Venom Blackbook 15 Gaming Notebook - High Performance, Sleek Design

**The Venom Black Book 15: A Comprehensive Review**

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**Introduction**

In a humorous twist, the reviewer's "black book" isn't filled with social contacts but is instead a gaming laptop from Venom—a brand that caught their attention with bold claims about performance and quality. Initially skeptical, the reviewer was impressed by Venom's commitment to customization and exclusivity, leading to an in-depth review of the Venom Black Book 15.

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**About Venom**

Venom is a small Australian company known for its unique approach in the gaming laptop market. Unlike larger manufacturers, Venom sources components like LCD panels, keyboard switches, memory, and drives exclusively, allowing them to focus on lower yield grade materials for superior results. This dedication has set them apart, offering a product that balances power, performance, and style without compromising on build quality.

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**Design Overview**

The Black Book 15 impresses with its sleek, business-oriented design. Constructed from premium aluminum in a stealthy black finish, the laptop features a unibody design for durability. Its IO ports are thoughtfully laid out: optical out, headphone/microphone jacks, SD and SIM slots (uncommon in Canada), USB 3.0 ports, an Intel Gigabit port on the right side, HDMI output, dual Mini DisplayPort 1.2, and a curiously positioned eSATA/USB 3.0 port with ventilation on the back. The design is both functional and visually appealing.

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**Hardware Specifications**

Under the hood, the Black Book 15 packs impressive hardware:

- **Processor:** Intel Core i7 4710HQ quad-core

- **GPU:** GeForce GTX 970M for powerful gaming performance

- **Storage:** 1TB 2.5-inch hard drive and a 256GB M.2 SSD (mid-tier model)

- **RAM:** 16GB, with options ranging from 8GB to 32GB across tiers

- **Display:** A stunning 3K (2880x1620) IPS matte display offering vibrant colors and deep blacks.

The specs are balanced for gaming performance without excessive heat or noise, making it a reliable choice for AAA titles at medium settings in native resolution.

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**Operating System and Software**

The laptop comes with Windows 8.1 pre-installed, featuring a curated selection of software:

- **Resident Evil 6 Benchmark:** For validation purposes.

- **Screen Evaluation Utility:** To check display health.

- **Firefox and Chrome Browsers:** Essential for browsing needs.

- **DivX Player:** A more user-friendly alternative to modern video players.

- **Norton Antivirus and Internet Security:** Included with a full year subscription, avoiding the pitfalls of trial software.

The Control Center utility is lightweight and functional, allowing quick configuration of fan profiles and other settings without bloatware.

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**Gaming Experience**

The Black Book 15 delivers an excellent gaming experience. The 3K display offers sharp visuals and vibrant colors, though it's noted that 1440p screens would be a welcome addition for future-proofing. Performance-wise, the GTX 970M handles most AAA games smoothly at medium settings in native resolution. The laptop strikes a balance between portability, power, and quiet operation, outperforming slimmer models while being more refined than bulkier alternatives.

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**Keyboard and Usability**

The keyboard is well-designed with excellent tactile feedback for a low-profile notebook. While it lacks macro keys, Venom's utility allows remapping or creating macros, albeit with some bugs. The layout is clean, though not exceptional, and the backlighting adds a nice touch without being over-the-top.

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**Overall Impression**

The Black Book 15 stands out for its premium build quality and thoughtful design. It caters to users seeking a balance between performance and portability, offering features closer to high-end brands like Apple or Razer. However, it's not budget-friendly, making it a niche product for those willing to invest in top-tier hardware.

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**Conclusion**

The Venom Black Book 15 is an impressive gaming laptop that challenges expectations with its build quality and performance. While not a bargain option, it offers a unique blend of style, power, and functionality, appealing to enthusiasts who value premium design and reliability. Whether you're looking for a powerful machine or a status symbol, the Black Book 15 delivers in spades.

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**Final Note**

Thank you for reading! If you enjoyed this review, don't forget to subscribe for more content. Check out our links for pricing comparisons and support options—your contributions help keep the channel running. See you next time!

