1040:1.

The maximum dE2000 color deviation compared to the center is 2.8, which isn’t a bad result as values above 4.0 are usually unwanted.

You can see how the results change when the screen is set to 140 cd/m2 or in other words at 72% brightness.

Color reproduction

To make sure we are on the same page, we would like to give you a little introduction of the sRGB color gamut and the Adobe RGB. To start, there’s the CIE 1976 Uniform Chromaticity Diagram that represents the visible specter of colors by the human eye, giving you a better perception of the color gamut coverage and the color accuracy.

Inside the black triangle, you will see the standard color gamut (sRGB) that is being used by millions of people in HDTV and on the web. As for the Adobe RGB, this is used in professional cameras, monitors etc for printing. Basically, colors inside the black triangle are used by everyone and this is the essential part of the color quality and color accuracy of a mainstream notebook.

Still, we’ve included other color spaces like the famous DCI-P3 standard used by movie studios, as well as the digital UHD Rec.2020 standard. Rec.2020, however, is still a thing of the future and it’s difficult for today’s displays to cover that well. We’ve also included the so-called Michael Pointer gamut, or Pointer’s gamut, which represents the colors that naturally occur around us every day.

The panel covers 90% of the sRGB color gamut making it ideal for office work, web browsing and multimedia. However, due to the missing 10% of the sRGB color space, we can’t say it will satisfy every user when it comes to color sensitive work.

Below you will see practically the same image but with the color circles representing the reference colors and the white circles being the result. You can see main and additional colors with 25%, 50%, 75% and 100% saturation inside the sRGB gamut pre and post calibration.

The “Design and Gaming” profile is created at 140 cd/m2 brightness, D65 (6500K) white point and optimal gamma in sRGB mode.

We tested the accuracy of the display with 24 commonly used colors like light and dark human skin, blue sky, green grass, orange etc. You can check out the results at factory condition and also, with the “Design and Gaming” profile.

The next figure shows how well the display is able to reproduce really dark parts of an image, which is essential when watching movies or playing games in low ambient light.

The left side of the image represents the display with stock settings, while the right one is with the “Gaming and Web Design” profile activated. On the horizontal axis, you will find the grayscale and on the vertical axis – the luminance of the display. On the two graphs below you can easily check for yourself how your display handles the darkest nuances but keep in mind that this also depends on the settings of your current display, the calibration, the viewing angle and the surrounding light conditions.

Response time

We test the reaction time of the pixels with the usual “black-to-white” and “white-to-black” method from 10% to 90% and reverse.

We recorded Fall Time + Rise Time = 24ms.

PWM (Screen flickering)

Pulse Width modulation (PWM) is an easy way to control monitor brightness. When you lower the brightness, the light intensity of the backlight is not lowered, but instead turned off and on by the electronics with a frequency indistinguishable to the human eye. In these light impulses the light/no-light time ratio varies, while brightness remains unchanged, which is harmful to your eyes. You can read more about that in our dedicated article on PWM.

As expected, the laptop’s screen flickers from 0 to 99% screen brightness and may put some strain on users with extra sensitive eyes. However, the high-frequency PWM reduces the negative effects.

Blue light emissions

Installing of our Health-Guard profile not only eliminates PWM but also reduces the harmful Blue Light emissions while keeping the colors of the screen perceptually accurate. If you’re not familiar with the Blue light, the TL;DR version is – emissions that negatively affect your eyes, skin, and your whole body. You can find more information about that in our dedicated article on Blue Light.

You can see the levels of emitted blue light on the spectral power distribution (SDP) graph.

Conclusion

If you are planning on using the machine without an external display more often than not, we strongly encourage you to opt for the Full HD IPS version that we got because the panel presented here is pretty good. Not perfect, but really good. It’s good for office work, gaming, multimedia and browsing. However, some users will find the 90% sRGB coverage insufficient for color-sensitive work on the go. In any case, the maximum brightness, contrast ratio, and viewing angles are more than fine. The only serious drawback of is the presence of PWM from 0 to 99% brightness, which can be eliminated by our Health-Guard profile. The other two profiles will also improve color accuracy and visibility in dark parts of an image/movie. So if you want the best possible experience out of the LG LP156WF6-SPP1, we strongly recommend purchasing our custom profiles.

Buy our display profiles

Since our profiles are tailored for each individual display model, this article and its respective profile package is meant for Dell Precision 15 3520 configurations with 15.6″ LG LP156WF6-SPP1 (FHD, 1920 × 1080) IPS screen and the laptop can be found at Amazon: http://amzn.to/2rYapzn

*Should you have problems with downloading the purchased file, try using a different browser to open the link you’ll receive via e-mail. If the download target is a .php file instead of an archive, change the file extension to .zip or contact us at bg.laptopmedia@gmail.com.

Read more about the profiles HERE.

In addition to receiving efficient and health-friendly profiles, by buying LaptopMedia's products you also support the development of our labs, where we test devices in order to produce the most objective reviews possible.

Office Work

Office Work should be used mostly by users who spend most of the time looking at pieces of text, tables or just surfing. This profile aims to deliver better distinctness and clarity by keeping a flat gamma curve (2.20), native color temperature and perceptually accurate colors.

$4.96

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Design and Gaming

This profile is aimed at designers who work with colors professionally, and for games and movies as well. Design and Gaming takes display panels to their limits, making them as accurate as possible in the sRGB IEC61966-2-1 standard for Web and HDTV, at white point D65.

$4.97

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Health-Guard

THealth-Guard eliminates the harmful Pulse-Width Modulation (PWM) and reduces the negative Blue Light which affects our eyes and body. Since it’s custom tailored for every panel, it manages to keep the colors perceptually accurate. Health-Guard simulates paper so the pressure on the eyes is greatly reduced.

$4.98

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$9.99

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Sound

The sound quality of the loudspeakers is good – there’s enough clarity in the low, mid and high frequencies.

Specs sheet

The current specs sheet refers to this particular model – configurations may differ depending on your region.

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Processor	Intel Core i7-7440HQ (4-core, 2.80 – 3.80 GHz, 6MB cache)
RAM	8GB (1x 8096MB) – DDR4, 2400MHz
Graphics card	NVIDIA Quadrom M620 (2GB GDDR5)
HDD/SSD	512GB M.2 PCIe NVMe SSD
Display	15.6-inch Full HD (1920×1080) IPS, matte
Optical drive	–
Connectivity	LAN 10/100/1000 Mbps, Wi-Fi 802.11ac, Bluetooth 4.0
Other features	3x USB 3.0 1x USB-C 3.1 (Gen 2, Thunderbolt) 3.5 mm audio jack HDMI RJ-45 SD card reader keyboard LED backlight
Battery	68Wh
Thickness	24.55 mm (0.97″)
Weight	2.17 kg (4.78 lbs)

Software

We used the pre-installed Windows 10 (64-bit) for the writing of this review but if you wish to perform a clean install of the OS without the bloatware, we suggest downloading all of the latest drivers from Dell’s official support page.

Battery

We were pretty surprised to see the Precision 3520 performing so well in our battery tests because, after all, the laptop sports a power-hungry quad-core Intel Core i5-7440HQ processor rated at 45W TDP and a 15-inch IPS panel. Instead, we see almost record-breaking browsing runtimes mainly thanks to the large 68Wh unit. So it turns out that not only does the notebook pack a serious horsepower under the hood but it can also run for hours without the need of charging it.

We ran all the usual battery tests using the same conditions as always – Wi-Fi constantly running, screen brightness set to 120 cd/m2 and Windows battery saving feature turned on.

Web browsing

In order to simulate real-life conditions, we used our own script for automatic web browsing through over 70 websites.

Excellent battery performance – 700 minutes (11 hours and 40 minutes).

Video playback

For every test like this, we use the same video in HD.

Considerably lower but still an excellent result – 478 minutes (7 hours and 58 minutes).

Gaming

We recently started using F1 2015’s built-in benchmark on loop in order to simulate real-life gaming.

Of course, the laptop isn’t made for gaming but it’s good to know that it can last more than three hours under heavy load – 135 minutes (2 hours and 15 minutes).

CPU – Intel Core i5-7440HQ

The Core i5-7440HQ is a processor based on Intel’s Kaby Lake microarchitecture featuring 14nm manufacturing process. It’s just like the Core i5-7300HQ but with slightly higher clock speeds (2.8 – 3.8 GHz) with 3.4 GHz being the maximum operating frequency with four active cores. Also, as a quad-core i5 chip, it doesn’t offer the much-needed Hyper-Threading technology so it falls behind its Core i7 alternatives. Anything other than that is practically the same – dual-channel memory controller supporting DDR3L-1600 and DDR4-2400, 45W TDP including the controller and Intel HD Graphic 630.

However, unlike most mainstream processors, including the Core i5-7300HQ, the Core i5-7440HQ offers the so-called Intel vPro pack of features. This means that the chip supports some essential business-oriented features like Intel AMT, Intel TXT, Intel VT and more. Usually, the processor is found in high-end business-grade laptops with the appropriate cooling solution from 15-inch form factor and above.

You can browse through our top CPUs ranking: http://laptopmedia.com/top-laptop-cpu-ranking/

Here you will find other useful information and every notebook we’ve tested with this processor: http://laptopmedia.com/processor/intel-core-i5-7440hq/

Fritz is a chess benchmark that tests the computing capabilities of the CPU with various chess moves. The Intel Core i5-7440HQ scored 10.373 million moves per second. In comparison, one of the most powerful chess computers, Deep(er) Blue, was able to squeeze out 200 million moves per second. In 1997 Deep(er) Blue even beat the famous Garry Kasparov with 3.5 to 2.5.

GPU – NVIDIA Quadro M620

The Quadro M620 is a professional-grade mobile graphics solution for mobile workstations supporting DirectX 12 and OpenGL 4.5. It’s based on the Maxwell architecture from NVIDIA and features 512 CUDA cores, 32 TMUs and 16 ROPs. It’s based on the GM107 chip built on the 28nm node from TSMC, which sports 640 shading units but, of course, some of them are disabled to reach the target count and it’s clocked at 977 MHz. The memory configuration includes 2GB of GDDR5 VRAM on a 128-bit memory bus and it’s clocked at 1250 MHz while the TDP is believed to be around 30W.

Obviously, the GPU isn’t a consumer-grade GPU for gaming, although the hardware supports it, instead, it’s optimized for CAD, DCC and CGI applications thanks to the special drivers made by NVIDIA.

You can browse through our top GPUs ranking: http://laptopmedia.com/top-laptop-graphics-ranking/

Here you will find other useful information and every notebook with this GPU that we’ve tested: http://laptopmedia.com/video-card/nvidia-quadro-m620-2gb-gddr5/

Temperatures

The temperature tests that we perform are a little bit over the top because, in real-life use, the notebook doesn’t reach 100% CPU and 100% GPU load for such long periods of time. However, the stress tests are still the best way to assess the overall stability and effectiveness of the cooling system. Especially in this case where the Precision 15 3520 is a mobile workstation that will have to get some serious work done on the go and presumably, will have to withstand some moderate to heavy workload.

We started with 100% CPU load for an hour. The Core i5-7440HQ was able to reach its maximum operating frequency for four active cores (3.2 GHz) while maintaining relatively low temperatures.

However, since the CPU and GPU share the same heat pipes, the GPU stress test made the CPU throttle. The Quadro M620 was also running way too hot and throttled as well. A dual cooling fan solution would have probably been more appropriate considering the TDP of both chips.

Temperatures on the surface appeared to be relatively normal. The upper part of the keyboard got a little bit warm but we doubt that users will feel anything under normal circumstances.

Verdict

If you are reading this review, you are probably already considering this laptop as your next mobile workstation and you just need the confirmation. Apparently, you are into this line of work (engineering, 3D modeling, CGI animations, etc.) so you need the special hardware to work with CAD, DCC and CGI applications. Well, we are happy to report that Dell’s Precision 15 3520 is a nice entry-level 15-inch workstation that will get the work done, although entry-level doesn’t mean affordable. Quite the opposite.

As we already said, if you aren’t looking for a Quadro GPU, you are better off with similarly priced gaming laptops that pack considerably more power under the hood. However, the Precision 3520 excels in all areas where those gaming notebooks fail. You get the strict, simplistic design with impeccable build quality, excellent input devices and surprisingly portable. Another thing that’s usually missing in all gaming laptops, especially in this price range, is the absolutely amazing battery life. The huge 68Wh unit just blew past its competition with ease. What fails to meet our expectations is the storage configuration and cooling system. You will have to choose between a standard 2.5-inch HDD/SSD or an M.2 SSD. The latter obstructs the 2.5-inch drive so investing in a high-capacity M.2 PCIe NVMe SSD is a must for most users. As for the cooling system, the stress tests speak for themselves – the unit wasn’t able to maintain normal temperatures under heavy workload on both chips and they thermal throttled. It probably isn’t something you would have problems with under normal circumstances but keep this in mind when purchasing the laptop.

Finally, we will complain about the screen. Well, not about this particular model, though, as it has excellent IPS screen suitable for more than just office work and multimedia – it features high maximum brightness, high contrast, wide sRGB coverage but unfortunately has PWM from 0 to 99% brightness. The latter is taken care of by our Health-Guard profile. Anyway, the base model comes with a bad TN panel, which unacceptable given the price tag. So if you are willing to spend so much on a mobile workstation, we strongly recommend opting for the IPS configuration that we got.

You can find the available configurations and their prices here: http://amzn.to/2rcztTi

The ThinkPad T-series from Lenovo remain as classic representatives of the whole ThinkPad family. Devices from this lineup are often associated with reliability, solid construction and excellent working experience on the go without compromise. Today we will be looking at the Lenovo ThinkPat T470 – one of the few ThinkPads this year to receive a full upgrade – we are talking hardware and chassis. Looking at the specs sheet, the ultrabook offers everything a businessman would want but, of course, for a hefty price tag.

Interestingly, the T470 offers something that competitors don’t – a double battery setup for longer battery life. We’ve tested the notebook’s endurance in various situations so we can get a better understanding of the device’s key selling point. Along with the seemingly long battery life, the laptop offers all the features and hardware you’d expect from a modern business-oriented ultrabook – Intel Core i5-7200U CPU, 8GB of DDR4-2400 memory, 512GB M.2 PCIe NVMe SSD, 14-inch Full HD IPS display, 4G LTE connectivity and a generous port selection including Thunderbolt 3 support via USB-C. What’s more, the laptop can be configured with up to Core i7-7700HQ paired with a discrete graphics card – NVIDIA GeForce GTX 940MX. This, of course, will affect battery life in a negative way so you really have to decide whether or not you need that extra power. In any case, the ThinkPad T470 makes a compelling case even with this pricing. Find out why in the review below.

You can find the available configurations and their prices here: http://amzn.to/2qTmPvw

Contents

Retail package

The laptop comes in a standard box containing the laptop, an AC charging brick, power cord and the external battery.

Design and construction

From a design standpoint, the ultrabook looks just about the same as the rest of the T-series machines including the previous generation. However, Lenovo was able to cram all that hardware inside a considerably leaner chassis compared to the previous one, which dates three years back. Now the T470 weighs a little over 1.6 kg (1.660 to be exact) with a fairly thin profile of just 19.95 mm – enough to say it’s below the 20 mm mark.

