Avita Admiror
A great-looking laptop that is held back by a throttledthrottle processor, slow SSD anda mediocre battery life
PRICE £667 (£800 inc VAT) from currys.co.uk
This is Avita’s third lapto laptop to h hit British shelves, and it m marks a step up in its aspirations: aspirations the Liber and Pura both had budg budget buyers in mind, with sub-£500 sub-£50 prices, but the Admiror enjoys enjoy the trappings of a much more expensive laptop.
This is obvious the momen moment you hold it, with a well-built 1.3kg metal chassis and a striking copper finish. A more modest brown version is available if you prefer, but I’d stick with copper as it’s bold without being gaudy. The other attention-grabbing feature is the touchpad, which stretches from left to right like the Joker’s grin. With a smooth surface and support for Windows’ precision commands, it gives you a generous amount of room for gestures.
The keyboard is another surprise considering this laptop’s keen price, with much more travel than is typical. Nor does Avita make any foolish decisions about layout; yes, there’s a single-height Enter key, but I didn’t find this a problem. The only potential negative is that it’s noisy and works best with a firm press of the buttons, almost like a mechanical keyboard, but personally I’m a fan of this action.
The final piece of the ergonomic jigsaw is the screen, which proved a solid performer. It covers 82.7% of the sRGB colour space with a hearty 1,662:1 contrast, and with a peak brightness of 405cd/m2 it will have plenty of impact on a showroom floor. It’s not the most colour accurate of screens, though, and note that it only covers 65.9% of the DCI-P3 gamut favoured by movie makers, but I have no complaints considering this laptop’s price. I also like the speakers, which don’t offer much subtlety but pack plenty of volume and create a well-separated stereo soundstage.
Avita gives the screen a premium sheen thanks to a sheet of covering glass stretching from edge to edge, but it can’t hide the presence of relatively thick bezels below and above the display. The top houses a basic 720p webcam that produces wan results, but at least it captures images of you rather than your chin, which gives it an instant advantage over the Huawei MateBook 14 ( see p53). There’s no Windows Hello login camera, but the fingerprint sensor built into the power key works smoothly.
Avita makes much of the AMD Ryzen 7 chip inside this laptop, but it comes nowhere near the hulking power of the MateBook 14. Where that uses a Ryzen 4800H processor, the Admiror includes a previousgeneration 3700U. Note the U suffix. This means it’s built for power efficiency rather than outright speed, but even so an overall result of 72 in our benchmarks is poor. That low score isn’t simply because of the older chip: there isn’t enough cooling inside this chassis to keep its four cores operating at optimum speeds for long. During our tough video-encoding test, it hovered at around 2GHz, and it’s notable how quickly the fans kick into action once you ask it to perform a serious task.
This has the unfortunate side effect of making the laptop more sluggish with sustained heavy use, which was notable in our trio of runs of the Metro: Last Light benchmark. In the first run, at 1080p High settings, it returned a 27fps
“The keyboard is another surprise considering the Avita Admiror’s affordable price, with much more travel than is typical”
rate, but this s dropped to 21fps on n the second nd and third run.
I also noticed ticed sluggishness in the Admiror ror as I was loading the benchmarks.
This involves es a hefty 11.4GB transfer of files, and it took more than ten minutes on the Avita compared pared to the five minutes or so on most laptops I review. view. Sure enough, n when hen I put the 512GB SSD to the test it returned results esults of 411MB/ sec sustained ed read and 471MB/sec c sustained write. That’s due e to the drive using SATA ATA rather than NVMe technology. echnology.
The e other speed handbrake brake is the 8GB of RAM, AM, and it was while ile searching for a manual for the Admiror miror to check if this was upgradeable that I noticed another worry: Avita’s UK site doesn’t yet offer a way to download this. Or indeed name the laptop on its support website (nor the Pura).
There are two other negatives to flag before deciding whether to buy this laptop. The first is its poor battery life of 5hrs 21mins, and that’s in our nonintensive video-rundown tests, and the second is the lack of legacy ports. I’m always happy to see two USB-C ports on a laptop, but if you forget to carry the bundled adapter (this includes USB-A, HDMI and USB-C ports, plus a 3.5mm jack), you won’t even be able to plug in a USB drive. Less crucially, note that the 802.11ac Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 4.2 are a generation behind the latest standards.
The Avita Admiror flatters with its looks and build quality, but when you can buy the much superior Huawei MateBook 14 for only £150 more – and note the Ryzen 5 4600H version, which will be at least twice as fast as the Admiror, costs osts £750 – there’s no way I can recommend
it.
SPECIFICATIONS CIFICATIONS
Four-core -core 2.3GHz AMD Ryzen 7 3700U processor 8GB DDR4 RAM Radeon RX Vega 10 graphics 14in non-touch h IPS display, 1,920 x 1,080 resolution lution 512GB SATA SSD 1-megapixel apixel webcam 2x2 802.11ac Wi-Fi Fi Bluetooth 4.2
2 x USB-C 3.1 USB-C dongle with HDMI, USB-A, USB-C SB-C and 3.5mm jack 38.5Wh battery y Windows 10 Home 325 x 235 x 18mm m (WDH) 1.3kg
1yr limited warranty ty