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: entoday's video is about a little black book that i have and if you jumped to the same conclusion as my wife and thought to yourself that hound dog scoundrel then i'm flattered but you're overestimating the effect that youtube internet fame has on members of the opposite sex or on members of the same sex for that matter nope i don't have that kind of black book i'm afraid my black book is a gaming laptop from venom and while it is pretty sexy the closest thing it contains to the phone numbers of members of the opposite sex is a bookmark for livelinks.com coolermaster's casemod world series is your opportunity to show off your modding skills and win great prizes entries close february 7th 2015. click now to learn more so let's kick things off with a bit of who the devil are these guys about venom they're a small australian gaming laptop company that caught my attention by making some pretty eyebrow raising claims with respect to the performance and quality of their products my initial response to their request for a review was a chili well i'm sure it's fine but frankly i'm not really sure what someone who isn't a tier one manufacturer can contribute to the category at this point but they insisted that if i gave it a chance i would be impressed and sent me this the venom black book 15. so what makes a black book special then anyway their overall sales aren't large enough for a worldwide exclusive chassis so according to venom anyway it's the finishing touches configuring fan behavior creating the os image which they include on a usb drive instead of a hard drive repetition thank you sourcing their own lcd panels sourcing their own keyboard key switches sourcing their own memory and drives and i was skeptical about this one at first but apparently one advantage of their lower volume requirements is that they can exclusively opt for lower yield a grade materials for the construction of their products and it actually seems to make a difference because the finished product really is unexpectedly nice there were a lot of ways that a company with the name venom could have gone overboard on the all-flash no dash gamery look designed to appeal to the demographic that needs to ask their parents for a new gaming machine but the blackbook 15 is all business from the outside with a good mix of i o including optical out dedicated headphone and microphone jacks an sd slot a sim slot unusual here in canada two usb 3 ports and an intel gigabit port on the right another usb 3 port hdmi out and dual mini display port 1.2 ports and some ventilation on the left and a curiously positioned esata slash usb 3 port and some more ventilation on the back to go along with the power jack so the overall takeaway holding it in my hands is reassuringly premium aluminum unibody construction stealthy blasted black anodized finish and uh well horses to spare once you get under the hood because spec wise all current black book 15s have an intel core i7 4710 hq quad-core processor geforce gtx 970m graphics a one terabyte two and a half inch hard drive for mass storage and windows 8.1 then there are three different tiers to get more or less ram and ssd space depending on how much you want to pay i've got the mid-tier one with a 256 gig m.2 ssd and 16 gigs of ram but the lowest n1 has that and the highest end one doubles it but chassis and specs aren't even really what's supposed to be interesting about this thing so let's get into what that is sitting in front of it the first thing i noticed is the gorgeous 3k 2880 by 1620 vision ips matte display man this thing is nice deep blacks vibrant colors minimal glow a must if you're gonna run at this resolution without scaling as expected motion blur for a non-tn panel and fantastic viewing angles the next thing i noticed was the os and while their windows image does have a fair bit of stuff installed out of the factory most of it is what i would classify as useful rather than bloat there's a resident evil 6 benchmark for example that they presumably use for validation that everything is working correctly a screen evaluation utility that i immediately fired up to determine that i have no dead pixels and that other than a touch of backlight bleed at the top and bottom edges it looks terrific firefox and chrome browsers a copy of divx player which isn't my favorite party player but prevented me from ever having to see the horrible modern ui video player and finally a copy of norton antivirus and internet security which normally i would blast them for but since they have the consideration to at least include a full year of service rather than some bs trial like the tier one guys are doing these days i guess we'll call that a draw their control center utility is fairly bare bones but is lightweight and does what i need it to do there are toggle buttons for most onboard stuff in quick configuration for fan profiles including the ability to create a custom profile if you wanted to you know turn the fan speed way up and overclock the gpu or something something i didn't end up playing around with because the stock config had the internals topping out at 70 degrees celsius while also staying reasonably quiet i mean we've got it running full bore right now and it doesn't have that annoying wine to it that some that some gaming notebooks do which i guess leads pretty well into the overall gaming experience the blackbook 15 strikes in my mind an excellent balance between notebooks that trade away their slimness for being powerful cool and quiet like asus g751 and notebooks that trade away their coolness and quietness for being extremely slim