DinoPC Pegasus 17.3″ review

DinoPC’s Pegasus laptop is a gargantuan 17.3in desktop replacement laptop with mid-range graphics and processing performance for buyers who are happy to be stationed at a desk. At 3.2kg and more than 4cm thick, this is a laptop for those who like their tech with a bit of meat on the bone.

As with a lot of independent manufacturers, DinoPC has used an off-the-shelf Clevo chassis for its laptop. It has to be said that this isn’t the most attractive chassis available and the rather bulky and square case makes the laptop a little ugly. Given that other manufacturers can make large and attractive laptops, it’s a shame that DinoPC couldn’t find a more attractive chassis. Still, with all of that said and done, it’s what’s inside that should really count.

It’s good to see a 120GB SSD alongside a traditional 1TB mechanical hard disk. The SSD is plenty big enough for Windows 8.1 and your favourite apps, giving the laptop a healthy speed boost; the 1TB hard disk gives you loads of room for all of your files.

A dual-core 2.6GHz Intel Core i5-4210M processor and 8GB of RAM are at the heart of the Pegasus laptop. Performance isn’t bad, although with an overall score of 61, we’ve seen laptops at this price score 30 points more. That’s not to say that the Pegasus can’t cope with what you throw at it, but we’d have expected a faster CPU at this price.

Gaming performance is much better thanks to the Nvidia GeForce GTX 860M graphics chip. This mid-range option is a powerful choice and one we often see in laptops at this price. It managed a frame rate of 50fps in the Dirt Showdown benchmark. Crysis 3 required a little tweaking to get playable performance, as is always the case with the mid-range 860M. In benchmarking conditions its average frame rate was playable 24.7fps but when the bullets started flying it dropped to a jerky 13fps. Tweaking the settings to 1x anti aliasing and Medium System Spec allowed us to keep the game looking pretty while also boosting the frame rate to a much more playable 42.7fps.

Under load the Pegasus is not particularly noisy, so you won’t have to worry about the deafening roar heard from more compact gaming laptops. Nonetheless, you’ll want to don headphones because the speakers are truly dreadful. While we’d expect most users to plug in headphones or speakers when using laptops this large, it’s definitely possible for manufacturers to provide better audio quality for those times when there’s nothing plugged in.

When it’s open, the Pegasus is a little more attractive, and the silver palm rest and pleasingly chunky keyboard are definite highlights. The keyboard is very pleasing to type on; long periods of work and play don’t become arduous and we never had any problems with missed key presses, which can often be the downfall of cheaper laptop chassis.

The touchpad is woefully bad, though; it has too much friction and sometimes failed to respond during our testing. You’ll want to plug in a USB mouse into one of the four USB (three of them USB3) ports. In addition to these connectors, there’s an eSATA connector, which doubles up as one of the USB3 ports, an SD card reader, full-size HDMI and VGA outputs, Gigabit Ethernet, and three separate 3.5mm audio jacks.

The quality of the 17.3in Full HD screen is what we’d expect from an off-the-shelf laptop, with 82.1% sRGB colour gamut coverage picked up by our colour calibrator. This means colours are relatively well represented, and the 1,312:1 contrast ratio means detail in darker spots in games and movies are relatively well served.

Battery life is nothing to shout about at 4h 55m, but we can’t imagine this PC will spend much of its life out and about. If you do plan on disconnecting from the grid, bear in mind that processor and graphics-intensive tasks will reduce battery life by more than half.

The DinoPC Pegasus is a perfectly capable laptop that can power its way through most tasks and games. Its only problem is the existence of the PC Specialist Optimus V Exige, which costs the same but has a bigger SSD and a more powerful processor, making that laptop a better buy.