Utopia Computers have packed a lot of power into a tiny chassis. How will it perform in our tests?
Product on Review: Utopian 11.6” i5 Gaming Laptop
Manufacturer and Sponsor: Utopia Computers
Street price: £674.98 inc. VAT (At time of review)
We have a custom gaming laptop from Utopia in our hands today and although it is only a bit bigger than a netbook, it definitely packs a lot of punch for its size. It has a dual core Intel Core i5 that runs at 2.5GHz, which has a turbo speed of 3.1GHz. Paired with 8GB of RAM and an NVIDIA GT650M, it should be able to give you great frame rates at its native resolution of 1366×768 on its 11.6 inch screen.
Let’s take a look at how this miniature laptop performs in our tests but first, here is a little about the laptop in the words of Utopia Computers.
An Overview of The Utopian Custom Laptop
This is the smallest of our custom laptops on sale here at Utopia but what it lacks in size it makes up for in performance. Running at 2.5GHz with 8GB of RAM as standard, you will find playing all of the latest games smoothly easily on this 11.6″ High Performance Laptop!
Specifications
The Utopian Custom laptop consists of the following components:
Chassis & Display – 11.6″ Matte HD LED Widescreen (1366×768)
Processor(CPU) – Intel Core i5 Dual Core Mobile Processor i5-3210M (2.5GHz)
Memory(RAM) – 8GB Samsung 1600MHz SODIMM DDR3 Memory
Graphics Card – NVIDIA GeForce GT 650M – 2.0GB DDR3 Video RAM – DirectX
Memory (HDD) – 500GB Serial ATA II 2.5″ Hard Drive With 8MB Cache
Memory Card Reader – Internal 9 In 1 Card Reader (MMC/RSMMC/SD: Mini, XC & HC/MS: Pro & Duo)
Sound Card – Intel 2 Channel High Definition + Mic / Headphone Jack
Network Facilities – Gigabit LAN & Wireless Intel N135 802.11N (150Mbps) + Bluetooth
USB Options – 2 x USB 3.0 Ports + 1 USB 2.0 Port As standard
Keyboard – Integrated UK Keyboard
Mouse – Integrated 2 Button Touchpad Mouse
Webcam – Integrated 1.3MP Webcam
Operating System – Windows 8 64-bit (Windows 7 on request)
Processor(CPU) – Intel Core i5 Dual Core Mobile Processor i5-3210M (2.5GHz)
Memory(RAM) – 8GB Samsung 1600MHz SODIMM DDR3 Memory
Graphics Card – NVIDIA GeForce GT 650M – 2.0GB DDR3 Video RAM – DirectX
Memory (HDD) – 500GB Serial ATA II 2.5″ Hard Drive With 8MB Cache
Memory Card Reader – Internal 9 In 1 Card Reader (MMC/RSMMC/SD: Mini, XC & HC/MS: Pro & Duo)
Sound Card – Intel 2 Channel High Definition + Mic / Headphone Jack
Network Facilities – Gigabit LAN & Wireless Intel N135 802.11N (150Mbps) + Bluetooth
USB Options – 2 x USB 3.0 Ports + 1 USB 2.0 Port As standard
Keyboard – Integrated UK Keyboard
Mouse – Integrated 2 Button Touchpad Mouse
Webcam – Integrated 1.3MP Webcam
Operating System – Windows 8 64-bit (Windows 7 on request)
Packaging & A First Look
Making sure your laptop arrives safely at your door is clearly a priority of Utopias. The box itself is much bigger than the product and it is absolutely filled to the top with air pockets to ensure that it takes no damage during transport.
There are no additional accessories that come with this laptop. You get the laptop and its charger in the box which arguably is all you need. The battery does come preinstalled in the laptop which is not too much of an issue but it is better to ship them on their own to avoid things such as drainage or leakage. Most laptops however do ship with the battery already installed so this is no issue.
A Closer Look
The entire laptop is covered in the same sort of finish and it is certainly an odd feeling surface. That is not to say that it is not a nice cover. It has a rubberised sort of feeling to it but it is not made out of rubber.
The back of the laptop is very easily removed via a few screws, should you want to gain access to the internals of the system.
The battery that powers this laptop is a 6-cell li-ion battery, which can provide you with three to four hours of normal usage. It will be much less if you are playing games but how much less is hard to say as each game taxes a system differently. We will put this to the test during our review, though.
On the left side of the laptop, we have most of the outputs that this chassis offers. They consist of a Gigabit port, VGA and HDMI ports, along with the two audio jacks for headphone and microphone as well as two USB 3.0 ports.
There is only a single USB 2.0 port on the right-hand-side as well as the power jack and the Kensington lock.
A Closer Look (Continued)
When you open up the laptop, you will see that it carries the same texture as the front of the laptop. Whilst the textured look is nice, the mouse pad is also textured in this way which I find slightly strange. Personally, I would rather see it as a smooth texture as it feels nicer to move around on but others may prefer it with this texture. Obviously, with such a small laptop, the keyboard is going to be slightly smaller too. To someone like me with big hands, I cannot comfortably type at pace. However, that may just be due to the fact that I am used to bigger keyboards such as that one on my 15.6 inch laptop.
At the top of the laptop, on the left-hand-side, there are various lights for your system. They consist of a WiFi light to tell you whether it is enabled or disabled, a HDD activity LED, num lock, caps lock and scroll lock lights are also present.