The lid follows the usual design of all ThinkPad laptops – sharp corners with slightly curved edges and a flat surface made of soft-touch matte rubberized finish. The latter is great for carrying the notebook around as it provides good grip but the downside is always the visible smudges and fingerprints. We’ve also noticed that the center of the lid is a bit more flexible than we would like. This applies especially for the lower bezel where bending is quite easy and results in picture distortions. We think the culprit are the narrow hinges, which don’t support the center of the screen at all. It shouldn’t be an issue to most users but should be taken into consideration due to the higher than usual price tag. Speaking of the hinges, we were met with firm movements up to 180-degree angle and no bouncing. However, opening the laptop with just one hand is impossible. The bottom plate is also made of black plastic with numerous vent openings for extra airflow but the key difference here is that the whole base uses carbon fiber in addition to the plastic on the outside. So this greatly improves the overall sturdiness of the machine.

Going around the sides, we see a not so “healthy” distribution of ports because most of them are crammed on the right side, which might be an issue only if the working spot is small but shouldn’t be an issue for most buyers. Anyway, the right side offers two USB 3.0 connectors, 3.5 mm audio jack, RJ-45 for wired connection, HDMI and SD card reader, whereas the left side accommodates only the DC charging port, one USB 3.0 and the USB-C 3.1 (Gen 2) port supporting DisplayPort and Thunderbolt 3. This means that you can benefit from the ultra-fast transfer speeds or multi-monitor setup due to the 40 Gbps bandwidth. Actually, the T470 is a hardcore working station and it’s as portable as it gets.

And now let’s talk about input devices. As expected, the T470 aced our tests with the super-responsive touchpad and excellent keyboard. The former won us over with extremely precise movements, light mouse clicks and relatively smooth gliding surface but we did notice that if you try to press it on the upper half of the surface, it becomes strangely stiff. It becomes hard to click for some reason and might get in the way sometimes. The keyboard is in the standard ThinkPad fashion with the function key in the bottom left corner and Ctrl in its usual place. Hardcore ThinkPad fans will like this but coming from a standard keyboard layout will not be easy at first. In any case, the keys provide smooth tactile feedback and long travel for really comfortable typing experience. The slightly concaved keycaps also aid for better feel. The LED backlight has two levels with the second one being really bright and it’s quite well implemented.

But what about the iconic TrackPoint? Well, it’s still here and we don’t see it going anywhere anytime soon. A lot of users tend to use it more than the conventional touchpad or an external mouse and we can see why. It’s responsive and accurate but takes some time to adjust. The provided mouse buttons below the spacebar offer good ergonomics but somehow short travel. The middle one can be used for scrolling.

In the end, the ThinkPad T470 remains as one of the most reliable high-end business laptops today. Its perfect score is only ruined by the relatively flexible lid but it’s somehow understandable because it’s quite thin while the base consists of plastic and carbon fiber cage inside, which adds to the overall durability and lowers the weight as much as possible. We find that flexing the base and the keyboard tray is nearly impossible and visible deformation occurs only during really strong pressure. We are surprised by the compact, yet functional design of the chassis delivering even more I/Os than a 15-inch laptop would.

Disassembly, maintenance and upgrade options

Yes, the notebook doesn’t have a dedicated service lid but it’s fairly easy to upgrade and maintain if needed. You just have to pop out the external battery and remove all the screws around the bottom of the chassis. Then gently pry it up – it comes off easily.

Storage upgrades – 2.5-inch HDD/SSD, M.2 SSD

Probably due to the form factor of the laptop, Lenovo wasn’t able to insert a 2.5-inch drive along with an additional M.2 SSD so our unit shipped just an M.2 PCIe NVMe SSD – Samsung 512GB PM961. It’s placed under a plate that’s usually used for a 2.5-inch HDD or SSD.

RAM

The good news about the upgradability of the laptop is that the motherboard holds two RAM slots but in our case, only one is taken by an SK Hynix 8GB DDR4-2400 chip.

Other components

Our model came equipped with an 4G LTE module as well. It can be found next to the Wi-Fi card.

The latter is Intel 8265NGW.

Since the system incorporates two batteries – one external and one built-in, the total capacity is 48Wh – 24Wh each.

Cooling system

The cooling system is quite simple – it consists of a single cooling fan and one heat pipe connected to the heatsink. Just enough to keep the CPU and iGPU cool.

Display quality

Although the laptop has an IPS panel, this just isn’t enough to put it against some other expensive 14-inch business competitors. It turns out that the ThinkPad T470 uses the same 14-inch Full HD IPS display as its considerably more affordable Lenovo ThinkPad E470. The panel is Innolux N140HCA-EAB with 157 ppi and 0.16 x 0.16 mm pixel pitch. It can be considered as “Retina” when viewed from a distance equal or greater than 55 cm.

Viewing angles are excellent.

The maximum brightness recorded is 245 cd/m2 in the middle and 238 cd/m2 as average across the surface with 17% deviation in the lower right corner. The color temperature aligns with the optimal 6500K (D65) while the contrast ratio is a bit lower – 680:1.

The maximum dE2000 color deviation is 4.5, which is a bit high because usually values above 4.0 are unwanted.

You can also see the values at 140 cd/m2 luminance, which in our case is 75% brightness.

Color reproduction

To make sure we are on the same page, we would like to give you a little introduction of the sRGB color gamut and the Adobe RGB. To start, there’s the CIE 1976 Uniform Chromaticity Diagram that represents the visible specter of colors by the human eye, giving you a better perception of the color gamut coverage and the color accuracy.

Inside the black triangle, you will see the standard color gamut (sRGB) that is being used by millions of people in HDTV and on the web. As for the Adobe RGB, this is used in professional cameras, monitors etc for printing. Basically, colors inside the black triangle are used by everyone and this is the essential part of the color quality and color accuracy of a mainstream notebook.

Still, we’ve included other color spaces like the famous DCI-P3 standard used by movie studios, as well as the digital UHD Rec.2020 standard. Rec.2020, however, is still a thing of the future and it’s difficult for today’s displays to cover that well. We’ve also included the so-called Michael Pointer gamut, or Pointer’s gamut, which represents the colors that naturally occur around us every day.

Of course, the sRGB color space coverage isn’t impressive as it covers merely half (52%) of the web-based and HDTV colors.

Below you will see practically the same image but with the color circles representing the reference colors and the white circles being the result. You can see main and additional colors with 25%, 50%, 75% and 100% saturation inside the sRGB gamut pre and post calibration.

The “Design and Gaming” profile is created at 140 cd/m2 brightness, D65 (6500K) white point and optimal gamma in sRGB mode.

We tested the accuracy of the display with 24 commonly used colors like light and dark human skin, blue sky, green grass, orange etc. You can check out the results at factory condition and also, with the “Design and Gaming” profile.

The next figure shows how well the display is able to reproduce really dark parts of an image, which is essential when watching movies or playing games in low ambient light.

The left side of the image represents the display with stock settings, while the right one is with the “Gaming and Web Design” profile activated. On the horizontal axis, you will find the grayscale and on the vertical axis – the luminance of the display. On the two graphs below you can easily check for yourself how your display handles the darkest nuances but keep in mind that this also depends on the settings of your current display, the calibration, the viewing angle and the surrounding light conditions.

Response time

We test the reaction time of the pixels with the usual “black-to-white” and “white-to-black” method from 10% to 90% and reverse.

We recorded Fall Time + Rise Time = 30 ms.

PWM (Screen flickering)

Pulse-width modulation (PWM) is an easy way to control monitor brightness. When you lower the brightness, the light intensity of the backlight is not lowered, but instead turned off and on by the electronics with a frequency indistinguishable to the human eye. In these light impulses the light/no-light time ratio varies, while brightness remains unchanged, which is harmful to your eyes. You can read more about that in our dedicated article on PWM.

As we said before, the panel uses PWM but only below 60 cd/m2 luminance and even then, the frequency of the emitted light is pretty high and thus reduces the negative impact on one’s eyesight.

Blue light emissions

Installing of our Health-Guard profile not only eliminates PWM but also reduces the harmful Blue Light emissions while keeping the colors of the screen perceptually accurate. If you’re not familiar with the Blue light, the TL;DR version is – emissions that negatively affect your eyes, skin, and your whole body. You can find more information about that in our dedicated article on Blue Light.

You can see the levels of emitted blue light on the spectral power distribution (SDP) graph.

Conclusion

To be honest, we are a bit disappointed by the quality of the IPS panel. The maximum brightness just isn’t enough for outdoor use, which is essential for a laptop with a 14-inch form factor, the contrast ratio isn’t satisfactory and the sRGB coverage is just 52%. Don’t get us wrong, though, this is enough for regular office work and web browsing but considering the standard for IPS panel in similarly priced machines, and even cheaper ones, the ThinkPad T470 falls short in this regard. It’s clear to see why we are unhappy with the Innolux solution because the ThinkPad E470, which is half the price of the T470, offers the exact same display. Our custom profiles, however, make the color accuracy and gamma levels more optimized so we suggest purchasing them for optimal viewing experience.

In any case, we can’t miss mentioning that the display doesn’t use PWM from 60 cd/m2 and above making it safe to use for long periods of time. It shouldn’t cause any problems to users with sensitive eyes.

Buy our display profiles

Since our profiles are tailored for each individual display model, this article and its respective profile package is meant for Lenovo ThinkPad T470 configurations with 14″ Innolux N140HCA-EAB (FHD, 1920 × 1080) IPS screen and the laptop can be found at Amazon: http://amzn.to/2qTmPvw

*Should you have problems with downloading the purchased file, try using a different browser to open the link you’ll receive via e-mail. If the download target is a .php file instead of an archive, change the file extension to .zip or contact us at bg.laptopmedia@gmail.com.

Read more about the profiles HERE.

In addition to receiving efficient and health-friendly profiles, by buying LaptopMedia's products you also support the development of our labs, where we test devices in order to produce the most objective reviews possible.

Office Work

Office Work should be used mostly by users who spend most of the time looking at pieces of text, tables or just surfing. This profile aims to deliver better distinctness and clarity by keeping a flat gamma curve (2.20), native color temperature and perceptually accurate colors.

$4.96

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Design and Gaming

This profile is aimed at designers who work with colors professionally, and for games and movies as well. Design and Gaming takes display panels to their limits, making them as accurate as possible in the sRGB IEC61966-2-1 standard for Web and HDTV, at white point D65.

$4.97

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Health-Guard

THealth-Guard eliminates the harmful Pulse-Width Modulation (PWM) and reduces the negative Blue Light which affects our eyes and body. Since it’s custom tailored for every panel, it manages to keep the colors perceptually accurate. Health-Guard simulates paper so the pressure on the eyes is greatly reduced.

$4.98

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$9.99

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Sound

The maximum volume is pretty high while the stereo loudspeakers maintain good clarity in the low, mid and high frequencies.

Specs sheet

The current specs sheet refers to this particular model – configurations may differ depending on your region.

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Processor	Intel Core i5-7200U (4-core, 2.50 – 3.10 GHz, 3MB cache)
RAM	8GB (1x 8096MB) – DDR4, 2400MHz
Graphics card	Intel HD Graphics 620
HDD/SSD	512GB M.2 PCIe NVMe SSD
Display	14-inch Full HD (1920×1080) IPS, matte
Optical drive	–
Connectivity	LAN 10/100/1000 Mbps, Wi-Fi 802.11ac, Bluetooth 4.1
Other features	3x USB 3.0 1x USB-C 3.1 (Gen 2, Thunderbolt) 3.5 mm audio jack HDMI RJ-45 SD card reader Smartcard reader keyboard LED backlight
Battery	68Wh
Thickness	19.95 mm (0.79″)
Weight	1.6 kg (3.67 lbs)

Software

We used the pre-installed Windows 10 (64-bit) for our testing but if you wish to perform a clean install of the OS without the bloatware, we suggest downloading all of the latest drivers from Lenovo’s official website.

Battery

To be honest, battery life is just okay. We expected a little bit more endurance from the laptop itself due to the double battery setup. But when you think of it, the internal battery is rated at merely 24Wh while the external one is also rated at 24Wh. This gets you a total of 48Wh that delivers a little above average battery runtimes but not nearly to what we expect from a top-tier business ultrabook. The interesting thing here is that the external battery is the first one to drain and the second one to charge after plugging the T470. This is a practical solution especially if you are willing to spend a little extra for an additional battery for this laptop. Lenovo is also selling external batteries for this laptop rated at 48Wh and even 72Wh. The latter will give considerably big bulge at the bottom while the 48Wh unit will lift the notebook to an angle ever so slightly. So if you get one of those external batteries, you can definitely benefit from this dual-battery setup because the system allows a hot swap (detaching and inserting the battery without the need of turning off the machine).

Anyway, we’ve tested the notebook using the same settings as always – Wi-Fi constantly running, screen brightness set to 120 cd/m2 and Windows battery saving feature turned on.

Web browsing

In order to simulate real-life conditions, we used our own script for automatic web browsing through over 70 websites.

Slightly above average runtime – 394 minutes (6 hours and 34 minutes).

Video playback

For every test like this, we use the same video in HD.

Just about the same battery performance during video playback – 397 minutes (6 hours and 37 minutes).

Gaming

We recently started using F1 2015’s built-in benchmark on loop in order to simulate real-life gaming.

Of course, the laptop isn’t made for gaming but it’s good to know that it can last almost three hours under heavy load – 156 minutes (2 hours and 36 minutes).

CPU – Intel Core i5-7200U

Intel’s Core i7-6200U is part of the 7th Generation Kaby Lake CPUs and it’s the direct successor of the Core i5-5200U (Broadwell) and Core i5-6200U (Skylake). It’s also based on the same architecture as the aforementioned chips with little differences that should bring a small performance increase and a bump in power consumption. However, the new CPU is clocked at 2.5 GHz and its Turbo Boost frequency is 3.1 GHz opposed to the 2.3 – 2.8 GHz clocks on the previous Core i5-6200U.

Anyway, we still have the 2/4 core/thread count, 3MB last level cache, and a TDP of 15W, which includes the iGPU and the dual-channel DDR4 memory controller. Speaking of the former, the chip integrates the newer generation Intel HD Graphics 620 graphics chip clocked at 300 – 1000 MHz.

You can browse through our top CPUs ranking: http://laptopmedia.com/top-laptop-cpu-ranking/

Here you will find other useful information and every notebook we’ve tested with this processor: http://laptopmedia.com/processor/intel-core-i5-7200u/

Fritz is a chess benchmark that tests the computing capabilities of the CPU with various chess moves. The Intel Core i5-7200U scored 6.350 million moves per second. In comparison, one of the most powerful chess computers, Deep(er) Blue, was able to squeeze out 200 million moves per second. In 1997 Deep(er) Blue even beat the famous Garry Kasparov with 3.5 to 2.5.

GPU – Intel HD Graphics 620

Intel’s HD Graphics 620 integrated iGPU can be found in various ULV (ultra-low voltage) processors from the Kaby Lake generation. The GT2 version of the graphics chip uses 24 EUs (Execution Units) that can be clocked up to 1050 MHz and it has a base frequency of 300 MHz but the former can vary depending on the CPU. Since the iGPU doesn’t have a dedicated memory of its own – or eDRAM for that matter – it uses the available RAM on the system which is 2x 64-bit DDR3 or DDR4.

The TDP depends on the CPU model but it’s usually equipped with a SoC rated at 15W including the memory controller.

