DinoPC Pegasus 17.3″ review

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.