The Apex 15R is a gaming laptop from Aftershock, a company who specialise in custom gaming
PCs and laptops in Singapore who recently came here to Australia, so let’s find out
how well their laptop holds up.
Let’s start with the specs of my unit, as you can customize it a bit when ordering.
I’ve got the 6 core Intel i7-8750H CPU.
I’ve got 16GB of memory running at DDR4-2666 in dual channel, but it can be upgraded to
32GB.
For storage it’s got two M.2 slots with support for NVMe storage, and I’ve got one
250GB SSD installed. There’s a single 2.5 inch drive bay for a hard drive or SSD, but
that slot’s empty in my unit.
For the graphics there’s an Nvidia GTX 1060 here in the Apex 15R, but you’ve also got
the option of getting the GTX 1050Ti in the Apex 15. This powers the 15.6” 1080p 144Hz
AHVA panel, although the base model comes with a 60Hz IPS panel.
For network connectivity there’s a gigabit ethernet port, support for 802.11ac WiFi and
Bluetooth.
The Apex 15 has a black brushed metallic exterior which is completely smooth, and this matches
the interior. The sides are well rounded but the front edge can feel a little sharp, but
otherwise the build quality feels very solid.
The dimensions of the laptop are 36cm in width, 24cm in depth, and just under 2cm in height,
so a little smaller than many other 15 inch laptops due to the thin bezel which generally
means a smaller footprint.
The weight is listed as 1.95KG on the Aftershock website, and mine weighed very close to this.
With the 180 Watt power brick and cables for charging included, the total weight increases
to 2.5KG.
It’s got a 15.6” 1080p 144Hz AHVA panel, although no G-Sync here. No problems at all
with viewing angles, AHVA is like IPS in that viewing angles are excellent.
I’ve measured the current colour gamut using the Spyder 5 Pro, and my results returned
97% of sRGB, 67% of NTSC and 72% of AdobeRGB, so not bad for a gaming laptop.
At 100% brightness I measured the panel at 371 nits in the center, so fairly bright,
and with a 730:1 contrast ratio, so again pretty decent for a gaming laptop and overall
I thought it looked great.
I’ve taken a long exposure photo in a dark room as a worst case backlight bleed test,
and there was some bleed showing from the corners, although I never actually noticed
this during normal use, however this will vary between laptops.
There was only minor screen flex while moving it, it was quite sturdy due to the metal exterior,
and the hinges being out towards the far corners further aids in stability. It can’t quite
be opened up with one finger, there’s slightly more weight towards the back but no issues
using it on my lap.
Despite the thin screen bezel, the 720p camera is placed above the top of the screen.
Both the camera and microphone are fairly average, but you'll be able to judge both
for yourself.
One of the stand out features of the laptop is that it’s got a mechanical keyboard with
blue switches and a tactile 2mm depth, not something you’d expect from a 2cm thin laptop.
The keys are RGB backlit too with individual key customization and quite a few effects
built in. The keys themselves were great to type with, but at times I felt like the keys
were a little close together for me.
As a mechanical keyboard, the key presses can be quite loud. Here’s how the keys sound
to type with to try and give you an idea of what to expect.
Aftershock also offer the laptop with brown switches instead, which offer silent linear
feedback as opposed to the clicky tactile feedback with the default blue switches that
I’ve got here.
There was minimal keyboard flex while pushing down hard, overall the body was quite solid.
Above the keyboard towards the right there’s the power button, and the fan boost button,
which will increase the fan speed to improve cooling at the expense of fan noise.
Fingerprints show up quite easily on the smooth metal lid and interior, but as a smooth surface
they’re easy enough to wipe off.
The touchpad was smooth to the touch and worked well, it clicks down when you push, you can
right click anywhere with two fingers or otherwise one finger click down the bottom left or right
hand sides for left or right clicks respectively.
On the left there’s a Kensington lock, air exhaust vent, gigabit ethernet port, USB 2.0
Type-A port, and 3.5mm microphone and headphone jacks.
On the right there’s two USB 3 Type-A ports, SD card slot, and air exhaust vent.
On the back there are two more air exhaust vents toward the corners, and then from left
to right we’ve got two mini DisplayPort outputs, HDMI 2.0 port, USB Type-C port, no
mention of Thunderbolt support though, and the power input.
The front has an RGB light bar in the center, which can be adjusted using the installed
controlled center software.
The speakers are found towards the front left and right corners, they sound …
On the back of the black brushed metal lid there’s the Aftershock logo in the center
with a mirrored finish.
Underneath there’s some pretty serious air vents right on the intake spots for the cooling
fans, and we’ll see how the temperatures go soon.
