Performance Analysis

The GTX 1060 is unsurprisingly potent in games. Deus Ex is a tough cookie to crack, so a 33fps minimum with Very High setting is commendable. That said, power limits being what they are, a full desktop GPU will hit a 38fps minimum in the same benchmark with Ultra settings, which proved a little too much for this laptop. Nonetheless, smooth 1080p gameplay can be expected in the majority of titles.

The 3DMark scores are in line with the previous-gen GTX 1060 laptop, the Gigabyte Aero 15. VRMark, meanwhile, indicates that the laptop has enough grunt to power current-gen VR headsets.

This is the first six-core Intel laptop we’ve seen (we actually previewed a Ryzen-based six-core laptop, but that was using a desktop-class chip), and it demonstrates huge leads over dual-core Ultrabook chips from the previous generation – unsurprising, since the core count and TDP are both threefold. That said, Intel now has quad-core Ultrabook chips in its arsenal, but we've yet to have one in for review. The Core i7-8750H is the best enthusiast laptop chip around excluding the expensive Core i9 above it, so you can be sure of great performance, and Cinebench shows nicely the clear differences between dual-core Ultrabook chips, previous-gen quad-cores, and the new hexa-core.

Battery life is pretty poor; the capacity is after all only 46Wh. You’re looking at a peak of around three hours for light productivity and an hour for gaming, though on the latter point we should note that while the laptop did stay on for 66 minutes running Unigine Valley, the GPU began throttling heavily after just 45 minutes or so, capping performance to unplayable frame rates. This was with about 40 percent still left in the tank, and we couldn’t identify a reason for this behaviour. Hopefully a firmware fix or something can change it, as it felt way too soon to be limiting performance like that.

The storage results are all fine – this is fast NVMe storage and it shows. The Samsung drive is a particularly reliable one, delivering first-class results in the storage traces.

The display is a surprising bonus, outputting great results across the board. It may “only” be a 60Hz 1080p panel without G-Sync, but image quality is definitely strong. Gamma is spot on, contrast is high, and uniformity for the most part is very good. That said, in darker scenes you may notice backlight bleed along the bottom edge and top right corner – it it pretty obvious.

Stress tests were handled well by the beefy cooling system. Under maximum sustained CPU load, we observed temperature just below 70°C, and the fans were relatively calm but certainly audible. The more power-hungry GPU load test did force the fans to run faster and louder, but we’ve observed much worse from gaming laptops. The GTX 1060 was hovering around 74°C, and this was still low enough to allow boosting to about 1,500MHz, which is ~100MHz higher than its base clock.

Conclusion

The Recoil II is positioned as a bang for buck gaming laptop, leaving a sensible gap in price between itself and models like the new Razer Blade 15 and Dell XPS 15 which feature the same or similar hardware but with more advanced displays and/or sleeker chassis. That said, the display here is very much up to task – the backlight bleed may annoy you if you watch a lot of movies, though – and the chassis is decent too thanks to deployment of brushed aluminium, easy upgrade routes, and great cooling, though we do wish there were no ports at the back. The RGB keyboard is a nice touch, but it’s likely to disappoint RGB fanboys thanks to shoddy control software. The battery life is disappointing, even for a gaming laptop, though gaming is going to be much better running from the mains anyway.

The combination of a six-core Intel CPU, 16GB of RAM, and a GTX 1060 is awesome for performance, whichever way you choose to assess it. Coupled with 500GB of NVMe storage and 1TB of bulk disk storage, you have a really solid spec here – you’ll be hard pressed to find better for the same price. This is particularly important too given that the spec cannot be customised without losing the value.

Great value products usually come with a few tradeoffs, though, and this definitely applies here. Whether these are worth it or not will depend on what you’re prioritising, but overall we think PC Specialist has done enough to earn this sub-£1,300 laptop a Recommended badge.