It's hard to imagine a better laptop. The size, weight, quietness, speed, battery life, everything is here. It's the laptop we've been dreaming about for a decade.
You're not going to find this powerful of a GPU or CPU in a form factor this small anywhere else. The screen is huge compared to other laptops this size and weight, beautiful too. Great keyboard as well. The 8 hour battery life they advertise is a bit of a stretch. You'll get a solid 2 hours for sure at normal use, even running some 3D applications. With more of the power saving features on, you'll get significantly longer (though good luck seeing the screen at the dimmest setting). Even so, from my research it seems like that's a lot more than you're going to get out of any other laptop this size.
I've been using it for gaming, general web stuff, and game development in Unreal Engine. Next time I edit video I'm going to use this, since the i7 will be better than the i5 in my desktop. It's aced everything I've thrown at it, with the exception of Unreal Engine feeling a little cramped on a 15 inch monitor.
I made the mistake of only getting a 256 gig hard drive, and I almost filled it up immediately (Dang it Destiny 2, why you gotta be 60 gigs). It has a second M.2 hard drive slot, but to access it you have to disassemble literally everything (I had to laugh when the teardown video showed how to take out the wifi card in order to read the hard drive slot). A bummer, but make the right choice and get at least 512 gigs and you won't have to worry about it.
The keyboard feels great, and SteelSeries has finally nailed the backlighting well enough that it's actually nice to look at (none of those stupid flashing rainbows). The sound is surprisingly good for such small speakers, though you'll still want a headset or some external ones for any serious listening.
It's pretty close to perfect for what it is. You might be able to find a faster laptop that weighs twice as much, or a bigger screen that doesn't fit in your bag, or a touch screen on a Surface that can't run your games, but if you're looking for a beastly and portable laptop that last forever and doesn't burn your legs off despite having two jet engines for fans, this is purchase. I do wish it had a touch screen though. :)
EDIT: Oh, two tips. When you get it, you have to plug it in before it will power up. Then reinstall windows via the recovery screen to get rid of norton and the rest of the bloat.
| Standing screen display size | 15.6 Inches |
|---|---|
| Screen Resolution | 1920 x 1080 pixels |
| Max Screen Resolution | 1920x1080 Pixels |
| Processor | 2.2 GHz core_i7 |
| RAM | 16 GB DDR4 |
| Memory Speed | 4.1 GHz |
| Hard Drive | 256 GB SSD |
| Graphics Coprocessor | NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 |
| Chipset Brand | NVIDIA |
| Card Description | Dedicated |
| Graphics Card Ram Size | 8 GB |
| Wireless Type | Bluetooth, 801.11ac |
| Number of USB 3.0 Ports | 3 |