You can browse through our top GPUs ranking: http://laptopmedia.com/top-laptop-graphics-ranking/

Here you will find other useful information and every notebook with this GPU that we’ve tested: http://laptopmedia.com/video-card/intel-hd-graphics-620/

Temperatures

We perform this two-staged stress test to see how the system handles heavy workloads for long periods of time and it also gives us a general idea of the cooling design’s effectiveness and the stability of the system as a whole. However, we think the high-performance version of the notebook would be more interesting to test out because it crams up a high-voltage quad-core Intel Core i7-7700HQ CPU and a discrete GeForce 940MX GPU in a 14-inch thin chassis. In any case, our tests show signs of really stable cooling performance. Here’s why…

We started with the usual CPU stress test for an hour. The chip ran at relatively low temperatures while utilizing the maximum clock speeds of 3.1 GHz with two active cores.

After one hour, we turned on the GPU stress test as well. As expected, the CPU’s clock speeds fell drastically in order to give enough headroom for the iGPU to perform to its fullest. Temperatures significantly dropped as well.

What’s more, the whole interior remained cool while the fan operations were relatively silent, which is rarely the case with thin ultrabooks. You shouldn’t worry about overheating at all.

Verdict

The Lenovo ThinkPad T470 is an excellent business notebook as long as you don’t mind the price tag on this thing. In any case, you get a lot in return – exceptional build quality, portability, reliability, overall great input devices, a wide range of I/O even for a 14-inch device and stable cooling system that also turns out to be pretty silent even under heavy workload. There’s no high-pitch sound coming from the fan.

However, there are a few trade-offs along the way that may not be a big deal for some users but will be a deal-breaker for others. Firstly, battery life isn’t impressive but still not bad. Secondly, the IPS panel just doesn’t fit the profile of a high-end business ultrabook – low maximum brightness, low contrast and narrow sRGB coverage. Thirdly, the touchpad is a bit stiff towards the upper half and finally, you can insert only a single M.2 SSD or 2.5-inch drive, depending on the configuration you get. But to be fair, the majority of 14-inch laptops offer only the M.2 SSD slot so let’s not get too picky.

So should you buy the ThinkPad T470? Yes, of course, if you have the extra cash. But if you are looking for something more simple, the Acer Swift 5 is a great choice. More powerful? Look for the ASUS ZenBook UX410. Similar but with better battery life and screen, consider the Acer TravelMate P648.

You can find the available configurations and their prices here: http://amzn.to/2qTmPvw

The growing popularity of high-refresh rate monitors has pushed a number of manufacturers to iron out the drawbacks of conventional 144Hz displays in order to stand out with picture quality. However, Samsung set the bar too high for most of its competitors with what appears to be one of the best in class Full HD gaming monitors – the C24FG70.

Samsung’s CFG70 series come in two flavors – 24-inch and 27-inch. For our review, we picked the significantly more affordable and probably the more sought after 24″ variant. Spec-wise, both models are identical but will most definitely score differently in our tests. Anyway, the display offers all features a hardcore gamer would want minus almost all of the drawbacks you would expect from a high refresh rate panel. Samsung’s panel surprises with excellent image quality – 120% sRGB coverage, 3000:1 contrast ratio thanks to the Quantum Dot layer, high maximum brightness, very good viewing angles due to the VA panel (not as good as IPS but sensibly better than TN) and it’s factory calibrated for better color reproduction. The 1800R curve is a nice finishing touch that makes it ideal for multimedia content consumption and gaming. On top of all, the monitor offers AMD’s FreeSync technology for smooth gameplay and less tearing, low input lag and 1ms response time.

You can find the Samsung C24FG70 here: http://amzn.to/2sGHG2D

Contents

Retail package

The monitor comes with a huge box containing all the usual user manuals, AC adapter and two cables – one HDMI and one DisplayPort. There’s also a small mounting plate that can be used with standard 75 x 75 mm VESA stands.

Design and ergonomics

The design of the monitor isn’t anything out of the ordinary. It has thin black matte bezels – the side and top bezels measure at 17 mm while the bottom one is 20 mm. This means that multi-monitor setup will work just fine, although you have to take into consideration the slight 1800R curve.

The back of the monitor is again made of black matte plastic with a joystick in the lower right corner. The joystick serves for opening up the OSD menu and navigating around. There are also three small hardware buttons on the bottom that are used for quick access to presets. Towards the center, you will find a big light blue LED light that Samsung calls “Arena Lightning” and can be used as blinking light or can be synced with the sound coming out of the monitor (if you have headphones or speakers connected to the monitor). It can be turned off as well. At the back, towards the bottom, you will find the two HDMI connectors and the DisplayPort one. The HDMI ports support up to 120Hz refresh rate and if you want to make the most out of the panel, the DisplayPort should be used to max out the 144Hz refresh rate. No matter which I/O you choose, FreeSync is supported on both standards. There’s also a 3.5 mm audio jack

Let’s get to the stand now. It’s an unconventional stand featuring dual-hinged arm with cable loop for cable management. The stand itself provides excellent ergonomic flexibility – tilt (2 degrees forwards and 17 backwards), height adjustment (140 mm), swivel (15 degrees in both directions) and pivot for 90 degrees rotation into portrait mode. But all this flexibility and unusual design come at a price. The stand dish takes up some space while the stand is pretty deep and might not suit some workspaces. Depending on the height – as you lower the screen, the stand sticks out quite a lot. But as you go above this, it becomes more compact as we already mentioned.

But if you happen to have a better VESA stand or wall mount, you can use the included mounting plate converting the back screws to 75 x 75 mm standard.

OSD menu

The OSD menu gives you access to quite a lot of settings. Once you press the joystick once, you will be presented with four options – source, menu, Eye Saver mode and turning off the screen. By selecting the menu option, you will access five sub-menus – Game, Picture, OnScreen Display, System, Information. The first two let you adjust the refresh rate, response time, set up FreeSync, turn on and off the low input lag mode, switch on the Eye Saver mode. Moreover, sharpness, contrast, brightness, color mode, gamma and color tone are also adjustable.

The menu also provides quite a few modes each one optimizing the picture to better suit your needs. The Custom one can be altered the way you want. But if you prefer the stock presets, you can choose between High-Brightness, FPS, RTS, RPG, AOS, sRGB, Cinema and the Custom one. But more on that later.

Specs sheet

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Diagonal	23.5″
Resolution	Full HD (1920×1080)
Additional	Aspect ratio: 16:9 Pixel pitch (mm): 0.271 mm Brightness (typ.): 350 cd/㎡ Native contrast (typ.): 3000:1 Viewing angles (L/R;U/D) (CR>=10): 178°/178° Response time (Tr+Tf) typ.: 1 ms MPRT Backlight technology: Quantum Dot LED (Quantum Dots + blue LED) Panel technology: SVA LCD panel Panel coating: matte AG coating Refresh rate: 144Hz Color depth: 16.7 million (8-bits per subpixel) Color Gamut: 120% sRGB Stand Swivel (left/right): –15°/+15° Tilt (down/up): –2°/+17° Height adjustment (mm): 140 mm
Ports	2x HDMI 1.4a, 1x DisplayPort 1.2, 3.5 mm audio jack
Panel	Samsung SVA (Super Vertical Alignment) LCD

Display tests

The Samsung C24FG70 monitor uses a Full HD (1920×1080) Samsung Super Vertical Alignment (SVA) LCD panel with 1800R curvature and a Quantum Dot (Quantum Dot layer + blue LED) type of backlight, which widens the color space coverage and increases the maximum contrast ratio. The panel also supports true 8-bit color and 1ms MPRT (moving picture response time). The panel’s maximum refresh rate is 144Hz and supports AMD’s adaptive sync standard FreeSync using the HDMI and DisplayPort connectors.

The diagonal of the panel is 23.5″ (59.8 cm) holding a resolution of 1920 x 1080 (Full HD) making the pixel density 94 ppi and the pixel pitch 0.271 x 0.271 mm. The screen can be considered as “Retina” when viewed from a distance equal or greater than 94 cm.

We are happy to report that the backlight bleeding is minimal and even surpasses the curved competition and the IPS alternatives on the market.

The VA panel provides comfortable viewing angles with minimal color shift to the sides and noticeable shift vertically. It’s still much better than TN panels but falls short compared to IPS displays.

The monitor comes with a color calibration report, which you can check out here.

The power consumption isn’t high – 33Wh with brightness turned up to maximum.

Since the monitor is gaming-oriented, there are plenty of modes to choose from.

However, we did our testing mainly in two of all modes – “Custom” and “sRGB”.

The maximum brightness we were able to record is 336 cd/m2 but we did our testing at 140 cd/m2 luminance. You can see the results from our testing at 140 cd/m2 (35% brightness) – 13% deviation and color temperature close to the optimal 6500K.

The maximum color deviation (dE2000) is 4.2 in the lower right corner which is a bit higher than the 4.0 mark. Usually, values above 4.0 are unwanted when color-sensitive work is involved. The contrast ratio is excellent 2700:1 but in sRGB mode and the rest of the presets, the display scored near to 3000:1 contrast. By playing around with the rest of the settings, we didn’t observe any significant change in the contrast ratio.

Color reproduction

To make sure we are on the same page, we would like to give you a little introduction of the sRGB color gamut and the Adobe RGB. To start, there’s the CIE 1976 Uniform Chromaticity Diagram that represents the visible specter of colors by the human eye, giving you a better perception of the color gamut coverage and the color accuracy.

Inside the black triangle, you will see the standard color gamut (sRGB) that is being used by millions of people in HDTV and on the web. As for the Adobe RGB, this is used in professional cameras, monitors etc for printing. Basically, colors inside the black triangle are used by everyone and this is the essential part of the color quality and color accuracy of a mainstream notebook.

Still, we’ve included other color spaces like the famous DCI-P3 standard used by movie studios, as well as the digital UHD Rec.2020 standard. Rec.2020, however, is still a thing of the future and it’s difficult for today’s displays to cover that well. We’ve also included the so-called Michael Pointer gamut, or Pointer’s gamut, which represents the colors that naturally occur around us every day.

Of course, the sRGB coverage is excellent and exceeds the sRGB color space – close to the specified 120% sRGB coverage. In fact, it almost covers the DCI-P3 standard in the green area.

And here’s the sRGB mode making sure the panel reproduces real colors without oversaturation.

Below you will see practically the same image but with the color circles representing the reference colors and the white circles being the result. You can see main and additional colors with 25%, 50%, 75% and 100% saturation inside the sRGB gamut pre and post calibration.

The results are with stock settings and applied “Design and Gaming” profile.

The “Design and Gaming” profile is created at 140 cd/m2 brightness, D65 (6500K) white point and optimal gamma in sRGB mode.

The next figure shows how well the display is able to reproduce really dark parts of an image, which is essential when watching movies or playing games in low ambient light.

The left side of the image represents the display with stock settings, while the right one is with the “Gaming and Web Design” profile activated. On the horizontal axis, you will find the grayscale and on the vertical axis – the luminance of the display. On the two graphs below you can easily check for yourself how your display handles the darkest nuances but keep in mind that this also depends on the settings of your current display, the calibration, the viewing angle and the surrounding light conditions.

Gaming capabilities (Response time)

We test the reaction time of the pixels with the usual “black-to-white” and “white-to-black” method from 10% to 90% and reverse.

We recorded Fall Time + Rise Time = 13 ms using the “Standard mode”.

But as we switch to “Faster” and “Fastest” mode under the “Response Time” section, we observe significantly better response times. However, we can see screen flickering occurring as the graphs suggest, but more on that later. In addition, the “Faster” and “Fastest” mode limit the brightness level and cannot be adjusted.

PWM (Screen flickering)

Pulse-width modulation (PWM) is an easy way to control monitor brightness. When you lower the brightness, the light intensity of the backlight is not lowered, but instead turned off and on by the electronics with a frequency indistinguishable to the human eye. In these light impulses the light/no-light time ratio varies, while brightness remains unchanged, which is harmful to your eyes. You can read more about that in our dedicated article on PWM.

We are happy to report that the panel doesn’t use PWM across all brightness levels making it comfortable to use for long hours of work and gaming. Still, the “Faster” and “Fastest” modes in the Response Time section will produce PWM so use those with caution.

Blue light emissions

Installing of our Health-Guard profile not only eliminates PWM but also reduces the harmful Blue Light emissions while keeping the colors of the screen perceptually accurate. If you’re not familiar with the Blue light, the TL;DR version is – emissions that negatively affect your eyes, skin, and your whole body. You can find more information about that in our dedicated article on Blue Light.

You can see the levels of emitted blue light on the spectral power distribution (SDP) graph.

Although the panel provides the “Eye Saver” mode, which does almost the same thing as our Health-Guard profile, the latter preserves color accuracy and contrast as much as possible.

Curvature

As far as the 1800R curve goes, it’s one of those things that you need to try in person by yourself to notice the difference. Obviously, this curve has been precisely measured by the design team because it really gets you close to an immersive gaming experience. It has been poorly described by the marketing team but well implemented by the engineers over at Samsung.

Buy our display profiles

Since our profiles are tailored for each individual display model, this article and its respective profile package is meant for Samsung C24FG70 with 23.5″ (24-inch model) Samsung SVA panel (FHD, 1920 × 1080) VA screen and the monitor can be found at Amazon: http://amzn.to/2r5HBrU

*Should you have problems with downloading the purchased file, try using a different browser to open the link you’ll receive via e-mail. If the download target is a .php file instead of an archive, change the file extension to .zip or contact us at bg.laptopmedia@gmail.com.

Read more about the profiles HERE.

In addition to receiving efficient and health-friendly profiles, by buying LaptopMedia's products you also support the development of our labs, where we test devices in order to produce the most objective reviews possible.

Office Work

Office Work should be used mostly by users who spend most of the time looking at pieces of text, tables or just surfing. This profile aims to deliver better distinctness and clarity by keeping a flat gamma curve (2.20), native color temperature and perceptually accurate colors.

$4.96

Buy Now Checkout Added to cart

Design and Gaming

This profile is aimed at designers who work with colors professionally, and for games and movies as well. Design and Gaming takes display panels to their limits, making them as accurate as possible in the sRGB IEC61966-2-1 standard for Web and HDTV, at white point D65.

$4.97

Buy Now Checkout Added to cart

Health-Guard

THealth-Guard eliminates the harmful Pulse-Width Modulation (PWM) and reduces the negative Blue Light which affects our eyes and body. Since it’s custom tailored for every panel, it manages to keep the colors perceptually accurate. Health-Guard simulates paper so the pressure on the eyes is greatly reduced.

$4.98

Buy Now Checkout Added to cart

$9.99

Buy Now Checkout Added to cart

Verdict

The Samsung C24FG70 is one of the best in class gaming monitor your hard-earned money can buy. It carries all the pros of a typical gaming monitor minus almost all of the disadvantages. Some may say that the VA panel still isn’t IPS but, to be honest, our tests show that this particular model from Samsung puts to shame all of the TN displays out there and most of the IPS alternatives as well. It has higher than usual maximum brightness, more than 100% sRGB coverage, good viewing angles, outstanding contrast ratio and less than expected backlight leakage. Again, in some of our tests, the panel performs better than IPS displays.

