Metabox PA70HS-G Gaming Laptop Review

Hey guys, Jarrod here and today we’re goingto check out the PA70HS-G laptop from Metabox’s Prime-S series and find what it’s got tooffer as well as how it performs in a range of gaming benchmarks.

Metabox are an Australian company who specialisein high end custom laptops, basically you pick the model you’re after and then youcan customize it to get it how you want.

Inside the box we’ve got a slim power brickand cable, instruction manual, warranty information, driver CD, and of course the laptop itself.

First we’ll cover the basic specs of thelaptop, but keep in mind that you can customize these quite a bit when ordering online tomeet your requirements, so you might end up with something a little different.

In this configuration there’s an Intel 7700HQCPU, which is a quad core Kabylake chip running at 2.

8GHz that can turbo up to 3.

8Ghz.

There’s16GB of DDR4 RAM running at 2,400MHz, and for storage there’s a 256GB SK Hynix SATA3 M.

2 SSD which is running Windows 10 Pro, and a 1TB 5,400RPM Seagate drive for additionalstorage.

For the graphics there's an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1070 with 8GB of GDDR5 memory,and we’ll see how that goes with the 17.

3” IPS WVA 60Hz 1080p panel, more on that inthe benchmarks.

As for network connectivity there’s a builtin gigabit ethernet port, and Intel 3168 AC dual band WiFi card which also supports Bluetooth4.

0.

All of this hardware is sitting inside a Clevobody, which has the usual black metallic look to it.

The aluminium alloy body of the laptopboth looks and feels great, the build of these laptops has definitely improved from the onesI started reviewing over 18 months ago.

The physical dimensions of the laptop are 41.

85cmin width, 28.

7cm in depth, and just 2.

49cm in height, so the laptop is fairly thin consideringthe 1070 graphics inside.

The total weight of the base model with batteryis advertised at 3KG, however this can vary based on your hardware selection.

My particularconfiguration with the additional hard drive weighs 3.

05KG, and with the power brick andcable the total increases to just under 4KG, so it’s not too bad for a 17” laptop comparedto others I’ve looked at.

As I’ve come to expect from Metabox laptops,the screen looks quite nice, as mentioned it’s a 1080p 60Hz IPS panel.

You can optionallyupgrade to 1440p or 4K, but in my experience 4K doesn’t look so great in Windows dueto scaling issues at 17 inches.

As we’ll see in the benchmarks at this resolution the1070 rips through most games, so you could probably consider upgrading to the 120Hz 1440ppanel which may be a better match for the 1070.

Regardless of panel type you chooseG-Sync should be available.

I’ve performed my usual backlight bleedtest on the display, which involves having the laptop show a completely black screenin a dark room to help emphasize any bleeding around the edges.

I then take a long exposurephoto with my camera to help display any bleed, so basically this is a worst case scenariotest.

There’s just a tiny bit of bleed, but it’s fairly minor and I couldn’t noticeit while using the laptop normally, though your results may vary.

The brightness of the screen can be adjustedquite a bit, and the viewing angles are pretty good, no matter what angle I view the screenfrom I can clearly see all details and colours without any issues thanks to the IPS panel.

The surface of the screen has a matte finish to it, which I personally prefer as you canmore easily see what you’re doing despite your lighting situation, as reflections areharder to see.

While moving the lid I only found a tiny bit of flex, it was quite sturdy.

Above the display is an inbuilt 2MP camerawhich is capable of full HD 1080p video.

As expected the quality isn’t anything special,but it’s not too bad with good lighting, I think the inbuilt microphone sounds prettygood, but you can judge for yourself.

The keyboard’s great, I like the smoothtexture of the keys and overall enjoy typing on it.

The keys don’t make too much noiseand feel nice to press.

It’s a full sized keyboard with numpad, and all of the keysare RGB backlit, allowing you to customize the overall look, although you can only customizegroups of keys together, rather than the lighting of individual keys.

I only found a small amountof keyboard flex when pushing down quite hard, it’s not a problem and fine under normaluse.

The touchpad was great to use too, it workedperfectly right to all edges.

There’s two physical left and right buttons at the bottomwhich are clicky but not too loud, and the fingerprint scanner is found toward the topleft corner of the touch pad.

