Metabox N850HK Laptop Review

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhey guys Jared here and today we're going to check out the n850 HK laptop from metab Box's Alpha Series and find out just how well it performs in games and benchmarks metabox are in Australian company who specialize in high-end custom laptops basically you pick the model you're after and then you can customize it to get it just how you want inside the box we have the usual manuals and Driver CD power brick and of course the laptop itself let's start with the specs of the laptop however keep in mind that you can customize most of the components when ordering online to suit your requirements so you may end up with something a little different in my configuration we've got an Intel 7700 HQ CPU which is a quadcore KB leak chip running at 2.8 GHz they can turbo up to 3.8 GHz for memory there's 16 GB of ddr4 RAM at 2,400 MHz for storage there's a crucial MX 300 275 gig S 3 m.2 SSD which is running Windows 10 and an additional 1 5,400 RPM hard drive for slower mass storage for graphics as an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1050 TI with 4 gbes of gddr5 memory and the display is a 15.6 in 60hz IPS 1080p LED backlit panel with a matte finish for network connectivity there's a gigabit Ethernet port and an Intel 8265 AC dualband Wi-Fi card which also provides Bluetooth all of this Hardware is placed into a clever body which has a Black Metallic look to it the overall build quality both looks and feels nice the physical dimensions of the laptop are 37.8 cm in width 26.7 cm in depth and 2.69 CM in height so it's just a little smaller than some of the other 15-in laptops from metabox that I've reviewed in the past the total weight of the laptop with battery is advertised at 2.5 kilos however again this can vary based on the hardware that you choose this particular configuration weighs in at 2.97 kilos with the power brick and cable which I wanted to note was one of the smallest bricks I've seen from metabox so far the laptop itself with without the brick or cables is just 2.38 kilos so not too heavy for its size despite this I found that I wasn't able to open the lid with one finger it seems to be more weighted towards the back as usual I found that the screen looks great and as mentioned it's 1080p however you can optionally upgrade to 4K I've mentioned in the past that I personally can't stand 4K screens at this size as window scaling is still pretty bad however I'd argue that doing so wouldn't be the best idea anyway considering the 1050ti inside more on that in the upcoming benchmarks the screen looks nice under normal conditions and even in the dark I did my usual backlight bleed test which involves making the laptop show a completely black screen in a dark room to help emphasize any bleeding around the edges I then take a long exposure photo with my camera to help display this so this really is a worst case scenario test in this case we can see a little bleed around some of the edges however it's only noticeable if you're actually using the laptop in a dark room I didn't notice it at all during normal usage in a lit room the brightness can be adjusted quite a bit and the viewing angles on the screen are pretty good I can easily see see details clearly from any sharp angle which has been the case with all metabox laptops that I've looked at so far and it's still impressive each time the surface of the screen has a matte finish to it which I personally prefer over a glossy screen as you can more easily see what you're doing regardless of the lighting situation as there's much less distracting Reflections shown I also didn't find much Flex to the display and there's no g-sync available with this model above the display is the inbuilt 2 megapixel camera which is capable of full HD 1080p video while the quality isn't amazing which seems to be pretty common for built laptop cameras in a well lit room it looks pretty good the microphone also sounds fairly average the keyboard appears to be the same or very similar to the one in the p650 hp-gpc to type on it's a full-size keyboard with dpad included and all of the keys are RGB backlit allowing you to customize how it looks although you can only customize different groups of keys together rather than individual keys I also found very little Flex when pushing down hard on on the keys which was nice the whole thing feels nice and sturdy the touchpad works well but the left and right buttons are a little different from the usual ones found on previous metab box laptops that I've looked at I found the buttons required a bit more pressure to click which took some getting used to they were less clicky and didn't push down as much which also made them quiet all as for the speakers well to be honest I didn't know where they were until I started playing some