I accidentally drowned my Thinkpad S440 a few months back and replacement parts are going to cost me at least 500 eur, with no guarantee it'll work again or need further repairs so I decided to look at new laptops instead.
I'm mostly using my laptop for school (programming), and on the train on the way there (maybe gaming). I'll have access to power sockets at both but my S440 could go the entire day without needing a charge.
Requirements for me are Kaby lake, space for at least one 2.5" HDD and a M.2 SSD, between 13" and 15.6", a good keyboard and at least 1080p
I don't care for a numpad, and would prefer a sleek laptop over some extreme gaming monstrosity
The new XPS 15 looks really good, but it's a bit expensive (base price €1500 for i5-7300HQ, GTX1050, 8GB RAM) and doesn't have home/end keys which I use a lot
The Inspiron 15 7000 starts at €999 for similar specs (i5-7300HQ, GTX 1050, 8GB RAM) but looks [url=http://i.dell.com/sites/imagecontent/products/PublishingImages/inspiron-15-7567-laptop/CS1703G0002-laptop-inspiron-15-7000-gaming-pdp-polaris-01.jpg]god awful[/url]
So I've narrowed down my options to:
[url=http://shop.lenovo.com/nl/nl/laptops/thinkpad/edge-series/e570/]Thinkpad E570[/url]
Intel Core i7-7500U
15.6" FHD(1920x1080) IPS Non-Touch
16 GB (8+8) DDR4 2400 MHz SODIMM
Nvidia Geforce GTX950M 2 GB
Intel 180 GB SSD
41Wh battery
€935,53
Pros:
S440 had good build quality and the warranty was excellent, expecting this to be the same
It has a fingerprint reader and I'm too lazy to enter a password after having used the fingerprint reader on my S440
Very good keyboard and touchpad
Cons:
2c4t ultrabook i7
950M is just a rebranded 850M
[url=http://www.clevo.com.tw/clevo_prodetail.asp?id=1002&lang=en]CLEVO N850HK1[/url]
i5-7300HQ or i7-7700HQ
15.6" FHD(1920x1080) IPS Led
16 GB (8+8) DDR4 2400 MHz SODIMM
GTX1050 Ti (4GB) or GTX 1050 (2GB)
128GB SSD
47Wh battery
€825,61 (With i7 and 1050 Ti, ~100 eur less for the i5 and non Ti)
Pros:
A lot more performance from CPU and GPU
Cheaper
Slightly bigger battery (but draws more power)
Cons:
Unknown build quality
Cooling might be an issue
Unknown keyboard/touchpad quality
Does anyone have experience with Clevo barebones, or are there any laptops I've missed/things I need to consider?
I've got the last gen Inspiron, if you're in higher education you can send an email to dell for a student voucher, saves you 10%
[editline]2nd February 2017[/editline]
Current gen inspiron looks significantly worse though, damn....
I have a Clevo, it's solid enough for me to take it in my backpack around campus and I don't really care about the weight. If you take decent care of it it should do fine. Overall I'm satisfied with the deal I got for it.
I'd avoid Clevo if possible. From my experience with them, their build quality can be questionable from time to time. They're also unnecessarily large and heavy, so that's a huge deal breaker for me.
I'm tempted to just give the Clevo a try, because reviews vary between both extremes on the internet. If it's really that bad I can just send it back within 14 days because yay europe law
Look at Dell as well. Their latest lineup is really good all of the sudden. Even for gaming.
[QUOTE=taipan;51778898]Look at Dell as well. Their latest lineup is really good all of the sudden. Even for gaming.[/QUOTE]
I mentioned the XPS 15 and Inspiron 15 7000 in my post, what Dell laptops are you talking about?
I went with the Clevo and picked it up today.
First impressions is that the keyboard is excellent, trackpad is a bit finicky when fingers are close together (but that might be a driver thing, i haven't installed any drivers besides nvidia and just let windows 10 do it's thing). Overall build quality seems good so far, but I haven't checked the inside yet, which I'll do tomorrow when installing new SSD and RAM.
It also seems at least one of the mini displayports (it has 2) is connected directly to the 1050 Ti, so I'm going to connect my Vive to it when I have time and see what happens.
Trackpad seems a lot better now, but that might just be me getting used to placing my fingers slightly further apart. Fans are quiet when using the power saver or balanced profile and not doing anything intensive (browsing internet, visual studio).
Bottom plate is a tad annoying to open since in addition to 10 screws there's also plastic clips all around
It also turns out my laptop came with a 62Wh battery instead of 47Wh, so that's an extra hour or so of light usage.
And finally it also fully works with my Vive because one of the two mini displayports is indeed not using Nvidia Optimus
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