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PC Specialist Lafité Notebook Review

Final Thoughts

Pricing

The model that we were given to review sits roughly at the midpoint of the Lafité range with the i5-5200U. For those of you who would like more power there is an i7 variant or for those who only need a minimalist setup there are Pentium and i3 options. Memory, SSD and M.2 SSD options are all available so you are free to find something to suit your budget. One thing I really did like about this in terms of pricing, is that I found that I was paying almost if not identical amounts for a completely custom spec notebook here than I would be picking a pre-made one off the shelf in the local PC World.

The warranty with this system is a pleasantly unusual 3 years as standard (1 month collect and return, 1 year parts, 3 years labour). For an extra £5 you can up the 1 month parts coverage to 1 year, or for an extra £69 you could opt for 2 years collect and return, 2 years parts and labour. As ever I would suggest if you were to buy one, to opt for the highest protection for your investment.

The Lafité can be customised and purchased from PC Specialist here.

Overview

To look at initially it won’t blow your socks off by any means but it will certainly grab your attention. The friends who came to visit me whilst I was reviewing this were both quick to ask and incorrect to assume I’d been sent an Apple product to review at first glance, and it was only when I allowed them a closer peek they could really see this was something completely different. The lid is completely featureless and proved difficult to photograph on a white background for this exact reason. Although it initially seemed alien to have no branding on it whatsoever, I quickly came to enjoy it as it proved an almost instant talking point. In fact, if this was my own I would go even as far as to remove the Intel sticker from beside the keyboard to totally de-brand the system.

The clever use of case feet provide a dual purpose here. Firstly, they allow some ventilation to the underside of the chassis (not that thermals are an issue at all, but hey). Second is that the case feet elevate the laptop just enough so that the drop-down Ethernet port on the side can be accessed without making it sit unevenly on a flat surface. This was the first time I’d personally seen this technique used before and it is a clever method of keeping full size ports native to the system whilst keeping dimensions as small as possible.

The screen for me was the star of the show, and although not touch screen it is absolutely stunning to look at. 1080p at 13.3” on this IPS panel meant luscious hues and very dark blacks, and there was almost no back light bleed at all. I checked it out from wide and high angles and colour wash out was good. Speaking in terms of audio. sound was a bit lacking in terms of bass, though there was no crackling and the fidelity in general was good.

The touch pad is massive and pleasant to use but did not seem to support multi-touch nor gestures. I had a look through the settings but could not see anything to reflect this and all of the drivers were intact yet generic. Perhaps my review unit was missing some software due to being refreshed/reset between reviewers. The keyboard is the familiar Chiclet style that we have become accustomed to in recent years, and although not backlit is still very good quality with no middle bend or signs of being anything less than premium. The power button is situated at the top right of the keyboard where the delete button usually resides, meaning if you touch type you can occasionally catch yourself shutting the system down or putting it to sleep should you accidentally press the power button thinking it is the delete key. The simple solution for this is to go into power options and set the power key to do nothing on pressing it, though it will mean you will need to shut down or put the notebook to sleep via the Windows menus.

I ran a few games that I personally play on my personal Surface 2 Pro (which runs on the i5-4200U) such as Blood Bowl Chaos Edition and Diablo 3: Reaper of Souls in both 1080p and 720p to get an idea of the improvements that Broadwell brings over Haswell in real life situations. Although there I wasn’t expecting earth moving improvements, I only really saw improvements of 5-9%, mainly less than half of the 15 or even 20% that I was hoping to see. I would definitely conclude that the Intel 5500 are more of a small evolution of the 4400 than a revolution of sorts for gaming purposes.

When it comes to CPU related tasks though I can definitely appreciate the improvements Broadwell brings to the table. The higher clock speed is merely the beginning, higher Turbo boost clocks as well as being based on the 14nm manufacturing process means that it is far cooler than my Surface Pro 2, at the same time as being faster. Boot times are fast, not usually taking more than a few more than 10 seconds from cold to be ready to go, and of course coming out of sleep at a fraction of that. We connected the Lafité to an external monitor and it was a pleasure to use with dual screens with no slouching even with multiple desktop and native apps running at the same time.

Battery life was very good, leaving the screen brightness on 50% (which is still very bright on this screen by the way) with WiFi enabled and making no conscious effort to conserve power settings wise granted a run time of 6 hours 49 minutes running Powermark. Reducing the screen brightness to minimum and turning flight mode on then re-running the tests pushed our battery life to 7 Hours 21 minutes, impressive indeed! Apart from the PC Specialist wallpaper and trials of Bullguard Antivirus and Microsoft Office, the Windows 8.1 installation was junk free I’m pleased to report.

If you’re looking for a portable truly all day work notebook then this is certainly worth some consideration as it ticks pretty much all of the boxes. It’s thin, light and you can keep it in a brown envelope to confuse Apple fanboys, what more could you ask for? Joking aside for business and daily use it was a pleasure to use. Integrated graphics means that you aren’t going to be breaking any benchmark records any time soon, but there’s more than enough power to blast away on some indie games in the lunch break.

Pros