But what about its gaming capabilities you might ask. Well, since it’s a gaming-oriented monitor, the C24FG70 boasts all the features you’d want from a display in this class – 144Hz maximum refresh rate, FeeSync (AMD’s adaptive sync technology) for less tearing and generally smooth gameplay, 1ms response time and virtually no input lag. The added 1800R comes as a bonus at this point.

In any case, be aware of some of the drawbacks. If you are getting it for gaming, then the unevenly distributed color temperature and color accuracy won’t pose any issues at all. But if you plan to do some professional photo and video editing, hence color sensitive work, we suggest looking elsewhere. Also, if you ramp up the response time, get ready for backlight flickering (PWM), which we don’t recommend for long hours of work/gaming.

To sum things up, the Samsung C24FG70 might just be one of the best gaming monitors out there with just a few drawbacks to consider – all the gaming benefits without sacrificing image quality. This means that the display can be used not only for gaming but for multimedia consumption and sometimes editing. However, the price of the monitor can be considered a bit hefty because there are a handful of other 24-inch 144Hz alternatives on the market that cost less but offer inferior panels. And if pixel density is your thing, WQHD (2560×1440) monitors are also found at this price point but be ready to settle for 60 or 75Hz refresh rate.

Again, if you still want the best possible experience, we suggest purchasing our profiles as they further improve color accuracy and visibility in dark parts of an image. Also, the Health-Guard profile reduces the blue light emissions while preserving color accuracy as much as possible.

You can find the Samsung C24FG70 here: http://amzn.to/2sGHG2D

HP’s first attempt in gaming laptops a few years ago didn’t go too well. The first Omen wasn’t received so well by the users because it didn’t offer anything out of the ordinary, yet it cost a pretty penny. Now, the HP Omen 17 with GTX 1070 is in the same ballpark as the ASUS ROG Strix GL702VS and Acer’s Predator 17. However, both are hard to match rivals and the Omen 17 has a hard time keeping up.

Seemingly, the HP Omen 17 has all that it takes to play in the big league – Intel Core i7-7700HQ, NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070, up to 32GB of DDR4-2400 RAM, an M.2 PCIe NVMe SSD for speedy data transfer/read and, of course, a good Full HD IPS display with 75Hz refresh rate and native G-Sync support. Still, these are specs that are commonly found in today’s gaming laptops so what sets them apart is the design and the way they handle this powerful hardware. What we mean by that is input devices, build quality and cooling solution. How does the new HP Omen 17 fare in our tests? Find out in our thorough review below.

You can see the available configurations and their prices here: http://amzn.to/2radFqv

Contents

Retail package

The laptop comes in an Omen-branded big black box with the usual user manuals, AC adapter and power cord.

Design and construction

The new HP Omen 17 follows the same aggressive gaming-oriented design with red accent and looks identical to the previous generation we reviewed. But expectedly, the 17-inch version’s case is considerably more thick and heavy in order to provide enough headroom for the hardware to perform. Measuring at around 33 mm in thickness and weighing 3.25 kg, the HP Omen 17 sits between the ASUS ROG Strix GL702VS and the Acer Predator 17 in terms of portability. Interestingly, though, the only material used for the casing is plastic so we are not sure why it weighs so much.

Anyway, let’s continue with the build itself. The lid features a pleasant matte finish with visual patterns imitating carbon fiber and, of course, the flashy red Omen logo in the middle. Fingerprints do stick but they are not as visible as we thought they would be. The bad news is that the plastic plate isn’t as thick and it’s susceptible to flexing and torsion. Bending the center and the edges of the lid is easy and causes distortions on the LCD screen. The same goes for the side bezels. On the contrary, the metal hinges appear to have a firm grip on the lid delivering smooth travel and allow the notebook to be opened with one hand. As for bottom piece of the notebook, it goes with a generic matte black plastic with the usual grills for additional airflow.

Колона

The sides are fairly thick measuring at 33 mm but don’t offer all the connectors you’d expect from a high-end 17-inch gaming laptop. Also, the port placement is a bit odd – the majority of I/O is on the right side, which sometimes might get in the way when using an external mouse. Anyway, the left side offers one USB 3.0 connector, and two 3.5 mm jacks for a headset and external microphone. There’s also one of the grills for dispersing the heat. On the right, you will find another two USB 3.0 ports, an HDMI, mini DisplayPort, SD card reader, RJ-45 for LAN connection and the DC charging port. We really would have liked half of them transferred to the left along with the DC charging port. Also, the USB-C 3.1 connector is nowhere to be found and misses on the Thunderbolt 3 support as well. It might not be a deal-breaker for most users but since all of Omen’s competitors offer it and the I/O expansion potential of the Thunderbolt standard is huge, we consider it as a big drawback.

Although the interior sports the same visual pattern with the carbon fiber threads, the surface is entirely different to touch. It’s slightly glossy and silky-smooth but doesn’t leave fingerprints visible. What we didn’t expect, however, is that the palm rest area and the upper part of the interior where the speakers are placed is pretty rigid. The same goes for the center of the keyboard, which bends just a little only under great pressure. Speaking of the keyboard, it’s nice for typing because it has a nice clicky feedback to it but doesn’t really deliver in terms of travel. The shallow nature of the keys and the small arrow keys don’t really scream “gaming material”. Unfortunately, the touchpad is even worse – the gliding surface is okay but that’s it. The trackpad wobbles, fails to register gestures from time to time, mouse clicks are stiff, it’s inaccurate and not responsive enough. It just leaves a cheap impression on contrary to the price tag. In fact, we are pretty sure they used the same touchpad as the one in the HP Pavilion series. While it might fit the low-end to mid-range profile of the Pavilions, it just isn’t enough for this expensive gaming machine.

To sum things up, HP Omen 17’s build, input devices and I/O are decent to some extent but not good enough to give it a high score. The base and the hinges are well-built, rigid and appear to be reliable in the long run but the lid is too flexible to our taste. Maybe the fact that only plastic is used for the entire build has taken its toll. Moreover, the keyboard and the touchpad aren’t satisfactory considering the nature of the laptop and its price tag – the touchpad is cheap while the keyboard lacks travel. And finally, the bad port distribution along with the missing USB-C connector supporting Thunderbolt just don’t make a compelling case for the HP Omen 17.

Disassembly, maintenance and upgrade options

The notebook has only one service hatch in the middle, which only gives access to the memory. But if you wish to access the cooling system for maintenance or upgrade the storage, you will have to remove the whole bottom piece. It’s relatively easy to do so but mind the silicone caps that are placed on top of the screws. Also, there’s one screw hiding under the service lid.

Storage upgrades – 2.5-inch HDD/SSD, M.2 SSD

As all laptops from this price range, the HP Omen 17 also offers the standard 2.5-inch HDD and an M.2 PCIe NVMe SSD. The HDD is from HGST with 1TB capacity while the M.2 is a Samsung PM961 drive with 256GB capacity.

RAM

As we said earlier, the RAM chips are easily accessible and can be found under the small service hatch on the bottom. Our laptop came with 2x 8GB DDR4-2400 chips from SK Hynix.

Other components

The Wi-Fi card can be found next to the left cooling fan (with the bottom of the chassis facing up) and it’s Intel 7265NGW.

The laptop uses a huge 95Wh battery located under the wrist rest area.

Cooling system

The cooling solution seems pretty solid, despite some inconsistencies we’ve detected during our stress tests. As you can see, the system uses two huge heatsinks and several heat pipes connected to the cooling fans and radiators.

Display quality

HP’s new Omen 17 features an IPS LG Philips LGD046E display with Full HD (1920×1080) resolution in a 17.3-inch diagonal, 127 ppi and 0.1995 x 0.1995 mm pixel pitch. The screen can be considered as “Retina” when viewed from a distance equal or greater than 69 cm.

The screen offers comfortable viewing angles from a 45-degree angle.

We were able to record 341 cd/m2 maximum brightness at the center of the screen and 338 cd/m2 average across the surface with just 7% deviation. The color temperature is 6500K. which is the standard D65 white point. On the image below, you will see all these measurements taken at 140 cd/m2 luminance (75% brightness).

The maximum dE2000 color deviation is 2.9 which is good since values above 4.0 are usually unwanted especially when color-sensitive work is involved. And as for the contrast ratio, it’s 1060:1 – typical for IPS panels.

Color reproduction

To make sure we are on the same page, we would like to give you a little introduction of the sRGB color gamut and the Adobe RGB. To start, there’s the CIE 1976 Uniform Chromaticity Diagram that represents the visible specter of colors by the human eye, giving you a better perception of the color gamut coverage and the color accuracy.

Inside the black triangle, you will see the standard color gamut (sRGB) that is being used by millions of people in HDTV and on the web. As for the Adobe RGB, this is used in professional cameras, monitors etc for printing. Basically, colors inside the black triangle are used by everyone and this is the essential part of the color quality and color accuracy of a mainstream notebook.

Still, we’ve included other color spaces like the famous DCI-P3 standard used by movie studios, as well as the digital UHD Rec.2020 standard. Rec.2020, however, is still a thing of the future and it’s difficult for today’s displays to cover that well. We’ve also included the so-called Michael Pointer gamut, or Pointer’s gamut, which represents the colors that naturally occur around us every day.

The display covers 87% of the sRGB color space making it good for multimedia and gaming.

Below you will see practically the same image but with the color circles representing the reference colors and the white circles being the result. You can see main and additional colors with 25%, 50%, 75% and 100% saturation inside the sRGB gamut pre and post calibration.

The “Design and Gaming” profile is created at 140 cd/m2 brightness, D65 (6500K) white point and optimal gamma in sRGB mode.

We tested the accuracy of the display with 24 commonly used colors like light and dark human skin, blue sky, green grass, orange etc. You can check out the results at factory condition and also, with the “Design and Gaming” profile.

The next figure shows how well the display is able to reproduce really dark parts of an image, which is essential when watching movies or playing games in low ambient light.

The left side of the image represents the display with stock settings, while the right one is with the “Gaming and Web Design” profile activated. On the horizontal axis, you will find the grayscale and on the vertical axis – the luminance of the display. On the two graphs below you can easily check for yourself how your display handles the darkest nuances but keep in mind that this also depends on the settings of your current display, the calibration, the viewing angle and the surrounding light conditions.

Gaming capabilities (Response time)

We test the reaction time of the pixels with the usual “black-to-white” and “white-to-black” method from 10% to 90% and reverse.

We recorded Fall Time + Rise Time = 22 ms.

PWM (Screen flickering)

Pulse-width modulation (PWM) is an easy way to control monitor brightness. When you lower the brightness, the light intensity of the backlight is not lowered, but instead turned off and on by the electronics with a frequency indistinguishable to the human eye. In these light impulses the light/no-light time ratio varies, while brightness remains unchanged, which is harmful to your eyes. You can read more about that in our dedicated article on PWM.

We weren’t able to detect normal PWM but we did notice pulsations with extremely high frequency – 135 kHz. In any case, even users with extra sensitive eyes won’t be able to feel the negative effects of the flickering.

Blue light emissions

Installing of our Health-Guard profile not only eliminates PWM but also reduces the harmful Blue Light emissions while keeping the colors of the screen perceptually accurate. If you’re not familiar with the Blue light, the TL;DR version is – emissions that negatively affect your eyes, skin, and your whole body. You can find more information about that in our dedicated article on Blue Light.

You can see the levels of emitted blue light on the spectral power distribution (SDP) graph.

Conclusion

The notebook’s display appears to be a good choice for multimedia consumption and gaming. It has good sRGB coverage, high contrast ratio, high maximum brightness and has virtually no PWM across all brightness levels, which is a great plus to consider when gaming or working in front of the screen for long periods of time. The additional G-Sync feature makes the gaming experience complete with 75Hz refresh rate.

Still, if you want the best possible experience out of this panel, we suggest downloading our custom profiles as they improve the color accuracy, adjust the gamma and black levels. The Health-Guard profile, for instance, reduces the negative blue light emissions while preserving the color accuracy as much as possible.

Buy our display profiles

Since our profiles are tailored for each individual display model, this article and its respective profile package is meant for HP Omen 17 (2017) configurations with 17.3″ LG LGD046E (FHD, 1920 × 1080) IPS screen and the laptop can be found at Amazon: http://amzn.to/2selQFE

*Should you have problems with downloading the purchased file, try using a different browser to open the link you’ll receive via e-mail. If the download target is a .php file instead of an archive, change the file extension to .zip or contact us at bg.laptopmedia@gmail.com.

Read more about the profiles HERE.

In addition to receiving efficient and health-friendly profiles, by buying LaptopMedia's products you also support the development of our labs, where we test devices in order to produce the most objective reviews possible.

Office Work

Office Work should be used mostly by users who spend most of the time looking at pieces of text, tables or just surfing. This profile aims to deliver better distinctness and clarity by keeping a flat gamma curve (2.20), native color temperature and perceptually accurate colors.

$4.96

Buy Now Checkout Added to cart

Design and Gaming

This profile is aimed at designers who work with colors professionally, and for games and movies as well. Design and Gaming takes display panels to their limits, making them as accurate as possible in the sRGB IEC61966-2-1 standard for Web and HDTV, at white point D65.

$4.97

Buy Now Checkout Added to cart

Health-Guard

THealth-Guard eliminates the harmful Pulse-Width Modulation (PWM) and reduces the negative Blue Light which affects our eyes and body. Since it’s custom tailored for every panel, it manages to keep the colors perceptually accurate. Health-Guard simulates paper so the pressure on the eyes is greatly reduced.

$4.98

Buy Now Checkout Added to cart

$9.99

Buy Now Checkout Added to cart

Sound

The sound quality is okay with enough clarity in the low, mid and high frequencies.

Specs sheet

The current specs sheet refers to this particular model – configurations may differ depending on your region.

Check price

CPU	Intel Core i7-7700HQ (4-core, 2.80 – 3.80 GHz, 6MB cache)
RAM	8GB (1x 8096MB) – DDR4, 2400MHz
GPU	NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 (8GB GDDR5)
HDD/SSD	1TB HDD + 256GB M.2 PCIe NVMe SSD
Display	17.3-inch – 1920×1080 (Full HD) IPS, matte
Optical drive	–
Connectivity	LAN 10/100/1000 Mbps, Wi-Fi 802.11ac (2×2), Bluetooth 4.0
Other features	3x USB 3.0 2x 3.5 mm audio jacks for microphone-in and headphones LAN mini DisplaPort HDMI card reader (SD, MMC, MS) red keyboard LED backlight
Battery	95Wh
Thickness	33 mm (1.3″)
Weight	3.25 kg (7.17 lbs)

Software

We used the pre-installed Windows 10 (64-bit) for the writing of this review but if you wish to perform a clean install of the OS without the bloatware, we suggest downloading all of the latest drivers from HP’s official website.

Battery

Although the notebook has a huge 95Wh battery, the endurance tests show just about the average performance but this is expected due to the demanding hardware and the missing NVIDIA Optimus support when there is native G-Sync support. The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 GPU, the Intel Core i7-7700HQ and the 17-inch IPS screen are all energy-sipping piece of hardware and even a 95Wh battery unit can’t keep the system running any longer than this.

As usual, all tests were run with the same settings – Wi-Fi turned on, Windows battery saving feature turned on and screen brightness set to 120 cd/m2.

Web browsing

In order to simulate real-life conditions, we used our own script for automatic web browsing through over 70 websites.

