Recoil II configuration for gaming/browsing.

[SemoB]

Hi all,

My old laptop (15.6 Defiance II) has recently said its goodbyes with some nasty fireworks, and so I'm looking to purchase a 15.6 Recoil II to replace it. I chose the Recoil II mainly because it is compact, good value for money and has a mechanical keyboard (I hated the DII's keyboard, and chassis in general). Main uses will be: gaming (I would like to be able to play modern and future (up to 3 years from now) games at high or ultra settings while maintaining 35+ FPS), I will also be using it for some multitasking desktop work: word processing, data analysis, etc, and to watch films and television.

Also a couple of extra notes: I will be replacing the 4GB RAM with 16GB HyperX from my old DII, and will be adding the 1TB HDD I had with it as well. I want the M.2 drive to be the boot drive. I also put high importance on image quality hence going for the 144Hz display, but if this is unnecessary please do comment!

Chassis & Display
Recoil Series: 15.6" Matte Full HD 144Hz 72% NTSC LED Widescreen (1920x1080)
Processor (CPU)
Intel® Core™ i7 Six Core Processor 8750H (2.2GHz, 4.1GHz Turbo)
Memory (RAM)
4GB Corsair 2133MHz SODIMM DDR4 (1 x 4GB) - to be replaced with 16GB 2400MHz HyperX
Graphics Card
NVIDIA® GeForce® GTX 1060 - 6.0GB GDDR5 Video RAM - DirectX® 12.1
1st Hard Disk
NOT REQUIRED - will install my own 1TB HDD
1st M.2 SSD Drive
512GB ADATA SX6000 PCIe M.2 2280 (1000 MB/R, 800 MB/W) - will be used as system drive (boot) and to store my most frequently used games and programmes
Memory Card Reader
Integrated 2 in 1 Memory Card Reader (SD, MMC)
AC Adaptor
1 x 180W AC Adaptor
Battery
Recoil II Series 46WH Lithium Ion Battery
Power Cable
1 x 1 Metre Cloverleaf UK Power Cable
Thermal Paste
COOLER MASTER MASTERGEL MAKER THERMAL COMPOUND
Sound Card
2 Channel High Def. Audio + SoundBlaster™ Cinema 3
Bluetooth & Wireless
GIGABIT LAN & KILLER™ WIRELESS-AC 1550 M.2 GAMING 802.11AC + BLUETOOTH 5.0
USB Options
1 x USB 3.1 PORT (Type C) + 2 x USB 3.1 PORTS + 1 x USB 2.0 PORT
Keyboard Language
PER-KEY RGB BACKLIT UK MECHANICAL KEYBOARD
Operating System
NO OPERATING SYSTEM REQUIRED
Operating System Language
United Kingdom - English Language
Windows Recovery Media
NO RECOVERY MEDIA REQUIRED
Office Software
FREE 30 Day Trial of Microsoft® Office® 365 (Operating System Required)
Anti-Virus
NO ANTI-VIRUS SOFTWARE
Browser
Microsoft® Edge (Windows 10 Only)
Notebook Mouse
INTEGRATED 2 BUTTON TOUCHPAD MOUSE
Webcam
INTEGRATED 1MP HD WEBCAM
Surge Protection
6 Socket 2m Surge Protector
Warranty
3 Year Gold Warranty (2 Year Collect & Return, 2 Year Parts, 3 Year Labour)

Are these specs suitable for my needs? Any particular components I should pay special attention to? Am I picking the right M.2 drive or should I upgrade? Any advice or comments would be highly appreciated.

 

[Oussebon]

The refresh rate of the screen doesn't affect image quality, only the number of frames displayed per second. This can lead to a smoother gaming experience, but only if you're playing games where you're getting a high framerate. If you're playing Witcher 3 with the eye candy turned up, you're not going to be much further than 60fps and sometimes below it, so what's the point.

