PC Specialist Ultranote 2 14inch Review

Introduction

I eventually took the plunge into starting my own business and I was on the lookout for a new laptop for this. I had come from using an old Dell laptop which was long past its sell by date and was failing at certain tasks which I had thrown at it in my day to day working environment. I wanted a new machine, which was portable and relatively lightweight. The graphics and game play side of the computer was not important as this requirement was purely a performance machine for Microsoft Windows, Office, Web based applications, video tasks, programming and general day to day usage.

I opted to purchase the PC Specialist Ultranote II 14 inch laptop. I did this for a number of reasons.

• The configuration was flexible
• The price was better than anywhere else I had seen at £720.00 all in
• The performance seemed to be acceptable with what I was looking for
• There had been some good reviews on many of the other builds which they had on offer

Specification

Chassis & Display UltraNote: 14″ Glossy HD LED Backlit Widescreen (1366×768)
Processor (CPU) Intel® Core™i7 Quad Core Mobile Processor i7-4712MQ (2.30GHz) 6MB
Memory (RAM) 8GB KINGSTON HYPER-X GENESIS 1600MHz SODIMM DDR3 (1 x 8GB)
Graphics Card INTEL® HD GRAPHICS MEDIA ACCELERATOR 4600
Memory – Hard Disk 250GB Samsung 840 EVO SSD, SATA 6Gb/s (upto 540MB/sR | 520MB/sW)
DVD/BLU-RAY Drive UltraNote Series: 8x SATA DVD±R/RW/Dual Layer (+ 24x CD-RW)
Memory Card Reader Internal 9 in 1 Card Reader (MMC/RSMMC/SD: Mini, XC & HC/MS: Pro & Duo)
Thermal Paste ARCTIC MX-4 EXTREME THERMAL CONDUCTIVITY COMPOUND
Sound Card Intel 2 Channel High Definition Audio + MIC/Headphone Jack
Bluetooth & Wireless GIGABIT LAN & WIRELESS INTEL® ULTIMATE N-6300 (450Mbps)
USB Options 2 x USB 3.0 PORTS + 1 x USB 2.0 PORT AS STANDARD
Battery UltraNote Series 6 Cell Lithium Ion Battery (62.16WH) (Up to 7 Hours)
Power Lead & Adaptor 1 x UK Power Lead & 65W AC Adaptor
Operating System Genuine Windows 8.1 Professional 64 Bit – inc DVD & Licence
DVD Recovery Media Windows 8.1 (64-bit) Professional DVD with paper sleeve
Keyboard Language ULTRANOTE SERIES UK KEYBOARD
Notebook Mouse INTEGRATED 2 BUTTON TOUCHPAD MOUSE
Webcam INTEGRATED 2.0 MEGAPIXEL WEBCAM

Initial Build Quality

I had agreed to wait 4 weeks for the laptop to be built and tested. This was delivered within the timescale which I was promised. Upon receiving my laptop I took a variety of pictures which hopefully explains the delivery packing and build quality.

 

The laptop came in the regular packing, which was well padded.

 

The contents of the packaging included the laptop, manual, power adapter, DVD’s for drives and Operating System and finally the manual delivered from PC Specialist.

The laptop was provided with a plastic wrap around the screen which had been carefully placed to protect the back lid of the laptop and the screen. The laptop has a “brushed” effect to the body which gives it a unique feel. This is a brushed plastic which might mean that the laptop is suited to less rugged environments but does provide an acceptable type of case for the laptop for what I need.

The battery is a Li Ion type which fits nicely into the back and does not stick out at the back offering a nice finish to the back of the laptop. The battery is quite small in comparison to other vendors on the market which offers to the reduce the weight of the laptop.

 

The laptop on the one side has 2 USB 3 ports, HDMI, VGA + Ethernet. These are placed in a nice area, splitting the USB by having 2 on the left hand side and 1 on the right hand side. The HDMI and VGA port are completely separated on the side which might provide some flexibility when plugging in multiple devices and not getting caught up with cables when doing a presentation.

On the other side the laptop lock port, DVD Drive, a single USB 2 drive and the audio jack/microphone ports. To offer more portability in the future, the laptop could be build without a DVD ROM drive or maybe provide a DVD blanking plate to reduce the weight further. As it stand however, the placement of the USB port at the front is easily accessible which is the same to be said for the audio ports.