Battery and power lights are at the bottom of your laptop, which are situated above a micro card reader which can read a variety of cards. It can read the following cards:
MMC
RSMMC
SD: Mini & XC
HC/MS: Pro & Duo
Battery Life
Battery life is an important one to note when it comes down to laptops. We feel that this should be noted so that you can gauge how much time you will have with your laptop before you need to find a plug to recharge its battery. There are two tests we conduct – idle and load. During the idle test, the system is set to the high performance preset in the Windows power options, with the screen left on maximum brightness as well as the sleep feature being turned off. We measure from when we remove the AC power to the minute it turns itself off when the battery reaches critical power levels. Load tests are set to run through the 3DMark 11 demo, again, the time is measured from when the AC power is removed until it turns off.
Benchmarks: AIDA64
This simple integer benchmark focuses on the branch prediction capabilities and the misprediction penalties of the CPU. It finds the solutions for the classic “Queens problem” on a 10 by 10 sized chessboard. At the same clock speed theoretically the processor with the shorter pipeline and smaller misprediction penalties will attain higher benchmark scores. For example – with HyperThreading disabled – the Intel Northwood core processors get higher scores than the Intel Prescott core based ones due to the 20-step vs. 31-step long pipeline. The CPU Queen test uses integer MMX, SSE2 and SSSE3 optimizations.
Benchmarks: CINEBENCH 11.5
CINEBENCH can measure systems with up to 64 processor threads. This test scene contains approximately 2,000 objects which in turn contain more than 300,000 polygons in total, and uses sharp and blurred reflections, area lights, shadows, procedural shaders, antialiasing, and much more. The result is displayed in points (pts). The higher the number, the faster your processor is.
Benchmarks: SiSoftware SANDRA 2012
SANDRA isn’t always a benchmark that is included in hardware reviews but we believe it shouldn’t be ignored. SANDRA provides a vigorous package that tests your system in a rather large array of benchmarks. There are many aspects of benchmark that can be executed. We will be considering the CPU and memory tests.
Benchmarks: x264 Version 4
Simply put, this test measures how fast your machine can encode a short, DVD quality MPEG-2 video clip into a high-quality x264 video clip. What’s x264, you ask? It’s more or less the next-generation Xvid/DivX codec. We think it’s ideal for a benchmark because the application (x264.exe) reports fairly accurate compression results (in frames per second) for each pass of the video encoding process and it uses multi-core processors very efficiently
3D Benchmarks: 3DMark 11
Designed to measure your PC’s gaming performance 3DMark 11 makes extensive use of all the new features in DirectX 11 including tessellation, compute shaders and multi-threading. Trusted by gamers worldwide to give accurate and unbiased results, 3DMark 11 is the best way to consistently and reliably test DirectX 11 under game-like loads.
3D Benchmarks: Unigine Heaven 3.0
It’s important for us to perform a number of game benchmarks as well as the synthetic tests because it allows us to test the 3D performance. So here we have some popular titles, critically acclaimed and action-packed. FRAPS and in-house benchmarking tools were used to capture average FPS.
Gaming Benchmarks: Crysis 2, DiRT Showdown & SleepingDogs
It’s important for us to perform a number of game benchmarks as well as the synthetic tests because it allows us to test the 3D performance. So here we have some popular titles, critically acclaimed and action-packed. FRAPS and in-house benchmarking tools were used to capture average FPS.
Conclusion
This custom laptop from Utopia definitely packs a lot of punch for its size. It may be little, but it is a very capable laptop. Not only does it pack a mighty punch when you use it for your games, it also has a long battery life for those who need it to do their work on the move. Whilst we did not use the laptop to test its low level usage battery life, we estimate that you should get at least four hours of usage out of it, and even more if you turn the brightness down to conserve energy.
For the £675 price tag, it definitely feels like you get a quality laptop and a lot of bang for buck. The chassis itself is based on a Clevo laptop which has been customized and altered so that it becomes a Utopian custom laptop such as this one.
Utopia has opted to use a standard hard drive in this system rather than a solid state drive. The only reason we can think of is for storage reasons, as there clearly is not enough space to put a second hard drive in such a compact chassis. Personally, I would rather have an SSD for the speed but many may opt for increased storage over speed which is probably why a larger capacity hard drive is installed. Once you install a 120/128GB SSD, or even larger, the price shoots up which makes it a less attractive system to most of the public.
One downside which I personally really would have loved to see is a scrolling feature on the laptops mouse pad. It is painfully slow to drag the mouse over to the scroll bar and to do it yourself when you are so used to doing it being as simple as dragging the mouse pad down on the right-hand-side of the pad. Perhaps this is a software issue or perhaps it just does not support it, we are not sure.
Overall, the laptop has definitely shown us that bigger is not always better. Sure, with a bigger chassis you can fit more components and more powerful ones at that, but for those seeking a portable and capable laptop, this laptop definitely should not be disregarded. The build quality is great and the overall feel to the laptop is great too. It is sturdy and it
Pros
+ Light weight
+ Portable
+ Good battery life
+ Good performance, especially given its size
Cons
– No SSD
– No scrolling on the mouse pad like other laptops
+ Light weight
+ Portable
+ Good battery life
+ Good performance, especially given its size
Cons
– No SSD
– No scrolling on the mouse pad like other laptops
