 Today's video is about a little black book that I have and if you jumped to the same conclusion as my wife and thought to yourself that hound dogs scoundrel Then I'm flattered, but you're overestimating the effect that YouTube internet fame has on members of the opposite sex or on members of the same sex For that matter nope. I don't have that kind of black book I'm afraid my black book is a gaming laptop from Venom and while it is pretty sexy the closest thing it contains to the phone Numbers of members of the opposite sex is a bookmark for LiveLinks.com Cooler Masters case mod world series is your opportunity to show off your modding skills and win great prizes Entries closed February 7th 2015 click now to learn more So let's kick things off with a bit of who the devil are these guys about venom They're a small Australian gaming laptop company that caught my attention by making some pretty Eyebrow-raising claims with respect to the performance and quality of their products my initial response to their request for a review Was a chilly well, I'm sure it's fine But frankly I'm not really sure what someone who isn't a tier one manufacturer can contribute to the category at this point But they insisted that if I gave it a chance I would be impressed and sent me this the venom black book 15 So what makes a black book special then anyway their overall sales aren't large enough for a worldwide exclusive chassis So according to venom anyway, it's the finishing touches Configuring fan behavior creating the OS image which they include on a USB drive instead of a hard drive petition. Thank you sourcing their own LCD panels sourcing their own keyboard keys switches sourcing their own memory and drives and I was skeptical about this one at First but apparently one advantage of their lower volume requirements is that they can exclusively opt for lower yield a grade materials for the construction of their products and It actually seems to make a difference because the finished product really is unexpectedly nice There were a lot of ways that a company with the name venom could have gone overboard on the all flash No dash Gamery look designed to appeal to the demographic that needs to ask their parents for a new gaming machine But the black book 15 is all business from the outside with a good mix of IO including optical out dedicated headphone and microphone jacks and SD slot a sim slot unusual here in Canada two USB three ports and an Intel gigabit port on the right another USB three port HDMI out and dual mini display port 1.2 ports and some ventilation on the left and a curiously positioned eSATA Slash USB three port and some more ventilation on the back to go along with the power jack so the overall takeaway holding it in my hands is reassuringly premium aluminum unibody construction stealthy blasted black anodized finish and Well horses to spare once you get under the hood because spec wise all current black book 15's have an Intel core i7 47 10 HQ quad core processor G force GTX 970 M graphics a 1 terabyte 2 and a half inch hard drive for mass storage And Windows 8.1 then there are three different tiers to get more or less RAM and SSD space depending on how much you want to pay I've got the mid tier one with a 256 gig and dot 2 SSD and 16 gigs of RAM But the lowest end one halves that and the highest end one doubles it But chassis and specs aren't even really what's supposed to be interesting about this thing so let's get into what that is Sitting in front of it the first thing I noticed is the gorgeous 3k 2880 by 1620 vision IPS matte display man this thing is nice deep blacks vibrant colors minimal glow a must if you're going to run at this resolution without scaling as expected motion blur for a non-tn panel and Fantastic viewing angles the next thing I noticed was the OS and while their Windows image does have a fair bit of stuff installed out of the factory most of it is what I would classify as Useful rather than bloat there's a Resident Evil 6 benchmark for example that they presumably use for validation that everything is working correctly a Screen evaluation utility that I immediately fired up to determine that I have no dead pixels and That other than a touch of backlight lead at the top and bottom edges it looks terrific Firefox and Chrome browsers a copy of Divx player Which isn't my favorite third-party player? But prevented me from ever having to see the horrible modern UI video player and finally a copy of Norton antivirus and internet security which Normally I would blast them for but since they have the consideration to at least include a full year of service rather than some BS Trial like the tier one guys are doing these days. I guess we'll call that a draw Their control center utility is fairly bare-bones But is lightweight and does what I need it to do there are toggle buttons for most onboard stuff and quick Configuration for fan profiles including the ability to create a custom profile if you wanted to you know turn the fan speed way up And overclock the GPU or something something I didn't end up playing around with because the stock config had the internals topping out at 70 degrees Celsius while also staying reasonably quiet. I mean we've got it running full bore right now And it doesn't have that annoying wine to it that some that some gaming notebooks do which I guess leads pretty well into the overall gaming experience the black book 15 strikes in my mind an excellent balance between Notebooks that trade away their slimness for being powerful cool and quiet like a susus g 751 and notebooks that trade away their coolness and quietness for being extremely slim and powerful like MSI's GS60 stealth this one is equally powerful But carrying it or using it feels like it's striking more of an even balance between noise heat and thickness Speaking of even balances the 3k panel is a total of 4.67 megapixels Which is another compromise that I mostly agree with 4k at 8.25 megapixels would have obviously been too much for this and really any notebook GPU to drive today and 1080p is Decidedly last gen at this point So I see why they did it But my complaint here is one for panel makers rather than for venom because while the black books 970m is enough to handle even Most triple a games at medium or better at native res I wish that 1440p notebook displays were available because that would give a little bit more breathing room for Future games at native res without without running at a lower res and dealing with interpolation Let's move on to the keyboard now though some stuff wasn't too noteworthy the layout commits no major sins But isn't exceptional and the backlight is a nice feature, but it's not super bright or anything But the feel of it was pretty unusual Honestly a little stiff for my tastes But given that this is a low profile notebook keyboard that we're talking about the tactile feedback is Excellent and while at first I bemoaned the lack of macro keys Venom includes a utility even though it is a bit buggy that allows any key to be rebound with another key or macro not bad so conclusion time is This notebook good. Yeah, it is is it really good actually Yeah, is it the kind of product that I would love to carry around with the fit and finish that's closer to what I'd expect From Apple or razor than to your typical plastic gaming PC notebook Yeah, but is it worth the price? Well, that's your call, but with the words razor and apple having just rolled off my tongue I think you already know that the blackbook 15 is not going to be a bargain basement gaming machine So ultimately that call has to be yours as usual. 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