Hey guys, Jarrod here and today we’re going to check out the P650RE laptop from Metabox,
you won't want to miss this.
Inside the box we have the laptop itself which is protected by foam, there’s also various
instructions and driver CDs, as well as another box containing the power brick and cable.
The P650RE is a laptop in the Prime series from Metabox, an Australian company that specialise
in custom high-end laptops.
First we’ll start with the specs of the laptop, these are the specs that I selected
when ordering the laptop online, basically every component has multiple ways that it
can be customized so you could end up with a completely different laptop depending on
your selection.
We’ve got an Intel Skylake i7 6700HQ CPU @ 2.6GHz which can turbo upto 3.5GHz, this
is a quad core processor featuring 4 cores and 8 total threads.
There’s 16GB of DDR4 memory @ 2133MHz.
For storage we have a Samsung 850 EVO 250GB m.2 SSD which runs the operating system, and
a secondary 500GB HGST Hard disk drive for data storage.
For the gamers there’s a Nvidia GeForce GTX 970M with 3GB of GDDR5 memory,,,,,, we’ll
have some benchmarks later on.
The display is a 15.6” IPS 1080p LED-backlit display.
For network connectivity have a Gigabit ethernet port and Intel Dual Band Wireless-AC card..
All of these specs are placed nicely into a Clevo P650RE6 case, essentially Metabox
have built this laptop inside the shell offered by Clevo.
The case has a black metallic brushed aluminium look and the build quality feels quite solid.
It looks pretty great until the fingerprints start to build up, it would have been nicer
if the surfaces were a bit more fingerprint resistant.
The total weight of the laptop including power brick is 2.5kg which is still quite portable,
I haven’t had any issues transporting it around.
I also like that it’s a good weight for me to easily open the lid with just one hand
easily.
The dimensions of of the laptop are 38.5cm in width, 27.1cm in depth, and 2.5cm in height,
so it’s actually fairly thin for such a powerful laptop.
The 15.6” display in my model features a 1080p IPS panel at 60Hz, but can optionally
be upgraded to 4K.
The brightness can be adjusted and it looks pretty good, the viewing angles on the screen
are actually pretty amazing and I can see details clearly from any sharp angle.
The surface of the screen has a matte finish to it which I prefer over a glossy screen
as you can more easily see what you’re doing regardless of the lighting situation as there’s
no reflection.
Above the display is an inbuilt 2MP camera capable of 1080p video at 30FPS, however the
quality isn’t very great which seems to be pretty common with inbuilt laptop cameras.
The keyboard and touchpad have been fine, no problems there but there wasn’t anything
special that surprised me either.
The keys feel nice to type on and have optional white LED back lighting, there’s even room
for a full numpad on the right.
The touchpad is quite a good size and features physical left and right click buttons, with
a fingerprint scanner in between.
The touchpad also supports multi gesture support which is awesome as I’m used to two finger
scrolling from my MacBook Pro.
There’s also a good amount of wrist resting space for both hands on either side of the
touchpad for typing.
Something I came to like after more use were the amount of ports available on the laptop
as it gives me the ability to do basically anything without carrying around any sort
of adapters.
On the left there are 2 mini displayport 1.2 ports, 1 USB 3.0 type A port, and 1 HDMI 2.0
port.
Over on the right we have a range of 3.5mm audio jack options including S/PDIF, microphone,
and headphone jacks.
There's a 6 in 1 card reader which supports MMC, RSMMC, SD, Mini-SD, SDHC and SDXC cards.
Next there's 2 more USB 3.0 type A ports, an RJ-45 gigabit ethernet port and Kensington
lock.
On the back there's another sneaky USB 3.0 type A port, as well as the AC power input
for the included battery brick.
With all that in mind how is the laptop to actually use?
Everyday real world performance has been excellent, which is kind of expected with specs like
these.
I’m running Windows 10 Professional and have not had any slowness or delay at all,
all programs I’ve had open at once have performed well with no issues.
During normal use I have not had any heat issues, even when idle the fans are noticeably
audible which would help keep things consistently cool.
With an ambient room temperature of 25c the CPU temperature was only 20c at idle.
In terms of more synthetic performance I’ve run some basic benchmarks to give you an idea
on how this laptop with these specs performs.
The CPU temperature rose to 50c while running the PassMark CPU benchmark, which resulted
in a score of 8734.
In Crystal Disk Mark the SSD performed around 530MB/s sequential reads and 470MB/s sequential
writes per second, while the spinning rust hard disk drive was only around 100MB/s both
read and write which was sort of expected as I cheaped out and got the lowest model
available just for data storage so that’s fine.
I ran the Fire Strike benchmark from 3DMark and got an overall score of 6606, I’ll leave
a link to the full results page in the video description.
Throughout the test I did notice some screen tearing which is expected without a g-sync
style display, this model of laptop is upgradeable to a g-sync panel however I’m using this
laptop for work primarily and not gaming so I didn’t go with the g-sync option.
The included battery is a 4 cell Lithium-Ion Polymer battery rated at 60 Watt Hours.
The battery is claimed to last for 325 minutes, and with a full charge and just doing web
browsing with the screen on half brightness, Windows 10 estimated that it would last for
342 minutes so that seems fairly accurate.
While running the benchmarks on battery power the estimate reduced to just 45 minutes.
Considering the high specs of the machine I think the battery life is fairly decent,
and should allow you to get plenty of things done on a full charge with the exception of
lots of hardcore gaming which shouldn’t be surprising in general with gaming laptops.
There are front facing ONKYO speakers which sound pretty decent as far as inbuilt laptop
speakers are concerned.
The P650RE comes with a 1 year warranty, with optional extensions to 2 or 3 years.
A work colleague of mine who has an older model from Metabox recently had a hardware
fault and needed to contact their support.
They were very helpful and after some basic over the phone troubleshooting determined
that the laptop would need to be sent back to them for further investigation and repair.
Metabox even covered the costs of the express postage which was really cool.
The Metabox P650RE laptop offers powerful mobile gaming and could act as a desktop replacement
while being portable and quite thin considering the specs inside.
The P650RE starts at $1,789 AUD and basically every component can be upgraded in multiple
ways, so the final price will greatly depend on your requirements, with the particular
customizations I have the total was around $2,200 AUD.
You can check out their website at metabox.com.au and customize your own high-end laptop, I’ve
left a link in the video description for this specific model.
So what did you guys think of the P650RE laptop from Metabox?
Considering the specs are better than my somewhat outdated desktop I think it’s pretty awesome
that something of this size can be so powerful.
Let me know what you guys thought down in the comments or simply leave a like or dislike
on the video, and don’t forget to subscribe for future videos like this one.