Though I only purchased this laptop recently, its specs at $1099 warrant a close look from anyone looking for a solid, do-it-all laptop for a great price.
PROS:
The specs. Seriously. Find a better deal for a non-sale laptop of similar size. If you do, go out and buy a lottery ticket. 100% the best non-sale value of any factory laptop you'll find. If this laptop ever does go on sale, don't hesitate or second-guess yourself if you can afford it and you need/want a new laptop. This is the one to get.
Fast, especially if you're like me and going from only HDDs to an OS on the SSD with room to spare AND a secondary 1TB HDD. From off to desktop in five seconds.
Gaming: This is a great rig for gaming. Even intensive games don't completely tax this laptop (Unless you're playing Cities: Skylines with 1,300 mods installed). It plays Witcher 3 on Ultra and maintains 60FPS ALMOST all the time. Rock-solid 60FPS on High settings.
Bloatware: There's not a whole lot compared to your usual suspects, which is extremely refreshing.
CONS:
Quiet? Not really. It's not very loud even at its loudest, but it's also not very quiet. The fans do a great job of keeping the Ryzen 7 CPU nice and cool, but that also means when it's under any amount of real load the fans are switched on, and you'll know unless you have wrap-around headphones on.
Backlighting: This is a personal con to me. The backlighting settings aren't very intuitive and take some time getting to where you want it. But damn if it doesn't look pretty right out of the box going through the rainbow.
Drivers: You'll have driver issues. Even after you update every driver, you'll still have driver issues. You'll have them until your third week in. Why? I don't know. Sometimes if you plug in your headphones, it sounds extremely strange until you do a restart. If you're patient, this won't bother you. If you're like me, people will ask why you're calling your laptop a finicky bitch under your breath.
Audio: The Realtek audio doesn't seem to be the same as the one on my Dell, which is what this replaced. The audio isn't as crisp, especially without Dell's additional settings and audio suite. If you listen to a lot of music on your laptop, you'll notice the difference immediately. It's not terrible, but in my book it's a con when songs don't sound the same across different laptops.
Battery: This laptop was meant to be plugged in while in use. It is readily apparent if you use it on battery life alone, even on power-saver settings. It'll last three, maybe four hours doing light work/browsing. Not great, but far from the worst I've seen.
That's about it. If you're hesitant about getting an AMD laptop due to the overheating stories you've heard, you can rest a fair bit easier once you realize that the fans in this thing work very, very well and that it'll only burst into flames when you try to load your 1,301st mod in Cities: Skylines.
| Standing screen display size | 14 Inches |
|---|---|
| Screen Resolution | 1920 x 1080 pixels |
| Max Screen Resolution | 1920x1080 Pixels |
| Processor | 4.4 GHz amd_ryzen_7 |
| RAM | DDR4 |
| Hard Drive | 1 TB SSD |
| Graphics Coprocessor | NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 |
| Chipset Brand | NVIDIA |
| Card Description | Dedicated |
| Wireless Type | 802.11ax |
| Number of USB 2.0 Ports | 2 |
| Number of USB 3.0 Ports | 2 |