and powerful like msi's gs60 stealth this one is equally powerful but carrying it or using it feels like it's striking more of an even balance between noise heat and thickness speaking of even balances the 3k panel is a total of 4.67 megapixels which is another compromise that i mostly agree with 4k at 8.25 megapixels would have obviously been too much for this and really any notebook gpu to drive today and 1080p is decidedly last gen at this point so i see why they did it but my complaint here is one for panel makers rather than for venom because while the black books 970m is enough to handle even most aaa games at medium or better at native res i wish that 1440p notebook displays were available because that would give a little bit more breathing room for future games at native res without without running at a lower res and dealing with interpolation let's move on to the keyboard now though some stuff wasn't too noteworthy the layout commits no major sins but isn't exceptional and the backlight is a nice feature but it's not super bright or anything but the feel of it was pretty unusual honestly a little stiff for my tastes but given that this is a low profile notebook keyboard that we're talking about the tactile feedback is excellent and while at first i bemoaned the lack of macro keys venom includes a utility even though it is a bit buggy that allows any key to be rebound with another key or a macro not bad so conclusion time is this notebook good yeah it is is it really good actually yeah is it the kind of product that i would love to carry around with the fit and finish that's closer to what i'd expect from apple or razer than to your typical plastic gaming pc notebook yeah but is it worth the price well that's your call but with the words razer and apple having just rolled off my tongue i think you already know that the black book 15 is not going to be a bargain basement gaming machine so ultimately that call has to be yours as usual we'll have links in the video description for price comparison guys thank you for watching like this video if you liked it dislike it if you disliked it leave a comment if your feelings are more complicated than this as always there are links in the video description aside from checking out the price of this to do other things like give us a monthly contribution if you want us to keep making videos buy a cool t-shirt like this one if you want us to keep making videos and change your amazon bookmark to one with our affiliate code so you can use that to give us a small kickback whenever you buy stuff on amazon if you want us to keep making videos and if you don't want us to keep making videos then don't do any of those things because then eventually we will have to stop thank you for watching and as always don't forget to subscribe or don't subscribe if you want us to stop making videostoday's video is about a little black book that i have and if you jumped to the same conclusion as my wife and thought to yourself that hound dog scoundrel then i'm flattered but you're overestimating the effect that youtube internet fame has on members of the opposite sex or on members of the same sex for that matter nope i don't have that kind of black book i'm afraid my black book is a gaming laptop from venom and while it is pretty sexy the closest thing it contains to the phone numbers of members of the opposite sex is a bookmark for livelinks.com coolermaster's casemod world series is your opportunity to show off your modding skills and win great prizes entries close february 7th 2015. click now to learn more so let's kick things off with a bit of who the devil are these guys about venom they're a small australian gaming laptop company that caught my attention by making some pretty eyebrow raising claims with respect to the performance and quality of their products my initial response to their request for a review was a chili well i'm sure it's fine but frankly i'm not really sure what someone who isn't a tier one manufacturer can contribute to the category at this point but they insisted that if i gave it a chance i would be impressed and sent me this the venom black book 15. so what makes a black book special then anyway their overall sales aren't large enough for a worldwide exclusive chassis so according to venom anyway it's the finishing touches configuring fan behavior creating the os image which they include on a usb drive instead of a hard drive repetition thank you sourcing their own lcd panels sourcing their own keyboard key switches sourcing their own memory and drives and i was skeptical about this one at first but apparently one advantage of their lower volume requirements is that they can exclusively opt for lower yield a grade materials for the construction of their products and it actually seems to make a difference because the finished product really is unexpectedly nice there were a lot of ways that a company with the name venom could have gone overboard on the all-flash no dash gamery look designed to appeal to the demographic that needs to ask their parents for a new gaming machine but the blackbook 15 is all business from the outside with a good mix of i o including optical out dedicated headphone and microphone jacks an sd slot a sim slot unusual here in canada two usb 3 ports and an intel gigabit port on the right another usb 3 port hdmi out and dual mini display port 1.2 ports and some ventilation on the left and a curiously positioned esata slash usb 3 port and some more ventilation on the back to go along with the power jack so the overall takeaway holding it in my hands is reassuringly premium aluminum unibody construction stealthy blasted