music in the past previous metab box laptops have had large front facing Eno speakers that actually sound pretty decent as far as laptop speakers are concerned however that's not the case here the speakers are found under the front lip of the laptop and they sound very tiny with no base at all I definitely stick to headphones here now let's have a look at the available IO options on the left there's the power input gigabit Ethernet port two mini display port 1.2 outputs 1 HDMI 1.4 output a USB 3.1 Gen 2 type- C port a USB 3.0 type a port and a 6 in1 card reader over on the right there's 3.5 mm headphone and microphone jacks a USB 2.0 type a port it's been a while since since I've seen one of these on a laptop the second USB 3.0 type a port air exhaust vent and Kensington lock the front only features some basic status LEDs while the back has nothing except some air exhaust fents underneath there's some air intakes which help keep all the components cool as well as some rubber feet which both stop the laptop from moving around on flat surfaces when in use and also rise it a little to let cool air in the rear section can be removed to easily take out and replace the battery which might be a useful feature if you have a replacement on hand the battery itself is a 6 lithium ion battery rated at 62 WS or 5,300 Mah hours with a full charge in doing basic tasks such as web browsing and watching YouTube videos with the screen on half brightness keyboard lighting off and background apps disabled I was able to use it for just under 7 hours pretty impressive though of course that would be significantly less playing games I also haven't had any problems with heat during normal use it stays quite cool with an idle CPU temperature of 30° C and an idle GPU temperature of 44° C with an ambient room room temperature of 18° C during benchmarking with the same room temperature the CPU reached a maximum of 71° c and the GPU peaked at 72° I left the tests going for close to an hour and the temperatures had stabilized by that time despite this the laptop still wasn't too hot to the touch during normal operation the laptop is pretty quiet too at idle it sat around the 30 D mark while running my benchmarks it went up to around 55 DB and when I manually maxed out the fans it peaked at around 57 DB just note that had the microphone pretty close to one of the exhaust vents of the laptop a complete idle I could barely hear it at all and even at maximum with my closed back headphones on I could barely hear the fan noise now let's get into those benchmarks I've been looking forward to doing this as this is the first laptop I've ever had with a 1050ti and I was King to find out how well it performed first we'll cover some gaming benchmarks followed by tests with various benchmarking tools all tests were done with all Windows updates to date applied and the Nvidia Graphics drivers installed with version 382.33 which are also the latest latest available at time of testing in Grand Theft Auto 5 I've disabled vsync and tested with FXAA on and msaa set to 8 with a 1080p resolution even with these settings we still averaged 54 frames per second likely as this game favors CPU in The Witcher 3 I used the ultra preset disabled vsync and Nvidia Hair Works and again ran at a 1080p resolution with these settings I was able to get an average of 34 frames per second so hardly playable dropping the settings down to high increased the frame rate to 46 frames per second while decreasing to medium increased to 51 frames per second which made things much smoother while in Shadow of motor with ultra settings at 1080p we averaged 85 frames per second but again this game seems to favor the CPU now onto the benchmarking tools while a useful indicator note that these results are less practical compared to the real world gaming results previously shown in heaven Benchmark with the quality set to ultra tessellation set to extreme and anti-aliasing on 8 at 1080p the laptop averaged 36 frames per second F Benchmark wasn't much different with the quality set to ultra in any antialiasing on 8 at 1080p the laptop managed to get 39 frames per second the PassMark Benchmark resulted in a score of 876 for the CPU 1,263 for the 3D graphics and 3,461 for the overall score putting this laptop into the 77th percentile of results not too bad I ran both the fire strike and time SP benchmarks from 3D Mark and got scores of 6,777 and 258 respectively not too great owing to the 1050 TI and these benchmarks Mar are typically for more powerful cards while most of the games tested rented acceptable frame rates you would definitely want to look at getting at least to 1060 for solid 60fps gaming with high settings in more graphically demanding titles however the 1050 TI seems to be capable of providing an acceptable experience I found the pairing with the Intel 7700 