There’s a couple of built in front facingspeakers just under the display, and two small subwoofers underneath the laptop.

Althoughthey look a little small they actually sound pretty decent as far as laptop sound goes.

Now let’s check out the available I/O.

On the left there’s the DC power input,HDMI 2.

0 port, 2 mini DisplayPort 1.

3 outputs, USB 3.

1 gen 2 Type-C port with Thunderbolt3 support, and 2 USB 3.

1 gen 1 Type-A ports.

Over on the right there’s 3.

5mm headphone,mic and SPDIF jacks, SD card reader, 2 more USB 3.

1 gen 1 Type-A ports, one of which ispowered, gigabit ethernet port and kensington lock.

As the body of the laptop is fairlythin the ethernet port needs to be pulled down to access it.

The front only features some basic statusLEDs, while the back has nothing except some air exhaust vents.

The lid has some slightgrooves as well as the Metabox branding, and can easily be opened with one finger.

Underneath there’s some air intakes to keepeverything cool, as well as some rubber feet which both stop the laptop from moving aroundon flat surfaces when in use, and also rise it up slightly to help let cool air in.

Asmentioned before we’ve also got the two subwoofers.

There’s a 4 cell 66Wh battery, and witha full charge and doing basic tasks such as browsing the Internet and watching YouTubewith the screen on around half brightness, keyboard lighting off and background appsdisabled, I was able to use it for 2 hours and 45 minutes.

While playing the Witcher3 with medium settings with Nvidia’s battery boost enabled the battery lasted 1 hour and12 minutes, so it did pretty well, remember there’s going to be a tradeoff between batterysize and laptop size, and although this laptop is on the thinner side the 17 inch form factorgives it more battery space over its 15 inch counterparts.

I didn’t have any major issues with thetemperatures, which I was a little concerned about considering the specs in such a thinlaptop with limited cooling space.

During normal use with an ambient room temperatureof 20 degrees celsius, the CPU idled at 42 degrees celsius, while the GPU idled at 38.

During benchmarking with the same room temperature, the CPU reached a maximum of 88 degrees celsius,while the GPU peaked at 78, however it’s worth noting the max CPU temp dropped about15c while the GPU was idle.

I left the tests going for over an hour and the temps had stabilisedby that time.

The laptop was quite warm to the touch up behind the keyboard, which shouldbe fine as you don’t normally put your hands there anyway.

It also got quite warm underneathtowards the back.

I also found the laptop to be fairly quietat idle, but quite loud under full load, which is to be expected based on the high end specsinside such a thin form factor.

At idle it sat around the 35.

8 decibel mark and I couldbarely hear it.

While running my benchmarks it went up to 52.

9 decibels, and when I manuallymaxed out the fans it peaked at around 56 decibels.

I’ll also note here that therewas no noticeable coil whine.

Finally let’s take a look at some benchmarks,we’ll first cover some real world gaming benchmarks followed by tests with variousbenchmarking tools.

All tests were run at 1080p resolution with all Windows and Nvidiaupdates to date installed.

In PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds I got greatperformance even at ultra settings, which still managed to stay above 60 FPS, thoughof course the framerate can dip down quite a bit depending on what’s going on, themore people in the area fighting the lower it will go.

In battlefield 1 with Direct X 11 we’reagain getting really good frame rates even at maximum settings, even the minimums arestill quite high, the game was always nice and smooth and played great.

In The Witcher 3 with VSync and Hairworksdisabled we’re getting a great experience even at ultra settings, with average framerates well above 60 FPS, even the minimum frame rates are in that area.

Watchdogs 2 also did quite well, in generalI’ve found this one to require decent resources to get a good experience, and even at ultrasettings the game was very playable.

As usual Shadow of Mordor is easily able toget really high frame rates, even at ultra settings on average we’re pushing over 100frames per second, with minimums still above 60 at the worst case.

DOOM also did well here, even at maximum settingswe averaged over 100 FPS and the minimums weren’t too far behind, it was a smoothexperience all round.

Ashes of the singularity is another one thatseems to like CPU, in this case I’ve tested both directx 11 and 12, and we can see thatwe get pretty good frame rates with extreme settings and below, with directx 12 givingus a little boost over 11.

