If you’re in the market for you a new laptop, like with mobile phones, you are spoiled for choice, but if you know what market you want to buy in, it makes it easier. Take gaming laptops, because there’s a specific type of laptop there, and Kogan wants a piece.
Aussie e-tailer Kogan has send through some numbers this week talking up a new computer the company has crafted for the Australian gaming world.
It’s a notebook carrying what the company believes is specs and value enough for anyone seeking something “high end”, and the CEO of Kogan, Ruslan Kogan, firmly believes it.
“Whether you are a serious gamer, designer, creative professional, architect, engineer, or any user who needs high end, we encourage people to do their research and shop around,” he said.
“We’re confident that pound-for-pound, you won’t find anything that comes close to the Kogan Atlas Pro.”
So let’s take a look at this computer, shall we?
Available only from the Kogan website, the Atlas Pro is bringing an Intel Core i7 quad-core processor that is says is set to 3.5GHz, 8GB RAM, with a 1TB hard drive with Windows 10 preinstalled.
Being a laptop, it needs to connect to places, so Intel’s 802.11ac WiFi has been brought to the table, with Bluetooth also offered, as well as two USB 3.0, one USB 2.0, 10/100 Ethernet, and a port for both eSATA and USB 3.0, Kogan claims.
Multimedia is also suggested for this so-called high end laptop, with a DVD burner built into the body and Nvidia’s GeForce 940M equipped for the graphics card, sitting under a 15.6 inch Full HD display.
“What we heard from our customers was that there was a gap in the market that no one was filling,” said Kogan. “Power users who want the latest technology, in a highly portable device, but don’t want to fork out an arm and a leg for it, had no clear choice. Ultra portables are covered, and there are some great performance laptops out there that cost thousands of dollars.”
“With the new Kogan Atlas Pro, we’ve built a solid, powerful and beautiful laptop that features high-end components and software from the world’s leading technology companies like Intel, Microsoft and Nvidia,” he said.
Looking at the specs, we’re not so sure we agree. Granted, it’s probably “value”, but it’s definitely not remarkably powerful, and it appears Kogan has even played with some of the specs.
Take that Intel Core i7 processor, the 4710MQ, which is now two generations old, part of Intel’s fourth-generation “Haswell” while we’re up to sixth-gen and “Skylake”. It’s also not actually a 3.5GHz processor, but that’s what it can run at. If Kogan checks the specs for the computer, they’ll find it’s probably closer to 2.5GHz.
We might be a little pedantic about it, mind you — we like computers — but we get a little concerned when a computer is advertised as “high end” and doesn’t get its own specs right.
Not helping the lack of high end performance is the video chipset, with the GeForce 940M not really sitting in the top, and just below mid-range. Even the hard drive is low end, running on a 5400RPM drive when an option for either a 7200RPM conventional drive or a budget solid-state drive would have been a better performer.
Kogan may well have good intentions for this laptop, mind you, but the lack of high performing parts gives us pause, especially when the body of the machine packs in a DVD drive — not a Blu-ray — and a 10/100 Ethernet port, with no Gigabit found.
That means Kogan’s point about it being made for serious gamers, creative professionals, or “any user who needs high end” doesn’t feel right.
We’ve asked Kogan why a better graphics card wasn’t used, and why a better type of drive wasn’t opted for, either, but so far, it hasn’t come back with an answer to either question.
As such, it feels as though this laptop is made for people who think they need high end and don’t quite know what they’re looking for, but want to spend as little as possible.
Just as Kogan suggests, we’d shop around, because there’s more out there that feels better spec’d for the price than Kogan’s own machine.