HQ CPU to be a little odd don't get me wrong it's a great laptop CPU but that's the thing the 1050ti seems to be more of a mid-range graphics card I can't complain with the result though it makes the laptop fairly lightweight and and thin it's quite portable yet still powerful for everyday tasks and all right at gaming in Crystal disc Mark the SSD performed around 532 mbes per second in sequential reads and 510 mbes per second for sequential rats this is to be expected from a modern sata 3 based SSD you can optionally upgrade to a pcie based SSD which should perform better there's also a 2.5 in Drive Bay which as I mentioned previously contains a 1 TB hard drive in this instance it gets around 136 mb per second in sequential reads and 129 mbes per second in sequential rates so it performs about as well as you'd expect for a 5,400 RPM Drive the laptop comes with a 2-year warranty with the option of extending to 3 years and in the past I've found dealing with metabox support to be a great experience overall they've been helpful over the phone when troubleshooting a problem overall the n850 HK laptop is fairly powerful it's got a great CPU that won't let you down in day-to-day tasks and I found the 1050ti graphics card to be acceptable for gaming at around medium settings depending on your game if you are planning on gaming gaming I'd recommend investigating how the particular games that you plan on running work with the 1050 TI otherwise in general I'd suggest looking at at least a 1060 as I found that to be a great sweet spot for 1080p gaming the n850 HK laptop with default configuration starts at $1,579 Australian doar so about $1,190 for my us viewers however you can optionally remove the second 1 TB hard drive to save $60 or drop down from 16 GB of RAM to 8 GB to save another 69 taking the price down to $1,450 Australian so there are definitely options available most of the components can be upgraded or downgraded to suit your needs so the final price will depend on your custom selection you can check out their website at metabox docomomo after I've left a link in the video description for this specific model so what did you guys think of the n850 HK Alpha laptop from metabox I found it to be a fairly powerful yet portable laptop let me know what you guys thought down in the comments or simply leave a like or dislike on the video to let me know thanks for watching and don't forget to subscribe for future Tech videos like this onehey guys Jared here and today we're going to check out the n850 HK laptop from metab Box's Alpha Series and find out just how well it performs in games and benchmarks metabox are in Australian company who specialize in high-end custom laptops basically you pick the model you're after and then you can customize it to get it just how you want inside the box we have the usual manuals and Driver CD power brick and of course the laptop itself let's start with the specs of the laptop however keep in mind that you can customize most of the components when ordering online to suit your requirements so you may end up with something a little different in my configuration we've got an Intel 7700 HQ CPU which is a quadcore KB leak chip running at 2.8 GHz they can turbo up to 3.8 GHz for memory there's 16 GB of ddr4 RAM at 2,400 MHz for storage there's a crucial MX 300 275 gig S 3 m.2 SSD which is running Windows 10 and an additional 1 5,400 RPM hard drive for slower mass storage for graphics as an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1050 TI with 4 gbes of gddr5 memory and the display is a 15.6 in 60hz IPS 1080p LED backlit panel with a matte finish for network connectivity there's a gigabit Ethernet port and an Intel 8265 AC dualband Wi-Fi card which also provides Bluetooth all of this Hardware is placed into a clever body which has a Black Metallic look to it the overall build quality both looks and feels nice the physical dimensions of the laptop are 37.8 cm in width 26.7 cm in depth and 2.69 CM in height so it's just a little smaller than some of the other 15-in laptops from metabox that I've reviewed in the past the total weight of the laptop with battery is advertised at 2.5 kilos however again this can vary based on the hardware that you choose this particular configuration weighs in at 2.97 kilos with the power brick and cable which I wanted to note was one of the smallest bricks I've seen from metabox so far the laptop itself with without the brick or cables is just 2.38 kilos so not too heavy for its size despite this I found that I wasn't able to open the lid with one finger it seems to be more weighted towards the back as usual I found that the screen looks great and as mentioned it's 1080p however you can optionally upgrade to 4K I've mentioned in the past that I personally can't stand 4K screens at this size as window scaling is still pretty