PC Specialist Optimus V Exige review

The PC Specialist Optimus V Exige is a 17.3in, 3.2kg laptop that, on paper, looks to be one of the best-value laptops we’ve ever reviewed, with a capable graphics card, powerful processor and a large SSD. If you’re going to benefit from this great value, you’re first going to have to accept that it uses one of the ugliest Clevo chassis on the market. PC Specialist hasn’t helped by choosing not to add any sort of system badge or sticker to break up the monotony of the dark grey lid. Open up the machine and you’re greeted with a large black keyboard sitting amongst a sea of metallic grey, and a tiny grey touchpad just below it.

The keyboard is comfortable to use, although if you’re a harsh typist it does sound like you’re typing onto a hollow plastic box, which doesn’t exactly ooze quality. The touchpad isn’t very good at all; it’s not sensitive enough and its two physical buttons have very little travel to them.

The usual selection of ports are available around the back and sides of the laptop, with three USB3 ports (one of which also doubles up as an eSATA connector), two USB2 ports, a Gigabit Ethernet port, an SD card reader, a VGA port and an HDMI connector.

PC Specialist has been extremely generous with the storage, including a 240GB SSD and a 1TB hard disk. This is much more than we’ve ever seen from laptops at this price, and is even more generous than many more expensive laptops.

The Optimus V Exige runs quietly when not under significant load, with the keyboard and palm rest remaining cool throughout normal use. Fire up a game and the rear-facing fans begin to whirr and get louder with more intense use, but they never became overbearingly noisy during our testing. Still, the whooshing of the fans will likely overpower the atrocious speakers, which are barely capable of pushing out music at an audible volume, let alone dialogue and the more subtle noises associated with games and movies. Invest in a decent set of desktop speakers or headphones when you buy this laptop, otherwise you will be left disappointed.

The screen is reasonably good. It’s not the best we’ve seen but it can hold its own against similarly priced rivals. It uses a 17.3in Full HD panel that’s able to cover 82.1% of the sRGB colour gamut, according to our measurements. This leaves very vibrant colours slightly washed out, but the amount of detail visible in images is helped by a high contrast we measured at 1,312:1.

Processing power is one area where the Optimus V Exige excels, with the popular quad-core 2.5GHz Intel Core i7-4710MQ processor paired with 8GB of RAM. It races through simple and tough tasks alike, scoring a near-desktop score of 93 in our benchmarks.

Gaming and multimedia performance is also helped along by the 2GB Nvidia GeForce GTX 860M graphics card. This card’s presence in such an otherwise well-specified laptop is great to see. It’s capable of playing modern games in Full HD at Medium or High settings, as was demonstrated by the 46.8fps average frame rate it recorded in Dirt Showdown at Full HD resolutions at High settings. Crysis 3 was trickier, managing an average of 29.8fps at High settings with 4x anti aliasing, but on occasion dropping to 15fps when the action got intense. We dropped the anti-aliasing to 1x, which made in-game objects much more jagged but increased the average frame rate to 40.1fps and brought the minimum frame rate up to a much more playable 26fps.

Performance in our light usage battery burn benchmark was unremarkable at 5h 17m. If you choose to take this behemoth out and about, expect the battery life to be less than half that when gaming. We’d keep this machine stationed at a desk.

CONCLUSION

We’re really impressed with the PC Specialist Optimus V Exige offers. For £800 you get a 17.3in laptop with a 240GB SSD and a GTX 860M graphics card, making it an absolute steal. Our main issue is with the bulky chassis, which at best is plain and at worst, plain ugly. If that doesn’t offend you and you don’t need carry your laptop far, you should buy this. If not, take a look at the beautiful Acer Aspire V15 Nitro, which has superb build quality and equally good performance.