Chillblast Prestige i5-4200SH review

The Chillblast Prestige i5-4200SH may not look particularly pretty from the outside, but this £600 laptop is almost as powerful as one of Apple’s top of the range 13-inch Macbook Pro laptops. This is thanks to its 2.5GHz Intel Core i5-4200M processor, which can Turbo Boost up to 3.1GHz when there’s enough thermal headroom.

This is by far one of the quickest dual core processors we’ve seen on a laptop and, paired with 8GB of RAM, the Prestige i5-4200SH waltzed through our multimedia benchmarks with a huge score of 60 overall. This is just three points behind Apple’s £1,499 13in Macbook Pro, and it outperforms many Core i7 ultra-portables as well, making the Prestige i5-4200SH one of the fastest laptops around for its price. It should have no trouble handling multiple applications at once, and it’s a good fit for demanding media programs as well.

Unusually for a Chillblast system, the Prestige i5-4200SH doesn’t have a dedicated graphics chip, but the laptop’s integrated Intel HD Graphics 4600 should still be able to play most 3D games if you lower the detail settings. In our Dirt Showdown test, it managed a steady 25.8fps on High quality at a 1,280×720 resolution, which is one of the better scores we’ve seen from this chip. It’s still not quite fast enough to play fast-paced action games at a comfortable speed, but we only had to lower the detail settings to Medium to get a smoother 36.8fps at the same resolution.

The Prestige i5-4200SH can handle games at the laptop’s native 1,920×1,080 resolution as well, but we had to set the quality to Low before we saw a playable 27.9fps in Dirt Showdown. Disabling the anti-aliasing raised this even further to 38.9fps. This is excellent for a non-gaming laptop and it shows you don’t always need a discrete graphics chip to play the latest games.

The laptop’s keyboard was great for typing. Its flat keys could have done with a little more vertical travel, but they still provided a good amount of tactile feedback and were sensibly spaced. There’s also a small numeric keypad on the right hand side.

We weren’t such big fans of the touchpad, though, as its hard, plastic surface made it very difficult to use multi-touch gestures such as two-finger scrolling and pinch-zooming. They did work occasionally, but each movement was very stilted and tricky to control, so we’d recommend using a mouse if you hate using manual scrollbars. Fortunately, Windows 8 shortcuts were much better, and the dedicated buttons were great for clicking on files on our desktop.

The Prestige i5-4200SH comes with a great range of ports, including two USB3 and two USB2 ports, VGA and HDMI video outputs, an SD card reader a Gigabit Ethernet port, a DVD rewriter and separate headphone and microphone jacks.

The laptop’s available with a variety of storage solutions as well, but our review sample came with a 500GB hybrid SSHD drive. This combines the speed of an SSD with the capacity of a traditional hard disk, helping to boost boot speeds and loading times. When we ran the Boot Racer application, the laptop had an average boot time of around 25 seconds, which is roughly twice as quick as a laptop with a traditional hard disk. As the caching works by moving the most regularly accessed files to the SSD part of the drive, such as Windows system files, normal read/write times are little better than for a regular hard disk.