PC Specialist Optimus V Exige review

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.