As expected, not a mind-blowing result – 314 minutes (5 hours and 14 minutes).

Video playback

For every test like this, we use the same video in HD.

Slightly lower but similar result here – 276 minutes (4 hours and 36 minutes).

Gaming

We recently started using F1 2015’s built-in benchmark on loop in order to simulate real-life gaming.

Of course, the laptop isn’t made for gaming but it’s good to know that it can last hour and a half under heavy load – 93 minutes (1 hour and 33 minutes).

CPU – Intel Core i7-7700HQ

The Core i7-7700HQ is Kaby Lake’s top-shelf direct successor of the Skylake Core i7-6700HQ offering slightly higher clock speeds on the almost identical architecture and TDP. While Intel markets Kaby Lake’s architecture as “14nm+”, the Core i7-7700HQ is still on the same 14nm node with the only significant update being in the iGPU department. That’s why the slightly altered clock speeds (2.8 – 3.8 GHz vs 2.6 – 3.5 GHz) bring not more than 10% increase in performance compared to the Core i7-6700HQ. We still have the supported Hyper-Threading technology with 4/8 – core/thread design, the same 45W TDP and 6MB cache.

However, the Kaby Lake generation boasts an updated video engine for the iGPU, although, its performance is just about the same. Branded as Intel HD Graphics 630, the GPU offers slightly higher clock speeds (350 – 1100 MHz vs 350 – 1050 MHz) compared to the Intel HD Graphics 530 and support for H265/HEVC Main10 profile at 10-bit color depth and the VP9 codec for full hardware acceleration. In addition, the HDCP 2.2 is also supported allowing Netflix’s 4K video streaming.

You can browse through our top CPUs ranking: http://laptopmedia.com/top-laptop-cpu-ranking/

Here you will find other useful information and every notebook we’ve tested with this processor: http://laptopmedia.com/processor/intel-core-i7-7700hq/

Fritz

Fritz is a chess benchmark that tests the computing capabilities of the CPU with various chess moves. The Intel Core i7-6700HQ managed to get 13.445 million moves per second. For comparison, one of the most powerful computers, Deep(er) Blue, was able to squeeze out 200 million moves per second. In 1997 Deep(er) Blue even beat the famous Garry Kasparov with 3.5 to 2.5.

GPU – NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 (8GB GDDR5)

The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 is the second fastest mobile GPU after the GTX 1080. It’s part of NVIDIA’s Pascal generation of GPUs and unlike previous releases, the company finally closes the gap between mobile and desktop graphics processors and that’s why there’s no “M” in the branding of Pascal GPUs. All thanks to the 16nm TSMC manufacturing process of the GPU, which allows better thermals and overall performance in a smaller form factor. That’s a big technology jump compared to the 28nm Maxwell generation.

Compared to its desktop counterpart, the GTX 1070 doesn’t differ too much. They share an identical number of ROPs (64) and identical memory – 8GB GDDR5 with 256-bit bus clocked at 8000 MHz. However, there’s a minor difference in clock speeds – the laptop GPU ticks at 1443 MHz and can go up to 1645 MHz while the desktop variant is running at 1506 MHz – 1683 MHz. To compensate to some extent, the laptop 1070 carries more CUDA cores (2048 vs 1920) and slightly more TMUs (170 vs 120).

Due to its performance, thermals and power consumption, which is believed to be 10W more than the GTX 980M, the GPU is suitable for large 17-inch laptops with the appropriate cooling solution.

You can browse through our top GPUs ranking: http://laptopmedia.com/top-laptop-graphics-ranking/

Here you will find other useful information and every notebook we’ve tested with this GPU: http://laptopmedia.com/video-card/nvidia-geforce-gtx-1070-8gb-gddr5/

Gaming tests

Temperatures

The two-staged temperature test that we perform isn’t necessarily a good representation of real-life use since the general user won’t be able to reach 100% CPU and 100% GPU load for such long periods of time even if the game is super demanding. However, the stress tests remain as the best way to assess the overall stability and effectiveness of the cooling system in the long run.

We start off with 100% CPU load. As you can see from the graph below, the CPU was able to maintain decent temperatures while utilizing the full performance of the Core i7-7700HQ for four active cores. Nevertheless, we observed some strange behavior. There were significant fluctuations regarding clock speeds – from 3.1 to 3.4 GHz while temperatures of individual cores were largely different. This can be caused by poorly applied thermal paste or bad heatsink design.

When we turned on the GPU stress test, the CPU’s temperatures rose significantly almost reaching 100 degrees Celsius. This also caused the Core i7-7700HQ to throttle a little at 2.4 – 2.6 GHz while the GTx 1070 maintained clock speeds within its base and Turbo Boost range. This comes as a breath of fresh air because the recently tested ASUS ROG Strix GL702VS had problems utilizing the full performance of the very same GPU during the test. It’s always better to prioritize the GPU before the CPU during heavy workloads, especially on a gaming machine. In addition, the GPU’s temperatures were relatively lower than what we are used to seeing in today’s high-end gaming laptops.

Of course, the high inner temperatures resulted in head dispersion across the surface of the keyboard. However, the warm spots were concentrated only in the middle of the keyboard and they weren’t even that hot. This ensures comfortable usage scenario during normal gaming session.

Verdict

Despite some of its drawbacks, the HP Omen 17 (GTX 1070) makes it to our recommendation list as it has some few strong selling points that need to be considered. Unfortunately, build quality, feel and input devices are not one of them. The lid feels flimsy, the keyboard offers short key travel (and it’s not optimized for gaming) and the touchpad appears to be cheaply made. We’ve criticized the ASUS ROG GL702VS for its lack of premium materials but it still came to be sturdy while the same cannot be said about HP’s Omen 17.

Aside from this, however, the laptop carries powerful hardware that can take advantage of the 75Hz Full HD G-Sync-enabled screen, which appears to be pretty good for multimedia consumption as well. It should satisfy the needs of most gamers out there. And it doesn’t have PWM making it safe to use by users with sensitive eyes. Also, battery life isn’t all that bad compared to most 17-inch gaming laptops so this is a plus.

And finally, we would like to address some of the small issues we’ve noticed within the cooling system. Although the laptop did well in our stress tests by utilizing the full performance of the CPU and GPU, we are a bit worried by the big temperature difference in the CPU’s cores and the small throttling during full load. This might just be an isolated incident with our unit due to bad thermal paste application or just a faulty unit. To be fair, though, the CPU’s thermal throttling is minor and will not occur during normal usage and gaming. Moreover, the GPU’s temperatures were relatively low and the same goes for the surface heat dispersion – both suggest of effective and stable cooling solution. This should really be considered, especially when choosing between the HP Omen 17 with GTX 1070 and ASUS’ ROG Strix GL702VS. Still, if you are willing to sacrifice weight and portability, the Acer Predator 17 (GTX 1070) and the slightly older ASUS ROG G752VS are probably more reliable and gaming-capable.

You can see the available configurations and their prices here: http://amzn.to/2radFqv

The HP Omen lineup doesn’t have a long history in the gaming industry and sometimes you can see the hints of lack of experience. The Omen 15 with GTX 1050 Ti is a clear example of that. While most of the big OEMs push their GTX 1050 and 1050 Ti-powered products with attractive pricing, the Omen 15 charges a pretty penny without offering much in return. It still has the expected performance, IPS display, M.2 PCIe NVMe SSD support and aggressive gaming design but is it enough to stand out against the fierce competition from Acer, Lenovo, Dell and ASUS?

While Acer’s VX 15 and Lenovo’s Legion Y520 are both GTX 1050 Ti-powered notebooks with IPS displays going for around $1 000 and ASUS’ GL553VE with the same specs and better IPS display sells for around $1 100, HP is trying to sell it’s Omen 15 for around $1 200 and in some regions going even higher without standing out with more powerful hardware or considerably better display. So where’s the catch? Maybe a better chassis with premium materials or extraordinary cooling system? Better keyboard? We find out in the full review below.

You can find the available configurations and their prices here: http://amzn.to/2so9DP3

Contents

Retail package

The Omen 15 comes in a cool black box with Omen’s logo on top and contains all the usual user manuals, AC adapter and power cord.

Design and construction

Generally speaking, the design of the HP Omen 15 hasn’t changed a lot since the last generation and it doesn’t differ too much from the current 17-inch model. Plastic is the only material used for the build, which takes away all the rigidity in some places giving us that “cheap” feel. Don’t get us wrong, though, there’s nothing wrong with using plastic for lower-end laptops that focus on the hardware rather than design but in this case, the Omen 15’s higher price just doesn’t justify the use of plastic. It just doesn’t leave a good impression, especially compared to the sturdy Lenovo Legion Y520, ASUS ROG Strix GL553VE and Dell’s Inspiron 7567. The good news is that the Omen 15 is considerably more portable than the competition weighing at just 2.19 kg and measuring at just 24 mm in height (Legion Y520 – 25.8 mm/2.5 kg, Inspiron 7567 – 27 mm/2.75 kg, Aspire VX 15 – 32 mm/2.5 kg, ROG Strix GL553VE – 30 mm/2.5kg).

The compromises, however, can be seen from the very beginning when opening the lid. We felt that the plastic, patterned, matte back feels great to touch but fails to impress with sturdiness. The center of the lid can be easily pressed while the sides aren’t resistant to torsion. Ripples appear on the LCD screen in our test attempts. Still, we must note the stealthy and smooth hinge travel that we saw in the 17-inch version as well. They are well tightened and allow opening the laptop with just one hand. The bottom of the notebook is again made of plastic and easily comes off by removing all the screws when upgrading. You will notice the vent openings at the bottom for extra airflow.

Despite the compact dimensions, the laptop offers the usual set of ports you’d find on a 15-inch machine, although, USB-C is nowhere to be found. The left side holds two USBs (one 3.0 and one 2.0) along with the 3.5 mm audio jack while the right side accommodates the DC charging port, HDMI, another USB 3.0, the SD card reader and the RJ-45 LAN port.

Going around the interior, we find one considerably weak spot between the spacebar and the touchpad – a little bit too flexible to our taste, again considering the price point of the product. The rest of the interior appears to be fairly resistant to bending and flexing, including the wrist rest area and the center of the keyboard. The glossy-like plastic finish is prone to smudges and fingerprints but feels nice to touch. As for the keyboard and touchpad, well they are absolutely identical to the ones in the 17-inch Omen – wobbly, unresponsive and cheap touchpad and good for typing, but not for gaming, keyboard. The latter offers relatively short key travel – especially compared to ASUS’ GL553VE and Lenovo’s Legion Y520 – and when you consider the layout of the arrow keys, you just hope that you won’t play racing games as much.

It’s really hard to give the Omen 15 a good score in terms of design because the higher price just doesn’t allow us. There are too many trade-offs along the way that include the flimsy screen, bad touchpad design and a good-for-typing-only keyboard.

Disassembly, maintenance and upgrade options

Just like the previous alteration of the Omen 15, this year’s model doesn’t have a dedicated service hatch but accessing the internals is pretty easy. Just make sure you’ve removed all the screws around the bottom and proceed by prying up the plate.

Storage upgrades – 2.5-inch HDD/SSD, M.2 SSD

Storage options are the usual – 2.5-inch HDD and an M.2 PCIe NVMe SSD. The HDD is HGST with 1TB capacity while the M.2 slot is taken by Samsung’s PM961 PCIe NVMe SSD.

RAM

The motherboard holds two memory slots and our unit came with two 8GB DDR4-2400 chips manufactured by Samsung.

Other components

The Wi-Fi card can be found next to the left cooling fan (with the bottom of the chassis facing up) and it’s Intel 7265NGW.

The laptop uses a relatively big 63.3Wh battery located under the wrist rest area.

Cooling system

No wonder why the cooling system isn’t able to keep up with the CPU and GPU under heavy workload – the cooling fans are stuck to each other while the short heat pipes share heat across the cooling system. We saw almost identical cooling solution on the Lenovo Legion Y520 where the same problems with heat management occurred.

Display quality

HP Omen 15’s display is manufactured by LG Philips and it’s listed as LGD0532. This is a 15.6-inch IPS display with matte finish, Full HD (1920×1080) resolution, 142 ppi and 0.18 x 0.18 mm pixel pitch. It can be considered as “Retina” when viewed from a distance equal or greater than 60 cm.

Viewing angles are good, as you can see from the image below.

We’ve measured a maximum brightness of 252 cd/m2 in the middle and 234 cd/m2 as average across the surface with 13% deviation. The color temperature is 6700K, which is pretty close to the optimal 6500K. Below, you can see the results at 140 cd/m2 luminance (75% brightness).

The maximum dE2000 color deviation is 3.3, which is still under the 4.0 mark. The contrast ratio is 780:1 – not bad for a budget IPS panel.

Color reproduction

To make sure we are on the same page, we would like to give you a little introduction of the sRGB color gamut and the Adobe RGB. To start, there’s the CIE 1976 Uniform Chromaticity Diagram that represents the visible specter of colors by the human eye, giving you a better perception of the color gamut coverage and the color accuracy.

Inside the black triangle, you will see the standard color gamut (sRGB) that is being used by millions of people in HDTV and on the web. As for the Adobe RGB, this is used in professional cameras, monitors etc for printing. Basically, colors inside the black triangle are used by everyone and this is the essential part of the color quality and color accuracy of a mainstream notebook.

Still, we’ve included other color spaces like the famous DCI-P3 standard used by movie studios, as well as the digital UHD Rec.2020 standard. Rec.2020, however, is still a thing of the future and it’s difficult for today’s displays to cover that well. We’ve also included the so-called Michael Pointer gamut, or Pointer’s gamut, which represents the colors that naturally occur around us every day.

The display covers 51% of the sRGB color space which is rather disappointing considering the asking price of the Omen 15.

Below you will see practically the same image but with the color circles representing the reference colors and the white circles being the result. You can see main and additional colors with 25%, 50%, 75% and 100% saturation inside the sRGB gamut pre and post calibration.

The “Design and Gaming” profile is created at 140 cd/m2 brightness, D65 (6500K) white point and optimal gamma in sRGB mode.

We tested the accuracy of the display with 24 commonly used colors like light and dark human skin, blue sky, green grass, orange etc. You can check out the results at factory condition and also, with the “Design and Gaming” profile.

The next figure shows how well the display is able to reproduce really dark parts of an image, which is essential when watching movies or playing games in low ambient light.

The left side of the image represents the display with stock settings, while the right one is with the “Gaming and Web Design” profile activated. On the horizontal axis, you will find the grayscale and on the vertical axis – the luminance of the display. On the two graphs below you can easily check for yourself how your display handles the darkest nuances but keep in mind that this also depends on the settings of your current display, the calibration, the viewing angle and the surrounding light conditions.

Gaming capabilities (Response time)

We test the reaction time of the pixels with the usual “black-to-white” and “white-to-black” method from 10% to 90% and reverse.

We recorded Fall Time + Rise Time = 26 ms.

PWM (Screen flickering)

Pulse-width modulation (PWM) is an easy way to control monitor brightness. When you lower the brightness, the light intensity of the backlight is not lowered, but instead turned off and on by the electronics with a frequency indistinguishable to the human eye. In these light impulses the light/no-light time ratio varies, while brightness remains unchanged, which is harmful to your eyes. You can read more about that in our dedicated article on PWM.

