Metabox Prime P650HP-G
Prime value for money
PRICE $ 2166 www.metabox.com.au We’ve
been inundated with gaming laptops of late, thanks to Nvidia’s wondrous new mobile GPUs. The Metabox Prime P650HP-G is a GeForce GTX 1060 based laptop that focuses on value and performance over portability, designer good-looks and exotic materials and features.
The 15.6-inch display means this machine fits squarely in the middle of the pack when it comes to gaming laptop sizing. It’s a little heavy, at 2.6kg, and it’s been built with ‘al-alloy’ according to Metabox. However, we’re sure some of the surfaces use plastic as well, or are at least covered in a coating that is reminiscent of plastic. Regardless, it feels nice and sturdy. The screen is a 120Hz 1920 x 1080 panel with G-Sync support, but enabling this high-refresh rate is rather tricky. We had to figure it out via a quick spot of Googling – it turns out that Nvidia’s Optimus technology must be disabled, which is called MSHybrid on this unit. Despite the use of an LCD screen, we found the image quality to be excellent, especially in regards to motion blurring.
We also had some issues initially with the system performance, with applications taking far too long to open considering the powerful hardware within. Thankfully a series of Windows updates resolved this problem entirely. Speaking of said hardware, it’s easy to see where Metabox has poured the budget for this machine – into the guts of the unit.
Intel’s extremely popular mobile gaming CPU, the i7-7700HQ, can hit a top Turbo speed of 3.8GHz, while it’s quad HyperThreaded cores ensures excellent multitasking performance. A decent amount of 16GB of DDR4 2400MHz has also been included, alongside a Crucial MX300 275GB M.2 SSD. There’s no secondary drive in this configuration, so we’d definitely suggest adding another mechanical drive to ensure you’re not always worried about disk space. Finally we have Nvidia’s excellent GeForce GTX 1060 GPU rounding out the mix, and it’s a good match for the rest of the specs within. Compared to the likes of the MSI GE72, which is the same price yet packs in a GeForce GTX 1050 Ti instead, and the Metabox Prime shines as great value. Even better, it’s nice and quiet whilst in operation, hitting a mere 46dB under load, a big drop over the other laptops.
As our new benchmarks show, this machine is a very close match to the Alienware 13, which has extremely
it’s nice and quiet, hitting a mere 46dB under load, a big drop over the other laptops
similar specs. It’s basically got the grunt to run most modern, demanding games at high settings at 1920 x 1080p, though the demanding Ghost Recon: Wildlands proved to be a bit too much of a struggle for this GPU.
Overall Metabox has delivered an exceptionally priced laptop that has excellent specs throughout; we would definitely suggest adding a second drive though. The inclusion of a 120Hz G-Sync panel is simply the final cherry on the top, just be aware that you’ll need to jump through a few hoops to enable it. BENNETT RING
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