CHILLBLAST AKIRA 3

£879 inc VAT • chillblast.com

Fancy building your own PC? It’s easy enough to do with a desktop (see our feature on page 88), but you’d have to be pretty brave to try constructing your own laptop out of raw components. Chillblast is a company that lets you pick out exactly the specs you’re after and does the hard work for you, though.

The Akira 3 is one of its latest ‘templates’, getting you a pretty portable 14in design and a GeForce GTX 950M to let you play games, as well as handling productivity tasks with ease. It’s not for those after a laptop that’s going to make a strong impression, though. While not cheap in price, several elements do feel a bit cheap.

Price

You can pay almost as much or as little as you like when you spec out a Chillblast laptop. However, the Akira 3 we’re looking at is an upper-mid range design. Prices start at £799 for the base model, which includes a 500GB hard drive, quad-core Intel Core i5 Skylake CPU and a GTX950M. Our review model also has a 128GB SSD, for that bit of extra day-to-day pep. The upgrade bumps the system price up to £879. This makes it a little cheaper than a lot of ‘portable power’ systems from Dell, but comparable with entry-level gaming laptops from companies like MSI.

Design

If you want a laptop that will impress people with its sheer presence, you don’t want a Akira 3. It’s very plain-looking, and the parts that stick out visually do so because they look a little clumsy.

Things such as the gloss keyboard plate, the very conspicuous camera, the obvious rubber buffers on the display surround and the heavily-lined hinge area give the Akira an, at best, dated look. Almost all £800- to £900 laptops from the ‘big names’ will look a lot better.

The single suggestion that this is a remotely higher-end laptop is the aluminium finish on its lid. The rest of the Akira 3 is plastic. You can also tell the casing is designed to be highly customisable. There’s a big blank bit of plastic on the right side where an optical drive might go, for example.

Laptops may be a bit like puzzles, made up of a bunch of joinedtogether bits, but the Chillblast may make this all-too evident for

Build Features Performance

Value