It appears that the display uses PWM from 0 to 99% brightness but the frequency of the emitted light is pretty high (21 kHz) and may not affect everyone.

Blue light emissions

Installing of our Health-Guard profile not only eliminates PWM but also reduces the harmful Blue Light emissions while keeping the colors of the screen perceptually accurate. If you’re not familiar with the Blue light, the TL;DR version is – emissions that negatively affect your eyes, skin, and your whole body. You can find more information about that in our dedicated article on Blue Light.

You can see the levels of emitted blue light on the spectral power distribution (SDP) graph.

Conclusion

To be honest, we expected a bit better IPS panel for the asking price. Something like the ASUS ROG GL553VE had to offer for the same amount of money. However, we get similar to the Lenovo Legion Y520 and Acer Aspire VX 15 display while both of these machines cost considerably less. All three displays have limited sRGB coverage (only half), low maximum brightness, lower than usual contrast ratio for an IPS panel and HP Omen 15’s screen also uses PWM across all brightness levels, except 100%, of course.

Buy our display profiles

Since our profiles are tailored for each individual display model, this article and its respective profile package is meant for HP Omen 15 (2017) configurations with 15.6″ LG LGD0532 (FHD, 1920 × 1080) IPS screen and the laptop can be found at Amazon: http://amzn.to/2rfxWex

*Should you have problems with downloading the purchased file, try using a different browser to open the link you’ll receive via e-mail. If the download target is a .php file instead of an archive, change the file extension to .zip or contact us at bg.laptopmedia@gmail.com.

Read more about the profiles HERE.

In addition to receiving efficient and health-friendly profiles, by buying LaptopMedia's products you also support the development of our labs, where we test devices in order to produce the most objective reviews possible.

Office Work

Office Work should be used mostly by users who spend most of the time looking at pieces of text, tables or just surfing. This profile aims to deliver better distinctness and clarity by keeping a flat gamma curve (2.20), native color temperature and perceptually accurate colors.

$4.96

Buy Now Checkout Added to cart

Design and Gaming

This profile is aimed at designers who work with colors professionally, and for games and movies as well. Design and Gaming takes display panels to their limits, making them as accurate as possible in the sRGB IEC61966-2-1 standard for Web and HDTV, at white point D65.

$4.97

Buy Now Checkout Added to cart

Health-Guard

THealth-Guard eliminates the harmful Pulse-Width Modulation (PWM) and reduces the negative Blue Light which affects our eyes and body. Since it’s custom tailored for every panel, it manages to keep the colors perceptually accurate. Health-Guard simulates paper so the pressure on the eyes is greatly reduced.

$4.98

Buy Now Checkout Added to cart

$9.99

Buy Now Checkout Added to cart

Sound

The sound quality is okay with enough clarity in the low, mid and high frequencies.

Specs sheet

The current specs sheet refers to this particular model – configurations may differ depending on your region.

Check price

CPU	Intel Core i7-7700HQ (4-core, 2.80 – 3.80 GHz, 6MB cache)
RAM	16GB (2x 8096MB) – DDR4, 2400MHz
GPU	NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 Ti (4GB GDDR5)
HDD/SSD	1TB HDD + 256GB M.2 PCIe NVMe SSD
Display	15.6-inch – 1920×1080 (Full HD) IPS, matte
Optical drive	–
Connectivity	LAN 10/100/1000 Mbps, Wi-Fi 802.11ac (2×2), Bluetooth 4.0
Other features	2x USB 3.0 1x USB 2.0 3.5 mm audio jack LAN HDMI card reader (SD, MMC, MS) red keyboard LED backlight
Battery	63.3Wh
Thickness	24 mm (0.94″)
Weight	3.25 kg (4.83 lbs)

Software

We used the pre-installed Windows 10 (64-bit) for the writing of this review but if you wish to perform a clean install of the OS without the bloatware, we suggest downloading all of the latest drivers from HP’s official website.

Battery

It appears that battery life is the key selling point of this laptop and the marketing team missed on this one. Quite surprisingly, the HP Omen 15 might not be able to surprise you with over the top specs or top-notch build quality but the battery life on this thing is amazing compared to other gaming notebooks. It only falls short to the Dell Inspiron 7567 as the latter features a TN panel and a bigger 74Wh battery while the Omen 15 sports a tad smaller 63.3Wh unit with an energy-sipping IPS panel.

In any case, the laptop has been tested with the same settings as always – Wi-Fi turned on, screen brightness set to 120 cd/m2 and Windows battery saving feature turned on.

Web browsing

In order to simulate real-life conditions, we used our own script for automatic web browsing through over 70 websites.

Exceptional battery performance during web browsing – 567 minutes (9 hours and 27 minutes).

Video playback

For every test like this, we use the same video in HD.

Considerably lower but still pretty good score – 403 minutes (6 hours and 43 minutes).

Gaming

We recently started using F1 2015’s built-in benchmark on loop in order to simulate real-life gaming.

Of course, the laptop isn’t made for gaming but it’s good to know that it can last hour and a half under heavy load – 127 minutes (2 hours and 7 minutes).

CPU – Intel Core i7-7700HQ

The Core i7-7700HQ is Kaby Lake’s top-shelf direct successor of the Skylake Core i7-6700HQ offering slightly higher clock speeds on the almost identical architecture and TDP. While Intel markets Kaby Lake’s architecture as “14nm+”, the Core i7-7700HQ is still on the same 14nm node with the only significant update being in the iGPU department. That’s why the slightly altered clock speeds (2.8 – 3.8 GHz vs 2.6 – 3.5 GHz) bring not more than 10% increase in performance compared to the Core i7-6700HQ. We still have the supported Hyper-Threading technology with 4/8 – core/thread design, the same 45W TDP and 6MB cache.

However, the Kaby Lake generation boasts an updated video engine for the iGPU, although, its performance is just about the same. Branded as Intel HD Graphics 630, the GPU offers slightly higher clock speeds (350 – 1100 MHz vs 350 – 1050 MHz) compared to the Intel HD Graphics 530 and support for H265/HEVC Main10 profile at 10-bit color depth and the VP9 codec for full hardware acceleration. In addition, the HDCP 2.2 is also supported allowing Netflix’s 4K video streaming.

You can browse through our top CPUs ranking: http://laptopmedia.com/top-laptop-cpu-ranking/

Here you will find other useful information and every notebook we’ve tested with this processor: http://laptopmedia.com/processor/intel-core-i7-7700hq/

Fritz

Fritz is a chess benchmark that tests the computing capabilities of the CPU with various chess moves. The Intel Core i7-7700HQ managed to get 13.335 million moves per second. For comparison, one of the most powerful PCs, Deep(er) Blue, was able to squeeze out 200 million moves per second. In 1997 Deep(er) Blue even beat the famous Garry Kasparov with 3.5 to 2.5.

GPU – NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 Ti (4GB GDDR5)

NVIDIA’s GTX 1050 Ti for notebooks is almost identical to its desktop counterpart but offers different clock rates. What’s more, the Ti variant uses more CUDA cores than the standard GTX 1050 version – 768 vs 640 but both GPUs use the same GP107 chip, which differs from the other NVIDIA high-end solutions. The GP107 chip is manufactured by Samsung, not TSMC, and it’s built on the 14nm node on contrary to the 16nm from TSMC.

Anyway, the GTX 1050 Ti also offers significantly higher clock rates than the normal GTX 1050 versions well 1493 – 1620 MHz vs 1364 – 1493 MHz. This contributes to a significant performance boost over the standard version but the rest of the specs remain the same. The GPU offers 4GB of GDDR5 memory connected via 128-bit interface and transfer rates as high as 112 GB/s.

You can browse through our top GPUs ranking: http://laptopmedia.com/top-laptop-graphics-ranking/

Here you will find other useful information and every notebook with this GPU that we’ve tested: http://laptopmedia.com/video-card/nvidia-geforce-gtx-1050-ti-4gb-gddr5/

Gaming tests

Temperatures

As usual, we ran the stress tests on the Omen 15 to see how the cooling system handles heavy workloads for extended periods of time. Of course, the extreme nature of the torture tests doesn’t allow us to compare it to normal usage scenario but they are still the best way to determine the overall stability and effectiveness of the cooling system in the long run.

We started off with 100% CPU load for an hour. We noticed that the CPU ran at surprisingly low temperatures but only due to the poor Turbo Boost utilization of the CPU. While the Core i7-7700HQ is expected to reach 3.1-3.4 GHz with four active cores, the chip on the Omen 15 struggled to maintain even 2.7-2.8 GHz, often going below the base frequency.

When we turned on the GPU stress test as well, we’ve noticed slight CPU throttling but nothing serious. The CPU ran at around 2.6 – 2.7 GHz stable, although temperatures were close to 100 degrees Celsius. In any case, we are happy to report that the GPU didn’t throttle and ran at its maximum capacity, although, temperatures were toasty 84 degrees.

However, temperatures on the surface appeared to be normal with the only warm area being around the Numpad block. This leaves us with mixed feelings about the cooling design. Yes, it does keep the heat away from the user’s hands but it also keeps the internals running pretty hot, especially when you consider the fact that the GTX 1050 Ti isn’t hard to keep cool and the CPU didn’t reach its maximum frequency at any point of the test. Also, we can’t miss mentioning the constantly spinning cooling fan even when the laptop is idle.

Verdict

We really hoped that if HP is charging so much for the Omen 15, it would offer at least slightly better user experience than the general competition. However, the Omen 15 not only doesn’t impress with build, performance or display quality, it drags behind its rivals in most aspects.

For starters, build quality isn’t great – wobbly screen, flexible interior in some places, shallow keyboard with small arrow keys (it’s good for typing but not for gaming) and nearly unusable touchpad. The upside here is that the chassis is thinner and lighter than the competition. Secondly, the display just isn’t what we’ve expected. You can get the ASUS ROG GL553VE for similar if not slightly lower price with superb display or you can get the very same image quality out of the considerably less expensive Acer Aspire VX 15 and Lenovo Legion Y520. And thirdly, the cooling system doen’t seem to be all that great – cooling fans spinning during idle, CPU doesn’t reach its maximum Turbo Boost frequency (this might just be an isolated incident with our unit but since we are reviewing a retail unit, we feel obligated to include that in the cons list) and the CPU and the GPU run pretty hot under load. We do have to give credit for the heat dispersion as the notebook’s surface remains pretty cool even under extreme scenarios.

But despite all the drawbacks, the HP Omen 15 excels in one key aspect – battery life. The big battery unit can keep the system running for quite some time before dying – something only the Dell Inspiron 7567 can beat at this point.

If the price was competitive and comparable to Acer, Lenovo, ASUS and Dell’s solutions, we could have let some of cons pass. For about $150, you can even get the Acer Aspire V 15 Nitro BE (VN7-593G) with GTX 1060 and a nice FHD IPS panel. Or for a few bucks less, you can get the Lenovo Legion Y520, Acer Aspire VX 15, ASUS ROG Strix GL553VE and Dell’s Inspiron 7567, which all have almost identical to the Omen 15’s specs. When you put it this way, it’s really hard to recommend the Omen 15, unless the few extra grams and millimeters that HP was able the shave off are of great importance to you and battery life is a deciding factor.

You can find the available configurations and their prices here: http://amzn.to/2so9DP3

Apple’s latest MacBook Pro lineup is a good example of how technology has not only catch up with today’s market trends but also got past them. The new MacBooks was another typical Apple attempt to redefine today’s laptops and how we use them but this time around, it backfired. Yes, the new MacBook Pro 15 is just as amazing as the last model with excellent performance, flawless display, surprisingly good battery life and impeccable build quality but it misses to address the concerns of such large number of users. The limited connectivity options have driven a big portion of content creators to switch to Windows or stick with their good old MacBooks. Also, the obviously stubborn decision to implement the so-called Touch Bar instead of a touchscreen is a mixed bag and fails to meet the expectation of a large number of convertible fans. Some might argue, though, why the hell you’d need a touchscreen on a laptop if it doesn’t have a 360-degree rotatable hinge. And they are probably right.

In any case, Apple’s MacBook Pro 15 is an excellent piece of technology offering “almost” the latest on the hardware scene equipped with Intel Core i7-6700HQ, AMD Radeon Pro 450 based on the company’s latest Polaris architecture, 16GB of DDR4-2133 LPDDR3 RAM (soldered) and a fast 256GB M.2 PCIe NVMe SSD. All that hardware draws power from an impressively big 76Wh battery unit crammed inside this thin and light chassis. And, as usual, the display features an unusual diagonal and resolution for today’s standard – 15.4-inch IPS panel with 2880 x 1800 pixels resolution, which we’ve thoroughly tested and examined in our review below. So is the new MacBook Pro 15 worth your hard-earned money or Dell’s XPS 15 is the better choice for you? We help you decide.

You can find all of the available configurations here: http://amzn.to/2sH1V2A

Contents

Retail package

The laptop comes with a luxurious white box which doesn’t contain anything out of the ordinary – just the laptop itself, the AC adapter and the USB-C charging cable.

Design and construction

And as always, the MacBook Pro 15 surprises with an elegant, simplistic, clean and sophisticated design. The build quality is borderline perfect – there’s nothing perfect, of course – and aluminum is the only material used for the case. But even though metal is the main material, Apple has managed to keep the profile thin (just 16 mm) and the weight low (1.8 kg). That’s pretty close to Dell’s XPS 15, which also excels in portability.

Let’s start with the usual. The lid’s anodized aluminum plate feels rock-solid and doesn’t bend in any direction even when pressed hard in the middle. Speaking of which, you will find only Apple’s logo there but this time, it’s not backlit and smudges are pretty visible due to the glass-like surface. Opening the laptop is made easy and possible with just one hand. There’s a relatively big and sensible indentation right in front of the touchpad so you can lift up the lid more easily. The screen uses a centered hinge design that feels stealthy, linear and keeps the display stable even on unstable surface. Moreover, the casing of the hinge is now metal compared to the plastic one from the previous generation. The bottom piece connects seamlessly with the base and provides two discreet vent openings on the sides for extra airflow.

The sides, as we already mentioned, are extremely thin measuring at just 16 mm with the lid closed. Another thing that caught our attention is that when the notebook is closed, the base and the lid fit perfectly and there are no protruding edges. A great example of the excellent craftsmanship. But despite the super thin profile, the MacBook Pro 15 manages to disappoint in a very big way – connectivity. A large number of users complain about not having the bare minimum set of I/Os you’d normally find on a 15-inch laptop. Yes, sure, the 4x USB-C 3.1 Thunderbolt 3 connectors provide 40 Gbit/s bandwidth each and when used with dongles, you can expand your I/Os with numerous USB 3.0, HDMI, DisplayPort etc. connectors and even support PCIe 3.0 external devices. But unfortunately, not everyone wants to use dongles on the go. That’s why the MacBook Pro 15 suffered from a lot of criticism since its launch. The good news is that you can charge the laptop using any of the four available USB-C ports, yet again, the nifty MagSafe connector is gone.