It was very easy to access the internals by simply taking out the screws with a phillps
head screwdriver. Inside we get easy access to the two M.2 slots, single 2.5 inch drive
bay, two memory slots, battery and WiFi card.
Powering the laptop is a 46 Watt hour battery, and with a full charge and just watching YouTube
videos with the screen on half brightness, lighting effects off and background apps disabled,
I was able to use it for 3 hours and 51 minutes. It was able to swap over to Intel integrated
graphics which helped improve battery, thanks to Nvidia Optimus.
While playing the Witcher 3 with medium settings and Nvidia’s battery boost set to 30 FPS
the battery lasted for an hour and 16 minutes, however when it had around 40% of a charge
left the frame rate dropped to around 10 FPS and it wasn’t playable anymore, so you’ll
want to keep the power brick nearby if you’re gaming, but I always recommend that anyway
for best performance.
Thermal testing was completed with an ambient room temperature of 21 degrees Celsius, so
expect warmer temperatures in a warmer environment. Also keep in mind there are heatpipes shared
between processor and graphics, so a change in one component may affect the other. It’s
also worth noting that when you buy the laptop you’ve got the option of selecting stock
thermal compound, or thermal grizzly kryonaut or conductonaut options.
Starting at the bottom of the graph, at idle the GPU was quite cool, a little warmer on
the CPU, but not bad considering the fans were silent. Moving up to the gaming test
at stock shown by the green bar I’ve tested Watch Dogs 2 as I find it to use a good combination
of CPU and GPU. Applying a CPU undervolt shown in yellow didn’t really change the CPU temperatures
much.
The stress tests were done by running Aida64 and the Heaven benchmark at the same time
in order to attempt to fully utilize both the processor and graphics. Continuing up
in the red bar the temperatures rise a bit for the CPU, although cooler for the GPU,
and no difference in temperatures with the CPU undervolt applied, but we’ll see how
this affected performance in the next graph.
These are the average clock speeds for the same tests just shown. Starting down the bottom
in the green bar with our gaming test we can see that there’s a 200MHz CPU boost with
the undervolt applied, and a 160MHz boost to the graphics with the overclock set.
With the stress tests running, we’re seeing a larger 400MHz improvement to the CPU once
undervolted, and a 140MHz boost to the graphics with the overclock applied, shown by the red
and purple bars.
Although the power limit of the CPU can be boosted, I didn’t test the combined CPU
and GPU stress test or gaming with the power limit boosted, as I still found this workload
to never pass 35 watts on the CPU, likely because the BIOS is just configured in this
manner for a combined workload.
These are the clock speeds I got while just running CPU only stress tests without any
GPU load. At stock in the blue bar we’re a bit below the 3.9GHz all core turbo speed,
but just applying a -0.150v undervolt to the CPU boosted us by 400MHz, and with the power
limit also boosted, shown in the red bar, we’re only just shy of full performance
in this stress test. By default the power limit is your standard 45 watts, but with
Intel XTU I was able to boost it to 56 watts for some extra performance.
To demonstrate how this translates into performance I’ve got some Cinebench CPU benchmarks here,
with the older 7th gen i7-7700HQ just down the bottom for comparison. Single core performance
didn’t change as there’s never any throttling there, but in multi core we can see how the
power limit boost and undervolt affects CPU performance.
Here are the GPU only clock speeds while under a graphical only stress test both at stock
and with a 200MHz GPU core overclock applied, although on average in this test we’re seeing
a 138MHz boost due to power limitations on the graphics which I wasn’t able to modify
using MSI Afterburner, and we’ll see how this affects performance later.
As for the external temperatures where you’ll actually be putting your hands, at idle it
was in the low 30s in the center, peaking to the high 30s right up the back, fairly
standard. While gaming the center reaches the mid 40s and around 50 degrees Celsius
right up the back, with the left and right sides of the keyboard much cooler in comparison,
and then similar results while under stress test.
As for the fan noise produced by the laptop, I’ll let you have a listen to some of these
tests.
At idle the fan wasn’t moving so it was completely silent. While gaming and under
stress test it got fairly loud with the fan maxed out, not too surprising considering
the specs inside and how thin the laptop is though.
Finally let’s take a look at some gaming benchmarks, all games were run at 1080p with
the latest Windows updates and these Nvidia drivers, with the software set to game mode
for best performance.
Fortnite was tested with the replay feature, and it was playing quite nicely even at epic
settings, which was still able to average above 70 FPS, and then at the lower levels
we really started taking advantage of the 144Hz panel.
Overwatch was tested playing in the practice range, and again very nice results in this
well optimized game at epic settings, no problems at all, with further improvements seen at
lower settings.
Battlefield 5 was tested in campaign mode and not in multiplayer mode, as it’s easier
to consistently reproduce the test run. It still played pretty well at ultra settings,
almost able to average 60 FPS, but it was noticeably better with medium or low settings.
