The N850EK is a new laptop with Intel’s 8th generation CPUs from Metabox, an Australian
company who specialise in custom laptops, so let’s find out what their newest models
have to offer.
As you can customize the hardware when ordering I’ll first cover the specs of my unit here.
For the CPU we’ve got Intel’s latest 8th gen i7-8750H 6 core CPU which can turbo up
to 4.1GHz in single core workloads or 3.9GHz on all core workloads.
There’s 8GB of DDR4 memory running at 2,400MHz in single channel, but the two slots support
up to 32GB at 2,666MHz.
For storage there’s a single M.2 slot which supports NVMe PCIe based storage, in my case
it’s populated with a 128GB M.2 SATA SSD.
There’s a single 2.5 inch drive bay which in this unit has a 1TB 5,400RPM hard drive
installed, but again that’s customizable.
For the graphics there’s an Nvidia 1050Ti 4GB which powers the 15.6” 1080p 60Hz IPS
panel, although you’ve got the option of upgrading to 1080p at 120Hz or 4K, and we’ll
see how this performs soon in the benchmarks.
Finally for the network connectivity there’s a gigabit ethernet port, support for 802.11ac
WiFi, as well as Bluetooth version 4.0, but the WiFi card can also be upgraded.
The dimensions of the laptop are 37.8cm in width, 26.7cm in depth, and 2.69cm in height,
so not too thin but that should help with cooling as we’ll see later.
The base weight of the laptop is listed as 2.5kg with the battery included, and I found
mine to weigh less than this even with the 2.5 inch drive bay populated.
When we add the 120 watt power brick and cable for charging the weight increases to just
under 3kg, so still pretty portable.
As mentioned the screen here is a 15.6 inch 60Hz 1080p IPS panel, no G-Sync available
here though.
I found the viewing angles to be pretty good, images are still perfectly clear even on sharp
angles but there was a bit less brightness when not looking front on.
The panel doesn’t get super bright, but it’s enough for inside use at up to 280
nits at 100% brightness.
I’ve also measured the current colour gamut using the Spyder 5 Pro, and my results returned
62% of sRGB, 44% of NTSC and 46% of AdobeRGB, exactly the same as the Dell G5 that I reviewed
recently so it’s not that great, definitely fine for gaming and office use but for professional
content creation you might want to look elsewhere, and keep in mind the 120Hz and 4K panels will
differ.
I’ve performed my usual backlight bleed test on the display, which involves having
the laptop show a black screen in a dark room to help emphasize any bleeding.
I then take a long exposure photo to display any bleed, so this is a worst case scenario
test.
The results are quite good, the camera does show some extremely minor differences but
to my own eyes it looked perfect, however this will of course vary between laptops.
The screen was fairly sturdy while flexing it, not too bad thanks to the hinges that
are out towards the far corners of the lid.
It can’t quite be opened with one finger, demonstrating that there’s more weight up
towards the back, which I’ll show when we open it up later.
Above the display in the center is a 1080p camera.
It actually looks pretty decent for a laptop camera, still a little grainy but definitely
a lot better than the majority of other laptops I’ve tested with 720p cameras.
The microphone sounds pretty good too, although it does seem to pick up a little fan noise.
The keyboard has RGB backlighting and can be controlled in three separate zones, as
is typical with other Metabox laptops I’ve looked at in the past.
The sides of the keys are clear which allows more light to shine through, and there are
a few different effects available through the included Flexikey software.
Overall I found the keyboard good to type with and had no issues to call out.
The key presses felt a little clicky and were quiet, here’s how they sound to try and
give you an idea.
There was only a little bit of keyboard flex, even while pushing down fairly hard it was
quite solid.
The touchpad worked alright too, it’s got a slightly grippy feeling to it from the matte
texture with two physically separated left and right click buttons with a fingerprint
scanner in the middle.
Moving onto the I/O on the left there’s the power input, gigabit ethernet port, two
mini DisplayPort outputs, one of which is version 1.2 while the other is 1.3, HDMI 1.4,
USB 3.1 Gen2 Type-C and Type-A ports, no Thunderbolt support unfortunately and SD card slot.
On the right there’s separate 3.5mm headphone and mic jacks, USB 2.0 and 3.0 Type-A ports,
air exhaust vent and kensington lock.
There’s nothing on the back other than an air exhaust vent on one side, and on the front
there’s just some status LEDs towards the left.
Up on the lid there’s only the Metabox logo in white towards the bottom, the matte black
finish which is the same as the interior does a decent job at hiding fingerprints, but they’re
easy to wipe away.