 

The keyboard is a nice simple keyboard which i very comfortable to type on. The keys are not heavy but do have a solid feel to them and they are very good for typing. 

 

Here you can see the laptop with the case closed and a close up on the brushed effect of the laptop. The total height of the laptop is about average compared to other vendors on the market. However the price of the laptop makes this model come out on top for office based performance.

The laptop lid closed. The laptop is quite light in respect to the specification and very portable. The design has a solid feel to it and here you can see the brushed effect of the laptop.

 

Here is the laptop in size compared to my hand. A lovely size to work with I believe and a nice small piece of technology to carry to/from work.

How does it compare?

I have a Dell Latitude E6410 which is now a number of years old and comes with an i7 and 8gb of RAM. I placed the laptops together to gauge the size difference of the 2 computers.

 

 

 

Clearly you can see the Ultranote II on the left is nearly half the height of the Dell laptop. You can also see how streamlined the port design is on the laptop compared to the Dell. For example, there are 2 USB ports on top of each other on the Dell laptop which is generally a nightmare trying to plug in USB ports when you are in a rush.

Here you can see the battery sticks out on the Dell, but on the PC Specialist Ultranote II it is nicely level and does not stick out anywhere providing a flush finish. 

Here you can see the width of the new laptop is slightly larger in size (maybe due to the widescreen option).

Finally I wanted to know if the new laptop weighs less than the old laptop. The result was: YES IT DOES!! The total weight difference is 301 grams. That is quite a lot really and considering the Dell laptop with the power supply and the cables I have to carry actually broke my laptop. With the power supplies in the machines too, the weight different increases to 353 grams. That is well on the way to half a kilo. 

Performance

I did a few tests to see what the real world performance was like.

In and out of Standby

Just to paint a picture, I can put my Dell in standby with about 5 applications open which are Outlook (2.5GB cache), Excel(50MB spreadsheet, Word(200 page document with pictures and videos), Chrome(5 HTML 5 videos open within it) and IE (google maps open). Then I can take it out of standby, go for a coffee then come back and it will be ready to use.

However the PC specialist Ultranote II is responsive fast, and in about 2 seconds everything has resumed as normal with no latency.

Disk Performance Random RW

I compared this to my Desktop PC which has the following spec:

Intel-i5 3750 Ivy

32GB 667mhz RAM

Asus z87 Pro motherboard

Asus DirectCU II Nvidia 680 GTX

Corsair Force GS SSD

Desktop PC Performance

Ultranote II Performance

 

The disk in the laptop is blisteringly fast. The Samsung SSD is twice as fast as my desktop SSD in Sequential Writes. Not only that, look at the small file (4k) performance. That’s over 3x faster! The Ultranote II beats my desktop PC hands down in every disk test passed to it.

PC Mark

Finally a general test of PC performance which uses CPU, Graphics and Memory to find the performance. Although not relational to real world applications, it gives a good indication of what your PC can do as an all round workhorse. 

Desktop PC: 5874

Ultranote II: 3449

Understandably the desktop machine is much better for gaming and general graphics applications than the laptop. However for general performance, the i7 stands up well against the i5 3750 which is a very good processor.

The only time where the laptop struggled was rendering DirectX graphics and when trying to run through the image manipulation process. However, the 680GTX flew through these – but it was once considered a High End card, so its going to 🙂 The rendering time on the Intel HD 4600 was fine, running about 30fps in the DirectX sections and the image switches were noticeably slower.

Considering I want to use this for work and IT Consultancy doing the general office based tasks then this performance is more than enough for me. Knowing that the disk is fast, I dont need fast graphics and I am not going to be using photoshop then I was happy with the result.

Summary

If you are after a laptop for work or home the Ultranote hits the mark for general use and office based work. Although this is not a work horse by any stretch of the imagination, it does make up in its portability points, lightweight and disk performance. The i7 draws about 40w of power when under load and performs very well and very efficiently. The laptop is responsive and well built. I will be using this for work mainly and managing the infrastructures I have to look after. 

If you want a gaming machine which plays all the latest games then get something designed to do this such as a 17 inch laptop which can take the 770 GTX. But if you are really not that bothered about games and all you want to do is Web site design, image editing, data copying, edit java based applications, pick up your emails, edit spreadsheets, write documents and manage Microsoft Server systems, VMware and Citrix then this will be the laptop for you.