Rise of the tomb raider managed to maintainhigh average frame rates, however I found some of the minimums to be quite low duringthe benchmarking process.

As with ashes of the singularity I also found that Directx12 gave a nice little performance boost when compared with Directx 11.

Ghost Recon is another one of those gamesthat seems to need a lot of CPU power, even with the 7700HQ I found it playable at veryhigh or lower, ultra was alright but starting to get a little too slow for my liking here.

Now onto the benchmarking tools, while a usefulindicator note that these results are less practical compared to the real world gamingresults previously shown.

Here are the results from Heaven benchmarkwith the tessellation set to extreme and anti-aliasing set to 8, and here are the results from Valleybenchmark with the anti-aliasing set to 8, and both did fairly well.

I ran both the Fire Strike and Time Spy benchmarksfrom 3DMark and got scores of 13,146 and 5,131 respectively, pretty nice for a laptop.

So we’ve seen that the laptop is capableof running many games at maximum settings above 60 FPS which is great, however it’sworth considering that we’ve got a 60Hz panel here, so in most cases even at maximumsettings we’re producing frames that will never be displayed.

I’ve mentioned in thepast that I’ve found Nvidia’s 1060 to be a nice sweet spot for 1080p gaming, andpersonally I find the 1070 a little overkill for 1080p.

Sure you can run most games atmax settings and maintain above 60 FPS, but I think getting a panel with a faster refreshrate could be worthwhile to take advantage of those extra frames.

As mentioned earlier, you can upgrade thedisplay to a 120Hz 1440p panel, however the increased resolution will in turn lower theframe rate, and as I don’t have that panel here to test I can’t say if the frame ratewill still be high enough to make use of the 120Hz panel.

Otherwise I could see the laptopbeing paired with an external display with higher refresh rate as a possible option toowhich could help better utilize that 1070.

In Crystal Disk Mark the SSD performed around554 MB/s in sequential reads and 268 MB/s in sequential writes.

This is to be expectedfrom a modern SATA 3 based SSD, although the writes are a little lower with this specificHynix model.

You can optionally upgrade to a faster PCIe based SSD which will furtherimprove speeds significantly, or add a second M.

2 drive.

There’s also a 2.

5” drive baywhich as mentioned contains a 1TB hard drive.

It only gets around 127 MB/s in sequentialreads and 120 MB/s in sequential writes which is about all you’re going to get from a5,400RPM drive.

The laptop comes with a 2 year warranty withthe option of extending to 3 years, and in the past I’ve found dealing with Metaboxsupport to be a great experience overall.

They’re based in Perth Australia and they’vebeen helpful over the phone when troubleshooting a problem.

Overall I’m pretty impressed with this laptop,and while I’m generally not a fan of 17” laptops due to the larger size and weight,this one wasn’t a problem owing to the fairly thin form factor and I wouldn’t mind takingit with me while travelling if I really wanted to do some gaming, it’s certainly got thehorsepower and pretty good battery life considering the specs.

Personally I find it hard to justifythe 1070 with a 1080p 60Hz panel, but if you’re going to use it with an external monitor withhigher refresh rate you should be set, otherwise you could save some money and look at themodel below it, the PA70HP-G, which is essentially the same but with a 1060 instead, though ofcourse the 1070 could be more future proof as games over the coming years need more graphicspower to run, so it’s your call.

The PA70HS-G laptop with base configurationstarts at $2,389 AUD with 8GB of RAM, the 1TB disk removed and no operating system atthe time of recording, so about $1,870 USD for my international viewers, and then takeoff 10% of that for GST.

Many of the components can be further upgraded to suit your needs,so the final price will depend on your custom selection.

You can check out their websiteat metabox.

Com.

Au and customize your own laptop based on what you’re after, and I’ve lefta link in the video description for this specific model.

So what did you guys think of the PA70HS-Glaptop from Metabox? I’ve found myself reconsidering the 17 inch form factor when it’s this thinand powerful, but I want to hear what you guys think down in the comments, or simplyleave a like or dislike on the video to let me know what you thought.

Thanks for watching,and don’t forget to subscribe for future tech videos like this one.

Source: Youtube