Underneath there’s some air intake vents in the center and near the front.
There’s also some thick rubber feet which do a good job at preventing the laptop from
sliding around when in use.
Towards the back you can remove the battery very easily without any tools, so if you have
a spare you could quickly swap it in.
The laptop can be opened up easily with a phillips head screwdriver, and inside we can
see the easily accessible 2.5 inch drive bay, two RAM slots, M.2 SSD and WiFi card.
There’s also two separate heatpipes for both the CPU and GPU, we’ll see how these
hold up soon in the temperature testing, spoiler, they do pretty well.
The two speakers are found underneath on the front corners, and they sound a bit tinny,
I’d stick to headphones.
Powering the laptop is a 6 cell 62 Watt hour battery, and with a full charge and just watching
YouTube videos with the screen on half brightness, keyboard lighting off and background apps
disabled, I was able to use it for 5 hours and 21 minutes, making it one of the best
laptops I’ve tested.
It was using the Intel integrated graphics in this test 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 57 minutes and was actually able to sustain 30 FPS the entire
time, quite a few others I’ve tested aren’t able to do that and drop frame rate.
Overall the battery life was pretty good, many more expensive gaming laptops with similar
specs I’ve tested have easily had half as much.
Thermal testing was completed with an ambient room temperature of 18 degrees celcius, it’s
getting cold here as winter has just started, so expect warmer temperatures in a warmer
environment.
At idle both the CPU and GPU weren’t too warm, 40 and 45 degrees celsius respectively
with the default fan speeds.
While playing PUBG at high settings the temperatures rise as shown by the green bar, but I think
they’re pretty good.
If we apply a -0.140v undervolt to the CPU the temperatures drop back a bit, as shown
in the yellow, and we’ll see how this affected clock speeds in the next graph.
Fans were also manually maxed out here, although it’s worth noting the CPU fan was already
at 100%, so the temperature drop here is from undervolting while the GPU drop is from the
fan increase from 70% to 100%.
The full load stress test was tested with Aida64 and the Heaven benchmark running at
the same time with the fans running at default speeds, and then again with the fans manually
maxed out, and then finally again with the same CPU undervolt applied in purple.
Again as before the CPU fan was already maxed out in the stress test which is why there’s
no change when the fans are maxed out in red, however the GPU fan was again at 70% so this
does help the temperatures there.
No thermal throttling was present during any of these tests, so the dual heat pipes were
adequate.
As we can see here, the stress test without undervolting is again shown in orange, and
then with undervolting in purple once more.
Out of the box the CPU was power limit throttling in this test, so not only do we drop 4 degrees
on the CPU while undervolting in the stress test, the average CPU clock speed increases
by almost 300MHz on all cores, still not quite reaching the all core turbo boost speed of
3.9GHz though.
This was possible with just CPU only tests with the undervolt applied.
I was still seeing power limit throttling on the CPU without the undervolting under
full CPU only load, which seems fairly typical with the 8750H CPU from my testing in other
laptops so far.
As for the external temperatures where you’ll actually be putting your hands, at idle the
body of the laptop is sitting in the mid 20s, quite cool.
While gaming this increases to the mid 40s and is warmest in the center, it felt fine
to the touch, and I saw a very similar result while running the stress tests, and things
get a few degrees cooler with the fans maxed out, overall the whole keyboard and wrist
rest area was fairly cool, as noted previously the temperatures aren’t getting too hot.
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 was only just audible, and while gaming it was actually a little lower
than many other laptops I’ve tested, probably due to the lower powered 1050Ti graphics as
most of the others run with 1060 or higher.
While under stress test and manually maxed out though the results are fairly similar
to most other laptops I’ve tested, fairly loud but nothing some headphones won’t block
out.
I’ll also note that I didn’t hear any coil whine in my unit.
Finally let’s take a look at some benchmarks, we’ll first cover some real world gaming
benchmarks followed by tests with various benchmarking tools.
All tests were run at 1080p with the latest Nvidia drivers and Windows updates to date
installed.
Starting out with Fortnite in general it ran quite well at high settings or lower, however
the results greatly depend on where you are in game and what other players are doing,
so take these with a grain of salt.
The 1% lows are a fair bit below the averages, and at times it did feel a bit stuttery at
epic settings for me, no worries at lower settings though.
Overwatch was tested playing with the bots, and even at epic settings it ran quite well
with 1% low averages above the refresh rate of the display, but again the results will
vary based on what’s going on in the game and the particular map for example.