bad however I'd argue that doing so wouldn't be the best idea anyway considering the 1050ti inside more on that in the upcoming benchmarks the screen looks nice under normal conditions and even in the dark I did my usual backlight bleed test which involves making the laptop show a completely black screen in a dark room to help emphasize any bleeding around the edges I then take a long exposure photo with my camera to help display this so this really is a worst case scenario test in this case we can see a little bleed around some of the edges however it's only noticeable if you're actually using the laptop in a dark room I didn't notice it at all during normal usage in a lit room the brightness can be adjusted quite a bit and the viewing angles on the screen are pretty good I can easily see see details clearly from any sharp angle which has been the case with all metabox laptops that I've looked at so far and it's still impressive each time the surface of the screen has a matte finish to it which I personally prefer over a glossy screen as you can more easily see what you're doing regardless of the lighting situation as there's much less distracting Reflections shown I also didn't find much Flex to the display and there's no g-sync available with this model above the display is the inbuilt 2 megapixel camera which is capable of full HD 1080p video while the quality isn't amazing which seems to be pretty common for built laptop cameras in a well lit room it looks pretty good the microphone also sounds fairly average the keyboard appears to be the same or very similar to the one in the p650 hp-gpc to type on it's a full-size keyboard with dpad included and all of the keys are RGB backlit allowing you to customize how it looks although you can only customize different groups of keys together rather than individual keys I also found very little Flex when pushing down hard on on the keys which was nice the whole thing feels nice and sturdy the touchpad works well but the left and right buttons are a little different from the usual ones found on previous metab box laptops that I've looked at I found the buttons required a bit more pressure to click which took some getting used to they were less clicky and didn't push down as much which also made them quiet all as for the speakers well to be honest I didn't know where they were until I started playing some music in the past previous metab box laptops have had large front facing Eno speakers that actually sound pretty decent as far as laptop speakers are concerned however that's not the case here the speakers are found under the front lip of the laptop and they sound very tiny with no base at all I definitely stick to headphones here now let's have a look at the available IO options on the left there's the power input gigabit Ethernet port two mini display port 1.2 outputs 1 HDMI 1.4 output a USB 3.1 Gen 2 type- C port a USB 3.0 type a port and a 6 in1 card reader over on the right there's 3.5 mm headphone and microphone jacks a USB 2.0 type a port it's been a while since since I've seen one of these on a laptop the second USB 3.0 type a port air exhaust vent and Kensington lock the front only features some basic status LEDs while the back has nothing except some air exhaust fents underneath there's some air intakes which help keep all the components cool as well as some rubber feet which both stop the laptop from moving around on flat surfaces when in use and also rise it a little to let cool air in the rear section can be removed to easily take out and replace the battery which might be a useful feature if you have a replacement on hand the battery itself is a 6 lithium ion battery rated at 62 WS or 5,300 Mah hours with a full charge in doing basic tasks such as web browsing and watching YouTube videos with the screen on half brightness keyboard lighting off and background apps disabled I was able to use it for just under 7 hours pretty impressive though of course that would be significantly less playing games I also haven't had any problems with heat during normal use it stays quite cool with an idle CPU temperature of 30° C and an idle GPU temperature of 44° C with an ambient room room temperature of 18° C during benchmarking with the same room temperature the CPU reached a maximum of 71° c and the GPU peaked at 72° I left the tests going for close to an hour and the temperatures had stabilized by that time despite this the laptop still wasn't too hot to the touch during normal operation the laptop is pretty quiet too at idle it sat around the 30 D mark while running my benchmarks it went up to around 55 DB and when I manually maxed out the fans it peaked at around 57 DB just note that had the microphone pretty close to one of the exhaust vents of the laptop a complete idle I could barely hear it at all and even at maximum with my closed