Shadow of the Tomb Raider was tested with the built in benchmark and Direct X 12, and
again pretty nice results with a fairly large jump once we go to low or lowest settings.
PUBG was tested using the replay feature, and as a less optimized game the frame rates
aren’t crazily high, but still very playable at around high settings which was averaging
above 60 FPS.
CS:GO was tested using the Ulletical benchmark, and as usual the frame rates at all settings
were fairly high.
Rainbow Six Siege was tested with the built in benchmark, and again very high frame rates
from this test which is pretty much always the case, with over 100 FPS reached at ultra
settings in this test.
Far Cry 5 was also tested with the built in benchmark, and some nice results for this
test with this laptop, just able to average above 60 FPS at ultra settings.
Assassin’s Creed Odyssey was another that was tested with the built in benchmark, and
while I don’t think you really need a high frame rate to play this game, the frame rate
could be improved a fair bit with lower settings.
Dota 2 was tested using a fairly intensive replay, so this should be a worst case scenario,
these results are not the same as actually playing the game which would result in higher
performance. I use this test as it’s reproducible, and easy to compare with my other videos.
Watch Dogs 2 is a demanding game, but as it doesn’t seem to need a high frame rate to
play I have no trouble playing at ultra settings, anything above 30 FPS as long as the 1% low
isn’t too terrible runs fine for me.
Ghost Recon is another resource demanding game, and as usual not great results at ultra
settings, but that’s normal for most laptops, much less problems at pretty much any other
setting level though.
The Witcher 3 was tested with Hairworks disabled, and even ultra settings were just able to
get us a 60 FPS average, although I found it played much nicer at high settings or below.
Shadow of war was tested with the built in benchmark, and quite high frame rates were
seen regardless of settings.
Now for the benchmarking tools, I’ve tested Heaven, Valley, and Superposition from Unigine,
as well as Firestrike, Timespy, and VRMark from 3DMark, just pause the video if you want
a detailed look at these results.
Overall, we’re seeing great gaming performance from the GTX 1060 and i7-8750H combination,
and the dual channel memory configuration is just icing on the cake. All games tested
were able to run with good settings and still get decent frame rates, I’ve said it before
and I’ll say it again the 1060 is an awesome option for 1080p gaming, although you’ll
only really see high enough frame rates to make best use of the 144Hz panel in the less
demanding titles like Overwatch.
As we saw earlier we’ve got the option of overclocking the graphics, so let’s see
how this actually helps improve gaming performance. The exact same Windows updates, game updates
and Nvidia drivers were installed so there shouldn’t be any changes other than these
CPU undervolting and graphics overclocking changes.
Far Cry 5 was retested using the built in benchmark, the average frame rates at ultra
settings were 8.6% better compared to stock speeds and a 7% boost to the 1% low, one of
the largest improvements I’ve seen from overclocking and undervolting a laptop, probably
because it’s also one of the few I’ve been able to boost the power limit with.
As for storage, in Crystal Disk Mark the 250GB is giving us pretty nice read speeds for a
SATA based SSD and alright writes. I don’t have a disk in the single 2.5 inch drive bay,
and these are the speeds from the SD card slot using a V90 rated card, so not great
but still better to have an SD slot than not.
For updated pricing check the links in the description, as prices will change over time.
At the time of recording, the Apex 15R is going for $1969 AUD, so around $1300 USD for
my international viewers without taxes. Just for context, the Acer Helios 300 with similar
specs goes for around $2000 AUD here and in my opinion, this is a much better laptop.
Stuff just costs more here, so just keep that in mind US based friends before you judge
it purely on our Australian dollar pricing.
So what did you guys think about the Apex 15R gaming laptop from Aftershock? Overall
I’m pretty impressed of the power we’re able to get from such a thin unit, especially
considering the thermals are kept in check. The GTX 1060 and i7-8750H combined with dual
channel memory gives us excellent gaming performance in pretty much all modern games tested with
good settings, and the 144Hz screen with thin bezels just looks great. The only downsides
I personally had was that the keyboard felt a little cramped with the keys close together,
the control panel software is a little clunky feeling and could use an update, and Watch
Dogs 2 actually thought it was cheat software and refused to start until I closed it, and
the battery wasn’t able to sustain gaming below 40%.
Otherwise though I really think the pros massively outweigh the cons with this laptop, you’re
getting good specs, solid build quality, a mechanical keyboard, thin bezels with small
overall footprint, great specs, and come on, even RGB light bar.
Let me know what you guys thought about the Apex 15 gaming laptop from Aftershock down
in the comments, and leave a like to let me know if you found the review useful. Thanks
for watching, and don’t forget to subscribe for future tech videos like this one.