And now let’s take a closer look at the interior and input devices. There’s nothing innovative about them but manage to impress with simplicity and comfortable use. The keyboard might not suit everybody due to its extremely short travel and to be honest, we also like long travel keyboards. However, the audible and tactile clicky feedback of each keypress is so satisfying that it can be used for a good ASMR video. We got used to the keyboard design quite easy and typing on it is just a delight. Each keycap is slightly concaved for extra comfort, which is a nice finishing touch. And as for the touchpad, well, if you ever used a MacBook you will know that it offers the best trackpad experience on the market. The new MacBook Pro 15 uses the already familiar Force Touch technology using a haptic engine that produces even tactile feedback mouse clicks all over the surface. Speaking of the surface, it’s huge. Probably the biggest trackpad currently on the market, which in combination with the Force Touch technology, perfect software optimization for enhanced precision and the buttery-smooth glass gliding surface makes up for an outstanding touchpad performance.

Touch Bar

One of the main features that define the MacBook Pro 15 is the so-called Touch Bar. In an attempt to replace the touchscreen, Apple has implemented an OLED strip that gives you touch controls, shortcuts and extra options in some applications. You can also call Siri, adjust the screen brightness, switch between applications, set the LED keyboard backlight level, adjust the volume and access the usual media controls. Pressing the function key brings up the F-key row and the Esc button. When watching a movie, the Touch Bar gives you control over the seeker and media controls but that’s only available when using the QuickTime player.

Which brings us to our first serious complaint. The Touch Bar’s usefulness strongly depends on the applications that support or will support this feature. For example, you can’t have access to your bookmarked pages when browsing on Chrome but you can do it on the Safari web browser. That’s limiting the user and at this point, the Touch Bar feature is borderline gimmicky. Don’t get us wrong, though, we really like the idea and we see how this is more convenient than a touchscreen for this form factor but it needs more time to be implemented and used in third-party applications.

Disassembly, maintenance and upgrade options

MacBooks have always been notorious for their limited upgradability but this one takes the cake. Upon disassembly, you will see that the there’s no SSD to change or upgrade the memory. All components are soldered and even the battery is glued to the chassis and isn’t easy to change. In fact, the bottom piece fits the base so perfectly, that you will find it hard to remove without the help of a suction cup or super thin plastic tools for prying up. Also, make sure you choose carefully which configuration of the MacBook Pro 15 you need because the RAM chips are soldered and can go only up to 16GB of LPDDR3-2133.

Cooling system

The cooling system proved to be efficient, quiet and reliable in our stress tests, especially considering the thin nature of the notebook. However, the cooling design appears to be pretty simple using only one huge heat pipe and two fans. The former goes across the CPU and GPU like a bridge.

Display quality

The MacBook Pro 15 uses a 15.4-inch IPS panel with an unusual resolution of 2880 x 1800 and 16:10 aspect ratio. The pixel density is 220 ppi and the pixel pitch is 0.115 x 0.115 mm. It can be considered as “Retina” when viewed from a distance equal or greater than 40 cm.

The MacBook Pro has comfortable viewing angles from a 45-degree incline.

We were able to record a record-breaking peak brightness of 519 cd/m2 in the middle and 501 cd/m2 as average across the surface which is only 8% deviation. The native color temperature is 6800K which is pretty close to the optimal 6500K while the contrast ratio is 1300:1.

The maximum dE2000 color deviation is just 1.9 in the lower left and upper left corner of the screen. Anything above 4.0 is usually unwanted when looking for a screen suitable for color-sensitive work.

Color reproduction

To make sure we are on the same page, we would like to give you a little introduction of the sRGB color gamut and the Adobe RGB. To start, there’s the CIE 1976 Uniform Chromaticity Diagram that represents the visible specter of colors by the human eye, giving you a better perception of the color gamut coverage and the color accuracy.

Inside the black triangle, you will see the standard color gamut (sRGB) that is being used by millions of people in HDTV and on the web. As for the Adobe RGB, this is used in professional cameras, monitors etc for printing. Basically, colors inside the black triangle are used by everyone and this is the essential part of the color quality and color accuracy of a mainstream notebook.

Still, we’ve included other color spaces like the famous DCI-P3 standard used by movie studios, as well as the digital UHD Rec.2020 standard. Rec.2020, however, is still a thing of the future and it’s difficult for today’s displays to cover that well. We’ve also included the so-called Michael Pointer gamut, or Pointer’s gamut, which represents the colors that naturally occur around us every day.

As you can see from the graph below, the screen is able to reproduce 100% of the sRGB color gamut and 97% of the DCI-P3 color space. The latter puts this particular display in a category of its own.

The following graphs are drawn using the native white point, 2.2 gamma, sRGB mode and using our custom profile. We did the tests using the Safari web browser and we observed really accurate color reproduction of the primary colors. We used the MacBook Pro’s DisplayCalibratorAssistant to set the 2.2 gamma.

Below you will see practically the same image but with the color circles representing the reference colors and the white circles being the result. You can see main and additional colors with 25%, 50%, 75% and 100% saturation inside the sRGB gamut pre and post calibration.

The “Design and Gaming” profile is created at 140 cd/m2 brightness, D65 (6500K) white point and optimal gamma in sRGB mode.

We tested the accuracy of the display with 24 commonly used colors like light and dark human skin, blue sky, green grass, orange etc. You can check out the results at factory condition and also, with the “Design and Gaming” profile.

The next figure shows how well the display is able to reproduce really dark parts of an image, which is essential when watching movies or playing games in low ambient light.

The left side of the image represents the display with stock settings, while the right one is with the “Gaming and Web Design” profile activated. On the horizontal axis, you will find the grayscale and on the vertical axis – the luminance of the display. On the two graphs below you can easily check for yourself how your display handles the darkest nuances but keep in mind that this also depends on the settings of your current display, the calibration, the viewing angle and the surrounding light conditions.

Response time

We test the reaction time of the pixels with the usual “black-to-white” and “white-to-black” method from 10% to 90% and reverse.

We recorded Fall Time + Rise Time = 31 ms.

PWM (Screen flickering)

Pulse-width modulation (PWM) is an easy way to control monitor brightness. When you lower the brightness, the light intensity of the backlight is not lowered, but instead turned off and on by the electronics with a frequency indistinguishable to the human eye. In these light impulses the light/no-light time ratio varies, while brightness remains unchanged, which is harmful to your eyes. You can read more about that in our dedicated article on PWM.

We didn’t detect any screen flickering throughout all brightness levels making it safe to use for long periods of time in this regard, of course.

Blue light emissions

Installing of our Health-Guard profile not only eliminates PWM but also reduces the harmful Blue Light emissions while keeping the colors of the screen perceptually accurate. If you’re not familiar with the Blue light, the TL;DR version is – emissions that negatively affect your eyes, skin, and your whole body. You can find more information about that in our dedicated article on Blue Light.

You can see the levels of emitted blue light on the spectral power distribution (SDP) graph.

Conclusion

Our tests confirm what we’ve suspected from the very beginning – the display quality is superb and it’s nothing we’ve seen so far even in the high-end spectrum of the Windows laptops. The record-breaking peak brightness makes it usable even under direct sunlight while the excellent contrast ratio, wide sRGB and DCI-P3 color space coverage along with the accurate color reproduction out of the box make the display useful not only for multimedia purposes but for color-sensitive professional work as well. The absence of PWM across all brightness levels is another great plus to consider here.

However, if you want the best possible viewing experience and color accuracy, we suggest using our custom profiles as they offer even better color reproduction, visibility in dark areas of an image and the Health-Guard profile reduces the negative impact of the blue light emissions while retaining the color accuracy as much as possible.

Buy our display profiles

Since our profiles are tailored for each individual display model, this article and its respective profile package is meant for MacBook Pro 15 configurations with 15.4″ 2880 × 1800 IPS screen and the laptop can be found at Amazon: http://amzn.to/2ta4ms8

*Should you have problems with downloading the purchased file, try using a different browser to open the link you’ll receive via e-mail. If the download target is a .php file instead of an archive, change the file extension to .zip or contact us at bg.laptopmedia@gmail.com.

Read more about the profiles HERE.

NOTE: You need to place the ICC color profile in the Library/ColorSync/Profiles in your home directory. Then the ColorSync Utility will recognize the profiles and can be activated.

In addition to receiving efficient and health-friendly profiles, by buying LaptopMedia's products you also support the development of our labs, where we test devices in order to produce the most objective reviews possible.

Office Work

Office Work should be used mostly by users who spend most of the time looking at pieces of text, tables or just surfing. This profile aims to deliver better distinctness and clarity by keeping a flat gamma curve (2.20), native color temperature and perceptually accurate colors.

$4.96

Buy Now Checkout Added to cart

Design and Gaming

This profile is aimed at designers who work with colors professionally, and for games and movies as well. Design and Gaming takes display panels to their limits, making them as accurate as possible in the sRGB IEC61966-2-1 standard for Web and HDTV, at white point D65.

$4.97

Buy Now Checkout Added to cart

Health-Guard

THealth-Guard eliminates the harmful Pulse-Width Modulation (PWM) and reduces the negative Blue Light which affects our eyes and body. Since it’s custom tailored for every panel, it manages to keep the colors perceptually accurate. Health-Guard simulates paper so the pressure on the eyes is greatly reduced.

$4.98

Buy Now Checkout Added to cart

$9.99

Buy Now Checkout Added to cart

Sound

The stereo loudspeakers provide excellent sound quality in the low, mid and high frequencies. The clarity is good even at higher volume.

Specs sheet

The current specs sheet refers to this particular model – configurations may differ depending on your region.

Check price

CPU	Intel Core i7-6700HQ (4-core, 2.60 – 3.50 GHz, 6MB cache)
RAM	16GB (2x 8192MB)- LPDDR3, 2133MHz
GPU	AMD Radeon Pro 450 (2GB GDDR5)
HDD/SSD	256GB PCIe NVMe SSD
Display	15.4-inch – 2880×1800 (Retina display) IPS, glossy
Optical drive	–
Connectivity	Wi-Fi 802.11ac, Bluetooth 4.2
Other features	4x USB-C 3.1 (Gen2 with Thunderbolt support) 3.5 mm audio jack keyboard backlight Touch ID Sensor Touch Bar
Battery	76Wh
Thickness	16 mm (0.63″)
Weight	1.8 kg (3.98 lbs)

Software

For the writing of this review, we used the latest version of MacOS at the time and in order to run our full set of tests like temperature tests, gaming tests and synthetic benchmarks on the CPU and GPU, we installed Windows 10 (64-bit) using Boot Camp. The process is extremely simple and if you want to learn more about the dual-boot option, we suggest reading the tutorials on Apple’s official website.

Battery life

There have been a lot of complaints about the MacBooks Pro 15’s battery life but we didn’t have any trouble with it. Probably all tests were performed right after the launch and a quick research found that the early versions of the macOS of Sierra had problems with the switchable graphics features – the Radeon Pro 450 didn’t switch off entirely. Anyway, we ran the usual web browsing and video playback tests using Google Chrome and VLC Media Player, respectively. Due to the big 76Wh battery and macOS’ famous battery optimization, the laptop achieved outstanding battery runtimes in both tests, considering the 15-inch form factor, of course. It’s definitely one of the most enduring 15-inch notebooks we’ve tested so far.

Of course, all tests were performed using the usual settings – Wi-Fi constantly running and screen brightness set to 120 cd/m2.

Web browsing

In order to simulate real-life conditions, we used our own script for automatic web browsing through over 70 websites.

The laptop scored quite an impressive result for a 15-inch device with high TDP CPU – 626 minutes (10 hours and 26 minutes).

Video playback

For every test like this, we use the same video in HD.

Considerably lower result but still pretty good – 444 minutes (7 hours and 24 minutes).

CPU – Intel Core i7-6700HQ

Intel Core i7-6700HQ represents the Skylake H family and it’s considered as a high-performance chip with high voltage – 45W TDP. This is a step down from its direct predecessor – Core i7-4700HQ but matches its short-lived predecessor Core i7-5700HQ. The Core i7-6700HQ has four cores ticking at 2.6GHz and can go up to 3.5 GHz for one active core and 3.1 GHz for four active cores. The silicon supports the so-called Hyper-Threading technology that emulates one virtual core for each physical and thus establishing a total of 8 threads.

Furthermore, the chip is manufactured using 14nm FinFET process and integrates Intel HD Graphics 530 GPU with 24 EU (Executable Units) clocked at 350 – 1050 MHz. The memory controller supports up to 64GB of DDR3 or DDR4 RAM at 1600 or 2133 MHz respectively. The CPU is suitable for heavy applications and gaming.

You can browse through our top CPUs ranking: http://laptopmedia.com/top-laptop-cpu-ranking/

Here you will find other useful information and every notebook we’ve tested with this processor: http://laptopmedia.com/processor/intel-core-i7-6700hq/

Fritz

Fritz is a chess benchmark that tests the computing capabilities of the CPU with various chess moves. The Intel Core i7-6700HQ managed to get 12.317 million moves per second. For comparison, one of the most powerful PCs, Deep(er) Blue, was able to squeeze out 200 million moves per second. In 1997 Deep(er) Blue even beat the famous Garry Kasparov with 3.5 to 2.5.

GPU – AMD Radeon Pro 450 (2GB GDDR5)

The AMD Radeon Pro 450 is a mobile GPU based on AMD’s Polaris architecture built upon 14nm FinFET manufacturing process. The chip can be found in the entry-level configurations of 2016’s Apple MacBook Pro 15 and uses 640 shaders clocked at 800 MHz base clock speed. The memory configuration uses the 128-bit bus, 2GB of GDDR5 VRAM clocked at 5080 MHz.

As like the rest of the Polaris-based chips from AMD, the Radeon Pro 450 supports the same features like DisplayPort 1.3 and 1.4, HDMI 2.0, AMD FreeSync and DirectX 12 renderer, although the latter is only supported on Windows 10. The GPU is rated at slightly below 35W TDP.

You can browse through our top GPUs ranking: http://laptopmedia.com/top-laptop-graphics-ranking/

Here you will find other useful information and every notebook we’ve tested with this GPU: http://laptopmedia.com/video-card/amd-radeon-pro-450-2gb-gddr5/

Gaming tests

Obviously, the MacBook Pro 15 isn’t made for gaming but if you plan to do some light gaming from time to time on the Windows partition, we have some good news – the AMD Radeon Pro 450 is fully capable of running some of the modern games in low resolution and low to medium graphics presets.

Temperatures

We ran the usual stress tests on the new MacBook Pro 15 on a Windows 10 (64-bit) operating system using Boot Camp since we saw no difference in the performance of the hardware when running on Windows or macOS. Of course, such extended and heavy workloads can’t represent real-life usage but at the same time, they provide a much-needed information about the cooling system’s stability and effectiveness.

We start off with 100% CPU load for an hour – the Core i7-6700HQ was running at 3.1 GHz for the first few minutes but then starting going back and forth between 2.6 GHz and 3.1 GHz. This fluctuation can’t be considered as throttling because this is exactly the range in which we expect the chip to run at full load with four active cores. However, temperatures seem a bit too high almost reaching 100 degrees Celsius.

While the CPU torture test was running, we switched on the GPU stress test as well. The CPU’s temperatures didn’t change, in fact, they went down by a few degrees due to the lowered frequency. The processor stayed at its base 2.6 GHz clock speed while the system utilized the Radeon Pro 450’s full performance at 800 MHz while running surprisingly cool – at 75 °C. Although the CPU’s temperatures were really high, we cannot miss the fact that the chassis is only 16 mm thin and even under heavy and extended load, neither of the chips throttled. For instance, the Dell XPS 15, which is comparably thin and has the same processor, had troubles with thermal throttling. This means that the MacBook Pro 15’s cooling system is excellently designed – it’s reliable and effective.