But if you're playing shooters like overwatch, CSGO then it may well be worth it - i.e games where you can both achieve those framerates with high settings and where higher framerates can give a competitive edge

If it were me, I'd have gone for the 60hz screen and a better SSD like a 970 Evo or WD Black, though they are very expensive at 500gb size.

 

[SemoB]

Thanks for your reply. So unless my graphic card can push a game to 144 FPS, then any framerate below that is a "waste" of refresh rate?

Given that it's a laptop, and a 1060 GPU not a 1070, then the chances of getting substantially more than 60 FPS in a beautiful game are minimal, so it is not worth it.

Am I correct in my reasoning?

 

[Oussebon]

Pretty much.

It's not like you need the full 144hz to get benefit off a 144hz screen - 120hz or 100hz is still going to be a real difference. But as you say:

Given that it's a laptop, and a 1060 GPU not a 1070, then the chances of getting substantially more than 60 FPS in a beautiful game are minimal, so it is not worth it.

This might be worth a look: https://www.notebookcheck.net/Computer-Games-on-Laptop-Graphics-Cards.13849.0.html

 

[SemoB]

Thanks again. That link is really useful, although I couldn't help but notice that the GTX 980 seems to perform better than the 1060? How is that possible when the 1060 is newer technology?

Also I have heard that using an NVMe as a bootable system drive is quite tricky. Is that true? Are there any precautions I need to bear in mind?

 

[Oussebon]

How is that possible when the 1060 is newer technology?

The short answer is easily and that it's not really worth paying much attention to. The slightly longer answer would be:

1) the 1060 is a lower tier than the 980, despite being newer
2) it's a laptop GTX 1060, not a desktop one
3) benchmarks / your mileage may vary, and there are factors that will have affected their benchmarks

1 - The GTX 1060 is -60 tier, while the 980 is -80 tier. -80 is high-end, while -60 is mid-range.

For desktop GPUs the GTX 980 was about £400 (quite a bit more often iirc?), and the GTX 1060 (which came out offering more or less the same performance) was ~£250. So the 1060 (desktop) wasn't designed to be much more powerful than the 980, it was meant to offer similar performance to the 980 (or, really, a bit better performance than the 970) at a lower price point - and to compete with AMD's RX 480. It was the GTX 1070 and 1080 that replaced the GTX 980. A GTX 2060 won't outperform a GTX 1080 ti either, and so on.

2 - The GTX 980 in laptops was actually a GTX 980, same core counts and frequencies as regular desktop cards. This was very exceptional. As you probably know, most laptop GPUs were labelled M (e.g. GTX 970M) and were significantly weaker than their desktop equivalents. A GTX 970M is on the level of the GTX 960 or GTX 1050 ti. The 980 was alone in that generation as being a full desktop GPU made available in certain laptops - mostly ones with very beefy cooling solutions I'd expect. There was a 980M too, which like all the -Ms was a lot weaker than the desktop namesake.

For Pascal (the 1000 series cards) Nvidia abandoned the -M naming scheme, and just called laptop cards the same as desktop cards. This was to reflect that with notebook GPUs for Pascal, the performance difference between them and their desktop counterparts was smaller than ever. A GTX 1060 in a laptop had the same core count as the desktop GTX 1060 6gb, it just had somewhat lower frequencies.

If you look at the table on notebookcheck and tell it to include both desktop and laptop GPUs, you'll notice that laptop and desktop GTX 980s perform almost exactly the same in many cases. There's a bit of variation, but often near the margin of error. Whereas the laptop GTX 1060 consistently underperforms versus the desktop 1060. Not by a really bad amount, maybe 10% a lot of the time, but it is weaker. However, this difference is vastly smaller than the difference between a GTX 970 and a GTX 970M, or a GTX 960 and a GTX 960M.

3) There are a lot of factors that could skew results a bit. I've no idea how robust their benchmark methodology is. Even if they are very rigorous, some games can be hard to benchmark (e.g. multiplayer ones), or may not give consistent results despite running the same benchmark. Plus the results you get from a given game may vary depending what part of that game you benchmark.

