Chillblast Prestige Iris 15in

The five-year warranty beats everyone else, but th this 15.6in desktop replacementreplacemen has tough competition

SCORE

Range starts at: £775 (£930 inc VAT) Model tested: £833 (£999 inc VAT) from chillblast.com

There’s a good reason we’ve spoiled our alphabetical order and reviewed the Chillblast Prestige Iris 15in on the same page as the PC Specialist 15.6in Lafité Pro: they’re identical (we changed the camera angle for variety). The only difference is their logo treatment, with Chillblast choosing to affix a substrate that stands 1.5mm proud of the lid. We prefer the PC Specialist approach: a more subtle decal.

With almost identical specs, we expected them to score identically in our benchmarks, but the Chillblast proved to be slower in its default settings – despite having 32GB of RAM. The mystery was easily solved, however, with the Prestige’s fans set to a quiet mode. If you want all-out speed, head to the Control Center software and set the fans to full. Our published results on p92 are all in the default mode, but you can see this machine’s potential by looking at the PC Specialist’s results.

As the “G7” at the end of the Core i7-1165G7’s name indicates, this laptop benefits from Intel’s best integrated graphics yet: Iris Xe. In this incarnation, they proved capable of some excellent results – most notably 44fps in Metro: Last Light at the native F ll HD resolution of the screen. And t’s at High settings. Just for fun, we ed it out in Shadow of the Tomb too, and while 16fps at Full HD ain High settings) isn’t playable, it hows that this machine has 3D eleration in spades.

The Chillblast slipped down the le in our screen tests ( see p93), w h sRGB coverage of 79% compared o he 90s of its similarly priced rivals. t don’t think this is a dull screen cause it isn’t: colours still have punch, and we like the matte finish, strong peak brightness of 349cd/m2 and its sheer size. Nor should you worry about it being Full HD rather than a higher resolution because text still looks sharp. TV shows look great on the screen too, but you’ll need to connect a pair of headphones to bypass the horrible, tinny speakers. We were again disappointed by the 720p webcam, which produces fuzzy images and has distracting struggles with exposure. The only good news is that there are so many ports to choose from, which we go into more detail about below.

So, Chillblast or PC Specialist? While Chillblast provides a quieter system out of the box, and a superior five-year warranty, we’d opt for the PC Specialist – which also costs less.