We also measured the temperatures across the surface only to find out that it’s cool despite the aluminum interior, which should disperse the heat easier than plastic. Only the upper part and the center of the keyboard appeared to be a bit warm but then again, this is after at least two hours of heavy workload. We were also surprised by the exceptionally silent cooling fans. During normal use and short benchmarks, the cooling fans didn’t turn on and only extended workload triggered them and even then, they weren’t annoyingly loud.

Verdict

With a price tag like this and since this is an Apple notebook, our expectations are high and we are happy to say that in most aspects, the new MacBook Pro 15 delivers. There are some things that need to be considered but there are no fundamental flaws in the design, build, hardware, etc. It’s almost perfectly crafted device with few drawbacks – the design is simplistic, clean and the chassis’ build quality is impeccable. The same goes for the input devices, although some users won’t be happy with the keyboard’s shallow keys. In our opinion, it just takes some time adjusting and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with them. Speaking of input devices, we can’t miss mentioning the iconic feature – the Touch Bar. We definitely see why Apple went after the Touch Bar instead of a full-fledged touchscreen but the lack of third-party apps support (for now) makes it borderline gimmicky. Still, if most of the time you use Apple’s built-in apps, you will definitely find it useful and comfortable to use.

With the looks and case on the side, the hardware inside is nothing less than ideal for a business machine, multimedia and even light gaming, if you are running Boot Camp, of course. The cooling system keeps things cool and quiet even during medium to high workload while making sure the Core i7-6700HQ and AMD’s Radeon Pro 450’s run at their full capacity, which is downright amazing considering the thin and light chassis.

Another great thing about this notebook is the gorgeous display. It’s suitable not only for multimedia but for professional color-sensitive work as well with wide sRGB and DCI-P3 color gamut coverage, exceptionally high maximum brightness for comfortable work outdoors, excellent contrast ratio and pretty accurate color reproduction out of the box. More importantly, the display doesn’t use PWM for regulating screen brightness making it safe to use for long periods of time. Of course, to get the best out of this panel, we suggest downloading our custom profiles as they improve even further the color reproduction.

However, the biggest misstep on Apple’s end is the limited upgradability. Once you configure your MacBook, you cannot upgrade it anymore as the SSD and the RAM chips are soldered to the motherboard. Moreover, the maximum amount of memory is 16GB of LPDDR3-2133 and this may not be enough for some users but will be an overkill for the majority anyway. We consider this a bigger drawback than the missing conventional I/O – the four USB-C Thunderbolt connectors should be more than enough for you to take advantage of all kinds of display connectors, standard USBs, SD card readers, etc. The problem is that you will most likely have to carry some dongles around – #DongleLife.

And now to answer the burning question – is it worth it and are there any good Windows alternatives? Well, it depends on what are you looking for. If you are into upgradability, more GPU horsepower and you absolutely hate dongles, well then the Dell XPS 15 is the one for you. We honestly can’t think of any other Windows laptop that can come close to MacBook Pro 15. In any other aspect, the MacBook Pro 15 is considerably better as long as you are willing to spend so much money on a laptop.

You can find all of the available configurations here: http://amzn.to/2sH1V2A

At first, you may think that Acer is offering the same hardware in different packages since there are three different Acer models with GTX 1060 but all of them are priced differently and have a different target audience. The Aspire V 15 and V 17 Nitro BE notebooks, for example, are not gaming-oriented anymore. They provide just about the same performance as the Predator lineup but try to appeal to a more sophisticated type of user looking for extra power on the go without sacrificing portability. The Predator 17 G5-793G, on the other hand, offers a superior cooling solution with some extra features like G-Sync and a display with higher refresh rate. Also, the price is considerably higher. So here comes the middle ground – the Predator Helios 300. We were able to get an early sample of the 15-inch model with GTX 1060, which is not only more reasonably priced but it’s also more portable than the Predator 17 (G5-793) and has a more gaming-centric appearance compared to the V 15 Nitro BE.

The starting price of this machine is around $1 099 and offers just about everything you’d need from a 15-inch gaming laptop – Intel Core i7-7700HQ, NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 with 6GB of GDDR5 VRAM, up to 32GB of DDR4-2400 memory, 2.5-inch HDD plus another M.2 PCIe NVMe-enabled SSD slot, IPS display, aggressive design with red accents and brushed aluminum as main material and a keyboard suitable for gaming. What’s lacking and what are the trade-offs here? Let’s see in the full review down below.

You can find the available configurations here: http://amzn.to/2rFFJT9

Contents

Retail package

The Predator Helios 300 comes in an identical to the rest of the Predator laptops package – luxurious black box with all the usual user manuals, AC adapter and a power cord.

Design and construction

At first, the laptop resembles its considerably more affordable sibling, Acer Aspire VX 15, but the building materials are largely different. Interestingly enough, though, the chassis isn’t much beefier tipping the scale at 2.58 kg and a thickness of around 26 mm it’s actually thinner than the VX 15.

Although the notebook’s design isn’t any special or ground-breaking, we found it to be quite sturdy and reliable in most cases. The lid, for example, offers a standard brushed aluminum sheet with a plastic patterned element on the top, probably for the Wi-Fi antennas. The material itself appears to be fairly sturdy – when pressing the middle, the surface bends ever so slightly and doesn’t cause ripples to appear on the LCD screen. However, the material is prone to fingerprints and smudges, as usual. The hinges provide smooth opening with one hand and satisfying linear travel but due to fact that they are spaced apart, the center of the bottom bezel is unsupported and can be twisted easily. The bottom side incorporates black, roughened plastic with some grills for intake and two small service hatches for easier memory and storage upgrade.

The sides provide the bare minimum of I/O but at least the connectors are distributed evenly on both sides. The right side accommodates the RJ-45, USB-C 3.1 (probably Gen 1), HDMI, SD card reader and a standard USB 3.0 connector. On the right, you will find only the 3.5 mm audio jack, two USB 2.0 connectors and the DC charging port. On the back, you will see the iconic heat dispersing grills with red accent but if you look closely, only the left side provides real vent openings while the right side serves only as aesthetic purpose.

Opening the laptop reveals somehow familiar interior – brushed aluminum surface with chamfered edges around the trackpad and the sides. Not only does it look stylish but it’s also really rigid. Pressing the palm rest area and the center of the keyboard doesn’t cause the material to bend. Anyway, the keyboard appears to be identical to the one on the VX 15 which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. The keys provide tactile clicky feedback while the keycaps are slightly concaved for extra comfort while typing. We would have appreciated a slightly deeper travel, though. There are also the usual media control keys above the Numpad area and the arrow keys are full-sized but not well-separated. And as for the touchpad – it’s accurate, responsive and registers mouse clicks accordingly. Still, they feel a bit stiff while the gliding surface isn’t the best we’ve seen.

All in all, the Helios 300 is a well-built 15-inch gaming laptop that isn’t too heavy and big to carry around, has decent input devices and appears to be pretty sturdy with good choice of materials. We definitely recommend it in this price range if the above-mentioned properties are of great importance to you.

Disassembly, maintenance and upgrade options

The notebook’s bottom piece offers two service hatches but they give you access only to the two RAM slots and the HDD. You will have to dig deeper for the rest of the components such as the M.2 SSD.

Storage upgrades – 2.5-inch HDD/SSD, M.2 SSD

As usual, the notebook offers the standard 2.5-inch HDD and an M.2 PCIe NVMe SSD. Both slots came full in our sample – the HDD is manufactured by Toshiba while the M.2 PCIe NVMe SSD is Intel’s 600P series with 512GB capacity, 2280 in size.

RAM

One of the service lids gives easy access to the RAM slots. In our case, both are taken by a 16GB DDR4-2400 Kingston chip each.

Other components

The Wi-Fi card can be found next to the cooling fan (with the bottom of the chassis facing up) and it’s Intel 7265NGW.

The laptop uses a relatively big 48Wh battery located under the wrist rest area.

Cooling system

The cooling design is unusual given the powerful hardware inside and raises some concerns about its effectiveness. Both cooling fans are stuck together and are connected via three heat pipes going across two heatsinks. We’ve seen similar design in the Lenovo Legion Y520 and we weren’t happy with its performance. We will see if this one does any better.

Display quality

The Helios 300 sample we’ve tested features a budget IPS panel with Full HD (1920×1080) resolution manufactured by LG with model number LP156WF6-SPK6. The pixel density is the usual for a 15-inch panel – 142 ppi while the pixel pitch is 0.18 x 0.18 mm. The screen can be considered as “Retina” when viewed from a distance equal or greater than 60 cm.

Viewing angles are good since the display incorporates an IPS panel.

We were able to measure a maximum brightness of 289 cd/m2 in the center of the panel and 273 cd/m2 as average across the surface with just 10% deviation.

Below, you can see the color temperature at 140 cd/m2 (44% brightness in this case) and as you scroll lower, you will see the color temperature that we’ve measured across all brightness levels. At 140 cd/m2, the panel has slightly colder than usual color temperature – 6900K but between 30% and 90% white, the color temperature is optimal – 6500K.

The color deviation dE2000 compared to the center of the screen is just 2.3 – a good result since values above 4.0 are unwanted. The contrast ratio is high – 1080:1.

Color reproduction

To make sure we are on the same page, we would like to give you a little introduction of the sRGB color gamut and the Adobe RGB. To start, there’s the CIE 1976 Uniform Chromaticity Diagram that represents the visible specter of colors by the human eye, giving you a better perception of the color gamut coverage and the color accuracy.

Inside the black triangle, you will see the standard color gamut (sRGB) that is being used by millions of people in HDTV and on the web. As for the Adobe RGB, this is used in professional cameras, monitors etc for printing. Basically, colors inside the black triangle are used by everyone and this is the essential part of the color quality and color accuracy of a mainstream notebook.

Still, we’ve included other color spaces like the famous DCI-P3 standard used by movie studios, as well as the digital UHD Rec.2020 standard. Rec.2020, however, is still a thing of the future and it’s difficult for today’s displays to cover that well. We’ve also included the so-called Michael Pointer gamut, or Pointer’s gamut, which represents the colors that naturally occur around us every day.

Unfortunately, the display covers just 54% of the sRGB gamut so it lacks almost half of the colors used on the web and in HDTV.

Below you will see practically the same image but with the color circles representing the reference colors and the white circles being the result. You can see main and additional colors with 25%, 50%, 75% and 100% saturation inside the sRGB gamut pre and post calibration.

The “Design and Gaming” profile is created at 140 cd/m2 brightness, D65 (6500K) white point and optimal gamma in sRGB mode.

We tested the accuracy of the display with 24 commonly used colors like light and dark human skin, blue sky, green grass, orange etc. You can check out the results at factory condition and also, with the “Design and Gaming” profile.

The next figure shows how well the display is able to reproduce really dark parts of an image, which is essential when watching movies or playing games in low ambient light.

The left side of the image represents the display with stock settings, while the right one is with the “Gaming and Web Design” profile activated. On the horizontal axis, you will find the grayscale and on the vertical axis – the luminance of the display. On the two graphs below you can easily check for yourself how your display handles the darkest nuances but keep in mind that this also depends on the settings of your current display, the calibration, the viewing angle and the surrounding light conditions.

Gaming capabilities (Response time)

We test the reaction time of the pixels with the usual “black-to-white” and “white-to-black” method from 10% to 90% and reverse.

We recorded Fall Time + Rise Time = 23 ms.

PWM (Screen flickering)

Pulse-width modulation (PWM) is an easy way to control monitor brightness. When you lower the brightness, the light intensity of the backlight is not lowered, but instead turned off and on by the electronics with a frequency indistinguishable to the human eye. In these light impulses the light/no-light time ratio varies, while brightness remains unchanged, which is harmful to your eyes. You can read more about that in our dedicated article on PWM.

We are happy to report that the panel is PWM-free so it’s safe to use across all brightness levels.

Blue light emissions

Installing of our Health-Guard profile not only eliminates PWM but also reduces the harmful Blue Light emissions while keeping the colors of the screen perceptually accurate. If you’re not familiar with the Blue light, the TL;DR version is – emissions that negatively affect your eyes, skin, and your whole body. You can find more information about that in our dedicated article on Blue Light.

You can see the levels of emitted blue light on the spectral power distribution (SDP) graph.

Conclusion

To be honest, we were expecting a completely different panel with much better sRGB coverage and higher maximum brightness. Instead, we got a budget IPS panel comparable to the one found in the considerably cheaper Acer Aspire VX 15. At this point, you are better off with the Acer Aspire V 15 Nitro BE (VN7-593G), although the latter costs more than the Helios 300. It really depends on how much you value screen quality.

The good news, however, is that the display doesn’t use PWM for regulating screen brightness so it can be used for extended periods of time by people with sensitive eyes. Also, our custom profiles make the panel a little bit better for gaming and multimedia.

Buy our display profiles

Since our profiles are tailored for each individual display model, this article and its respective profile package is meant for Acer Pedator Helios 300 configurations with 15.6″ LG LP156WF6-SPK6 (FHD, 1920 × 1080) IPS screen and the laptop can be found at Amazon: http://amzn.to/2sX0NbU

*Should you have problems with downloading the purchased file, try using a different browser to open the link you’ll receive via e-mail. If the download target is a .php file instead of an archive, change the file extension to .zip or contact us at bg.laptopmedia@gmail.com.

Read more about the profiles HERE.

In addition to receiving efficient and health-friendly profiles, by buying LaptopMedia's products you also support the development of our labs, where we test devices in order to produce the most objective reviews possible.

Office Work

Office Work should be used mostly by users who spend most of the time looking at pieces of text, tables or just surfing. This profile aims to deliver better distinctness and clarity by keeping a flat gamma curve (2.20), native color temperature and perceptually accurate colors.

$4.96

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Design and Gaming

This profile is aimed at designers who work with colors professionally, and for games and movies as well. Design and Gaming takes display panels to their limits, making them as accurate as possible in the sRGB IEC61966-2-1 standard for Web and HDTV, at white point D65.

$4.97

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Health-Guard

THealth-Guard eliminates the harmful Pulse-Width Modulation (PWM) and reduces the negative Blue Light which affects our eyes and body. Since it’s custom tailored for every panel, it manages to keep the colors perceptually accurate. Health-Guard simulates paper so the pressure on the eyes is greatly reduced.

$4.98

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$9.99

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Specs sheet

The current specs sheet refers to this particular model – configurations may differ depending on your region.

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CPU	Intel Core i7-7700HQ (4-core, 2.80 – 3.80 GHz, 6MB cache)
RAM	16GB (2x 8096MB) – DDR4, 2400MHz
GPU	NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 Ti (4GB GDDR5)
HDD/SSD	1TB HDD + 256GB M.2 PCIe NVMe SSD
Display	15.6-inch – 1920×1080 (Full HD) IPS, matte
Optical drive	–
Connectivity	LAN 10/100/1000 Mbps, Wi-Fi 802.11ac (2×2), Bluetooth 4.0
Other features	1x USB 3.0 2x USB 2.0 1x USB-C 3.1 (Gen 1) 3.5 mm audio jack LAN HDMI card reader (SD, MMC, MS) red keyboard LED backlight
Battery	48Wh
Thickness	27.94 mm (1.1″)
Weight	2.7 kg (5.95 lbs)