back headphones on I could barely hear the fan noise now let's get into those benchmarks I've been looking forward to doing this as this is the first laptop I've ever had with a 1050ti and I was King to find out how well it performed first we'll cover some gaming benchmarks followed by tests with various benchmarking tools all tests were done with all Windows updates to date applied and the Nvidia Graphics drivers installed with version 382.33 which are also the latest latest available at time of testing in Grand Theft Auto 5 I've disabled vsync and tested with FXAA on and msaa set to 8 with a 1080p resolution even with these settings we still averaged 54 frames per second likely as this game favors CPU in The Witcher 3 I used the ultra preset disabled vsync and Nvidia Hair Works and again ran at a 1080p resolution with these settings I was able to get an average of 34 frames per second so hardly playable dropping the settings down to high increased the frame rate to 46 frames per second while decreasing to medium increased to 51 frames per second which made things much smoother while in Shadow of motor with ultra settings at 1080p we averaged 85 frames per second but again this game seems to favor the CPU now onto the benchmarking tools while a useful indicator note that these results are less practical compared to the real world gaming results previously shown in heaven Benchmark with the quality set to ultra tessellation set to extreme and anti-aliasing on 8 at 1080p the laptop averaged 36 frames per second F Benchmark wasn't much different with the quality set to ultra in any antialiasing on 8 at 1080p the laptop managed to get 39 frames per second the PassMark Benchmark resulted in a score of 876 for the CPU 1,263 for the 3D graphics and 3,461 for the overall score putting this laptop into the 77th percentile of results not too bad I ran both the fire strike and time SP benchmarks from 3D Mark and got scores of 6,777 and 258 respectively not too great owing to the 1050 TI and these benchmarks Mar are typically for more powerful cards while most of the games tested rented acceptable frame rates you would definitely want to look at getting at least to 1060 for solid 60fps gaming with high settings in more graphically demanding titles however the 1050 TI seems to be capable of providing an acceptable experience I found the pairing with the Intel 7700 HQ CPU to be a little odd don't get me wrong it's a great laptop CPU but that's the thing the 1050ti seems to be more of a mid-range graphics card I can't complain with the result though it makes the laptop fairly lightweight and and thin it's quite portable yet still powerful for everyday tasks and all right at gaming in Crystal disc Mark the SSD performed around 532 mbes per second in sequential reads and 510 mbes per second for sequential rats this is to be expected from a modern sata 3 based SSD you can optionally upgrade to a pcie based SSD which should perform better there's also a 2.5 in Drive Bay which as I mentioned previously contains a 1 TB hard drive in this instance it gets around 136 mb per second in sequential reads and 129 mbes per second in sequential rates so it performs about as well as you'd expect for a 5,400 RPM Drive the laptop comes with a 2-year warranty with the option of extending to 3 years and in the past I've found dealing with metabox support to be a great experience overall they've been helpful over the phone when troubleshooting a problem overall the n850 HK laptop is fairly powerful it's got a great CPU that won't let you down in day-to-day tasks and I found the 1050ti graphics card to be acceptable for gaming at around medium settings depending on your game if you are planning on gaming gaming I'd recommend investigating how the particular games that you plan on running work with the 1050 TI otherwise in general I'd suggest looking at at least a 1060 as I found that to be a great sweet spot for 1080p gaming the n850 HK laptop with default configuration starts at $1,579 Australian doar so about $1,190 for my us viewers however you can optionally remove the second 1 TB hard drive to save $60 or drop down from 16 GB of RAM to 8 GB to save another 69 taking the price down to $1,450 Australian so there are definitely options available most of the components can be upgraded or downgraded to suit your needs so the final price will depend on your custom selection you can check out their website at metabox docomomo after I've left a link in the video description for this specific model so what did you guys think of the n850 HK Alpha laptop from metabox I found it to be a fairly powerful yet portable laptop let me know what you guys thought down in the comments or simply leave a like or dislike on the video to let me know thanks for watching and don't forget to subscribe for future Tech videos like this one\n"