black anodized finish and uh well horses to spare once you get under the hood because spec wise all current black book 15s have an intel core i7 4710 hq quad-core processor geforce gtx 970m graphics a one terabyte two and a half inch hard drive for mass storage and windows 8.1 then there are three different tiers to get more or less ram and ssd space depending on how much you want to pay i've got the mid-tier one with a 256 gig m.2 ssd and 16 gigs of ram but the lowest n1 has that and the highest end one doubles it but chassis and specs aren't even really what's supposed to be interesting about this thing so let's get into what that is sitting in front of it the first thing i noticed is the gorgeous 3k 2880 by 1620 vision ips matte display man this thing is nice deep blacks vibrant colors minimal glow a must if you're gonna run at this resolution without scaling as expected motion blur for a non-tn panel and fantastic viewing angles the next thing i noticed was the os and while their windows image does have a fair bit of stuff installed out of the factory most of it is what i would classify as useful rather than bloat there's a resident evil 6 benchmark for example that they presumably use for validation that everything is working correctly a screen evaluation utility that i immediately fired up to determine that i have no dead pixels and that other than a touch of backlight bleed at the top and bottom edges it looks terrific firefox and chrome browsers a copy of divx player which isn't my favorite party player but prevented me from ever having to see the horrible modern ui video player and finally a copy of norton antivirus and internet security which normally i would blast them for but since they have the consideration to at least include a full year of service rather than some bs trial like the tier one guys are doing these days i guess we'll call that a draw their control center utility is fairly bare bones but is lightweight and does what i need it to do there are toggle buttons for most onboard stuff in quick configuration for fan profiles including the ability to create a custom profile if you wanted to you know turn the fan speed way up and overclock the gpu or something something i didn't end up playing around with because the stock config had the internals topping out at 70 degrees celsius while also staying reasonably quiet i mean we've got it running full bore right now and it doesn't have that annoying wine to it that some that some gaming notebooks do which i guess leads pretty well into the overall gaming experience the blackbook 15 strikes in my mind an excellent balance between notebooks that trade away their slimness for being powerful cool and quiet like asus g751 and notebooks that trade away their coolness and quietness for being extremely slim and powerful like msi's gs60 stealth this one is equally powerful but carrying it or using it feels like it's striking more of an even balance between noise heat and thickness speaking of even balances the 3k panel is a total of 4.67 megapixels which is another compromise that i mostly agree with 4k at 8.25 megapixels would have obviously been too much for this and really any notebook gpu to drive today and 1080p is decidedly last gen at this point so i see why they did it but my complaint here is one for panel makers rather than for venom because while the black books 970m is enough to handle even most aaa games at medium or better at native res i wish that 1440p notebook displays were available because that would give a little bit more breathing room for future games at native res without without running at a lower res and dealing with interpolation let's move on to the keyboard now though some stuff wasn't too noteworthy the layout commits no major sins but isn't exceptional and the backlight is a nice feature but it's not super bright or anything but the feel of it was pretty unusual honestly a little stiff for my tastes but given that this is a low profile notebook keyboard that we're talking about the tactile feedback is excellent and while at first i bemoaned the lack of macro keys venom includes a utility even though it is a bit buggy that allows any key to be rebound with another key or a macro not bad so conclusion time is this notebook good yeah it is is it really good actually yeah is it the kind of product that i would love to carry around with the fit and finish that's closer to what i'd expect from apple or razer than to your typical plastic gaming pc notebook yeah but is it worth the price well that's your call but with the words razer and apple having just rolled off my tongue i think you already know that the black book 15 is not going to be a bargain basement gaming machine so ultimately that call has to be yours as usual we'll have links in the video description for price comparison guys thank you for watching like this video if you liked it dislike it if you disliked it leave a comment if your feelings are more complicated than this as always there are links in the video description aside from checking out the price of this to do other things like give us a monthly contribution if you want us to keep making videos buy a cool t-shirt like this one if you want us to keep making videos and change your amazon bookmark to one with our affiliate code so you can use that to give us a small kickback whenever you buy stuff on amazon if you want us to keep making videos and if you don't want us to keep making videos then don't do any of those things because then eventually we will have to stop thank you for watching and as always don't forget to subscribe or don't subscribe if you want us to stop making videos\n"