As usual CS:GO was averaging well above what the refresh rate of the display could output,
the 1% lows drop quite a bit due to the smokes in this benchmark test, however it was more
than playable, this game runs on just about anything these days.
PUBG was tested using the replay feature, but again take the results with a grain of
salt, as like Fortnite it will depend on what’s going on in the game, so the results can vary
quite a lot, as shown by the 1% lows which are quite a bit lower than the averages.
Despite being a less optimized game, it still ran alright on the 1050Ti at lower settings.
I’ve tested Far Cry 5 with the built in benchmark, the results aren’t that great
in this title, you’d probably want to look at running on low settings.
Dota 2 was tested using a fairly intensive replay, so this should be a worst case scenario,
realistically you’ll probably get better results than this while actually playing,
and even in this intensive test the results aren’t that bad compared to more powerful
laptops I’ve tested.
Rainbow Six Siege was tested with the built in benchmark, and is another game that runs
fairly well on most modern hardware, even at ultra settings the 1% lows are averaging
60 FPS.
Battlefield 1 can also vary a bit depending on what’s going on in game, during the first
campaign mission it ran pretty well for me at high settings or lower even during big
fights, I did start to notice some chopiness at ultra though.
Ghost recon is a fairly resource intensive game, and was again tested with the built
in benchmark.
Based on this it’s probably not something you’d want to play with the 1050Ti unless
you’re ok with minimum settings.
Now onto 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.
I’ve only included a few resource intensive games here just to demonstrate that the 1050Ti
isn’t generally upto running these unless you’re prepared to run minimum settings,
on the other hand it’s still great for many less demanding games though as we’ve just
seen.
Based on these results I don’t personally think there’s much advantage to be gained
by upgrading to the optional 1080p 120Hz screen unless you’re primarily playing less demanding
games like Overwatch, CSGO or Fortnite at lower settings.
As for overclocking, the 8750H CPU can’t be overclocked, but I was able to overclock
the GPU core clock of the 1050Ti by quite a bit, so I’m not too sure if this is typical
or good silicon lottery luck.
With a 250MHz core overclock applied it was stable running the Heaven benchmark for an
extended period and this only raised the GPU temperature by 2 degrees.
With both CPU undervolting and GPU overclocking applied we see a nice little boost in games,
I’ve retested PUBG and we’re getting just over a 5% increase on average, although not
really enough of a difference to justify retesting all of the games.
I’ve just quickly got some CPU benchmarks here, and we can see that the new 8th gen
coffee lake chip is a decent step up from the 7th generation as we’ve got two extra
cores with slightly faster single threaded clock speeds, and we can see there’s a nice
boost with the undervolt applied, expect slightly better with dual channel memory configurations,
as I’ve only got one stick here.
In Crystal Disk Mark the 128GB M.2 SATA SSD was getting above 500MB/s in sequential reads
and under 200MB/s on the writes, but it’s worth remembering you can select different
drives which will change these speeds.
The 1TB 5,400RPM hard drive went well enough on the reads but a bit lower than I expected
on the writes.
I’ve tested the SD slot with a V90 rated card, so the card itself shouldn’t be a
bottleneck, I don’t think the speeds are too bad here.
As for the price with these exact specs it comes in at around $1,388 AUD at the time
of recording, but this will vary based on specials and the hardware that you select
for the laptop.
Honestly I think this is a pretty good price for a laptop with these specs here in Australia,
if you compare it to a similarly specced Dell G5 laptop for example you’d be looking at
about $1,800 AUD, granted the memory is clocked faster and the SSD is double the size, but
I doubt that warrants a $400 premium.
In fact you could upgrade the N850EK to 16GB of 2,666MHz DDR4 and a 250GB SSD to put it
ahead of that Dell G5 and it’s still over $200 cheaper with the additional 1TB hard
drive.
So what did you guys think of the N850EK gaming laptop from Metabox?
As shown here in Australia it’s definitely giving you great bang for your buck compared
to the competition, you’ll be able to play many games, although be prepared to use lower
settings in AAA titles with the 1050Ti, less demanding games like Overwatch for example
should run well though.
For the price you’re getting decent build quality and a capable machine that I had no
problems with.
The screen quality isn’t the greatest, but for a budget gaming laptop like this I think
that’s acceptable, and going back to the Dell G5 comparison again I actually got the
exact same result in my colour gamut testing and that’s a more expensive machine.
Let me know what you guys thought down in the comments, and leave a like to let me know
if you found the review useful.
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one.