And they're benchmarking whole laptops, not just the graphics cards. So if the models they benched had significantly different cooling systems, that would likely affect results through what boost clocks could be sustained. Also, laptops with GTX 980s often had full desktop CPUs (e.g. i7 6700k) rather than mobile CPUs (e.g. i7 6700HQ). So that will probably have weighed in the 980's favour as well. Unlike reviews of desktop graphics cards where a reviewer will have a test bench where all components (CPU, RAM, storage, mobo, mobo BIOS version, etc) are uniform and the only variable is the graphics card they are testing. Benchmarking different laptops against each other inherently involves a lot of variables that you can't necessarily separate out.

I hope that at least goes part of the way to suggest why the 'laptop' GTX 980 can be seen to outperform a laptop 1060.

The 980 in laptops was super expensive - in the Octane laptop tier at PCS. So ~£2000 or so? Whereas the laptop 1060 you can get in a system probably sub £1000 in the Vyper chassis, and more commonly in the £1000-£1200 range. So ~10% less FPS or whatever for half the price isn't a bad tradeoff for most wallets.

Also I have heard that using an NVMe as a bootable system drive is quite tricky. Is that true? Are there any precautions I need to bear in mind?

For your system it's not true.

If you were trying to use one with Windows 7 on an older motherboard, some extra work might have been required. But for a modern system with Win 10 it's fine.

 

[SemoB]

That's a very thorough answer, thank you! It's definitely answered my question.

I've decided to swap the 144Hz display for a 60Hz one and use the extra money to get a faster M.2 SSD. I took the 500GB WD Black™. I will place the order sometime today hopefully. Thanks again for all the tips and advice.

 

[Oussebon]

Cool, glad it helped Keep us posted with how it all goes, if you have the time.

 

[SemoB]

So I got the laptop on Wednesday and I was very happy with it. As I've explained before, I ordered a tiny 4GB 2133Mhz RAM as I was going to reuse my old 2 x 8GB 2400MHz Kingston HyperX ones. After I'd done that, the laptop ran fine for about a day, then it started to blue-screen at random, and very frequently, sometimes not even letting me enter Windows. The error codes were various. The most common one was Memory_Management, followed by IRQL_Not_Less_Or_Equal and Quota_Underflow. I immediately assumed it was a RAM issue, so I tested my new and old RAMs (separately) using both the Windows Memory Diagnostic Tool and Memtest86. My RAMs returned zero errors, yet the blue-screening continues. I'm not sure what to do at this point. Any help would be appreciated.

 

[Oussebon]

Was the RAM in your old defiance purchased as a matched kit, or were the sticks purchased separately? (and by separately, I mean even if you bought 2 sticks from the same vendor on the same day, but not as a 2x8gb kit in the same packet)

 

[SemoB]

Thanks for the reply. They were bought separately, although I made sure that they had exactly the same specifications. They ran my old Defiance II for 2.5 years without any problems.

 

[Oussebon]

It's possible the new motherboard just doesn't like it. Even the same specifications and same brands can sometimes not play nice together, and it could vary from system to system.

I would suggest trying your new laptop with 1 x 8gb stick for a few days. See if you still get those errors. If not, try the same with the other stick (and try it in the other slot just to rule out issues with that too).

You could also download CPU-Z https://www.cpuid.com/softwares/cpu-z.html and check the SPD tab for each stick of RAM (feel free to post a screenshot).

 

[SemoB]

Hi, so here are the SPD details for each piece of RAM. RAM C1 is the original 4GB 2133MHz Corsair that came with the Recoil. H1 and H2 are the two 8GB 2400MHz Kingston HyperX that I imported from my old Defiance.



Right now, I'm running on H1 with no issues (yet). H2 blue-screened almost straight after I managed to take the screenshot of its SPD sheet. All three RAMs sat in the same slot while doing this.

 

[Oussebon]

I've no idea. Not sure if you've contacted PCS in the intervening time for an opinion? I can only guess that the Recoil's motherboard is less happy with the apparently not quite matched RAM than the Defiance was.