Eurocom Tornado F5

[b-mac]

I know I was always looking at reviews for gaming laptops as my new job will be having me travel so I thought I would post some updates as I go along tinkering with my new laptop. I found it helpful having an actual owners insight post purchase. The link below has the model I ordered.

http://www.eurocom.com/ec/configure(2,384,0)ec

Notebookreview has a good thread on this laptop as well.

http://forum.notebookreview.com/thr...nado-f5-owners-and-discussions-lounge.797128/

The Tornado F5 is essentially a barebones MSI 62GTVR that as you might guess, MSI sells. I went with the following options.

1080p GSYNC
Nvidia 1070
Intel 6700 (NON-K)
8 GB RAM
NO HDD/SSD
Intel 7265 AC Wireless
No OS

They do offer a 10% student discount which dropped my purchase total from ~$1570 to ~$1415. I bought 16 GB DDR4 and a M.2 850 EVO and a copy of windows 10 Pro. Total price after these items brought me to about $1650 total. A pretty good price I think for what I got.

Eurocom was very easy to deal with, especially the communication was outstanding.

I don't have any photos but the notebookreview thread has some good ones. Taking the bottom cover off was easy, just a couple of screws. Adding my own RAM and SSD was pretty once I got the cover off. The trickiest part was getting all the latches back in place when putting the cover back on. All in all it took about 10 minutes to get it off, install these items and put it back on.

The 1080p screen is very nice. Very good color and nice viewing angles, all without any color calibration at the moment. The keyboard isn't too bad, pretty well spaced and decent key travel. I am by no means a keyboard expert but will updates this as I use it a bit more. Fans got a bit loud when running the intel XTU benchmark, however I will be installing a MSI fan control suite and see how I can adjust the fan settings to my liking.

It weighs around 6 lbs so it is of course heavier than your typical ultrabook. I think my ASUS weights just a bit over 3 lbs.

I only got around to installing Windows and a few other programs so I will take it through the paces and post CPU/GPU temps, performance, etc. I do plan on undervolting the CPU and playing with the GPU boost speed to see if I can drop some temps and eek more battery life out.

I will update this thread as I tinker with it more but please ask any questions if you have any.

 

[b-mac]

Using throttlestop I am able to undervolt the CPU core and cache by about -180 mV. This reduced by temps from about 80C to the low 60s using the Intel XTU stress test. This was with the fans running at about 30% speed which was fairly quiet in my opinion.

The GPU would get to about 80C running the division on ultra settings with the fan speed around 30% as well. Core would stabilize around 1750-1800 mhz. Could probably drop temps and get the boost to stay higher with a more aggressive fan curve. I also hope a modded Vbios gets released too so I can try undervolting the GPU as well.

 

[b-mac]

With my undervolt and disabling turboboost I am able to eek out about 4 hours of battery life while browsing the web. Not too shabby for a desktop chip and GPU.

The division seems to be running well and I tested fallout 4 for a bit. Seems to be able to maintain a constant 60 FPS. CPU temps seems to max in the 70/80 range with about 40-50 percent fan. GPU maxes at 79 with similar fan speeds.