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.