PCSpecialist Defiance III 17.3 Laptop (w/ GTX 1060)

In summary, the PCSpecialist Defiance III 17.3 is an excellent gaming laptop.

For starters, it is housed in a lovely, brushed aluminium chassis – which is reasonably light at 3.2KG, and only 29.98mm thick. The keyboard also deserves a special mention for its decent amount of key travel and RGB functionality.

The star of the show is the brand-new GTX 1060 GPU, though. While overclocking the chip does not result in big, if any, improvements, GPU Boost 3.0 does a very good job at keeping the clock speeds well above the advertised boost clock.

When paired with a capable, quad-core-with-Hyper-Threading CPU such as the i7-6700HQ, it makes for a great gaming combination. The Defiance III actually outperforms the £3500 Asus ROG GX700 of last generation in every game we ran, with an increase of 8fps in GTA V's minimum frame rate being just one example of its relative gaming prowess.

The CPU by itself is also very solid, with great scores across our range of benchmarks – an encoding time of 2:28 for my Handbrake test is particularly good.

I also saw top speeds from the SanDisk X400 M.2 SSD, while a 1TB SSHD from Seagate is ideal for mass storage. USB 3.0 speeds are top-notch, while the battery life is surprisingly good for a gaming laptop of this calibre.

In summary, the PCSpecialist Defiance III just does everything consistently well. It has great hardware inside, but also an excellent keyboard and chassis which makes day-to-day use very satisfying. Also, let's not forget the stonking gaming performance provided by the GTX 1060.

You can pick one up from PCSpecialist for £1349 HERE.

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Pros

• GTX 1060 is excellent at 1080p.
• i7-6700HQ is no slouch either.
• Lovely keyboard with RGB functionality.
• Beats the £3500 Asus ROG GX700 with previous generation hardware, despite being £2250 cheaper.
• Chassis is attractive, while also being reasonably light.

Cons

• Manually overclocking Pascal in a laptop is a bit iffy.

KitGuru says: The PCSpecialist Defiance III has excellent hardware, an attractive chassis and solid all-round performance. For £1349, it's faster than the more expensive Asus ROG GX700, making it look a real bargain.

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