PowerSpec makes a gaggle of ho-hum desktop towers that look much the same as the ones you might have brought home from a Micro Center [the mostly East Coast equivalent of Fry's Electronics] in the 1990s. Now, the company is selling Micro Center shoppers something significantly more eye-catching: souped-up but inexpensive gaming laptops, including the PowerSpec 1710 [$1,299] we're reviewing here. A quick glance at the specs shows that this machine represents amazing value for money, with its Intel Core i7 processor, Nvidia GeForce GTX 1070 graphics, 16GB of RAM, and 17.3-inch full HD display. Performance tests confirm that this is indeed a beast on a budget as long as you can deal with the significant heat it generates. The downside is that you can only buy it in Micro Center stores.
Slim, With Good Looks
At 1 by 16.5 by 11 inches [HWD] and 6.7 pounds, the PowerSpec 1710 is as big and heavy as you'd expect from a 17-inch gaming rig, though it's far from the biggest or heaviest. It's svelte compared with the 13.1-inch deep, 9.77-pound Alienware 17 R4. In fact, this is one of the lightest 17-inchers we've tested recently, weighing a pound less than the New Razer Blade Pro. Even better, the Power Spec's manageable AC adapter adds only 1.77 pounds, compared with the behemoth power bricks that power competing laptops with 10-series GPUs.
The Power Spec 1710 isn't just slim, it looks good too, offering an understated aesthetic that could be suitable for the game room or the boardroom. It's made entirely of black plastic, except for the red plastic borders around the air intake grilles on the back edge and the speaker ports on the bottom. The top of the display lid is sculpted, with angular cutouts on the left and right sides, and there are more sculpted bits next to the webcam and on the front edge. Everything feels very solid and well-put-together. There's noticeable flex in the display lid, but that's understandable for such a large, thin surface, and it doesn't feel flimsy.
An air of quality and usefulness continues on the bottom of the laptop, even down to the labels on the screws that tell you which ones you need to loosen to detach the keyboard and which ones allow the chassis itself to come apart.
Similar Products
Micro Center is also selling a smaller version of this laptop called the PowerSpec 1510, which has a 15-inch display and completely different case styling, but mostly identical specs to the PowerSpec 1710.
Wide Angles, No Tearing
The PowerSpec 1710's full HD [1,920-by-1,080] display uses an In-Plane Switching [IPS] panel, which means that colors don't wash out and text is visible even when viewing the screen from extreme angles. The display supports Nvidia's G-Sync technology to reduce the annoying tearing effect during gameplay by synchronizing the screen's refresh rate and the frame rate of the GTX 1070. You can toggle this feature on or off in the Settings panel of games that support it.
The screen's matte finish is very good at reducing glare from nearby lights, eliminating a significant source of frustration for gamers. The downside of a matte screen is that colors don't appear as vibrant as they would on a glossy display. There's no option to configure a glossy display on the PowerSpec 1710. In fact, there are no configuration options at all, and you can't even buy it online. You walk into your local Micro Center, swipe your credit card, and walk out with the laptop.
The 17-inch form factor allows enough room for a full-sized keyboard, and it's nice to see that the PowerSpec 1710 takes full advantage of that space. You won't find mechanical switches, but you will find a complete number pad as well as full-sized directional arrow keys. The keys are a bit mushy and wobbly, but there's very little flex when you strike them forcefully, thanks to the solid chassis.
The keyboard's three-zone RGB backlighting is controlled by a mixture of dedicated function buttons and software. You can increase or decrease the backlight brightness and turn it off using the Fn + [asterisk] and Fn+ [minus] keys on the numpad, or bring up the GameFeet software for further customization by pressing Fn+ [forward slash].
The touchpad isn't clickable, but it is adequately responsive even at the lower sensitivity settings, which means that you don't have to jack up the sensitivity and risk accidental palm input while you're typing just so you can have a usable touchpad. Left- and right-click buttons are located below the touchpad. The pad itself is slightly left of center on the laptop, but centered below the main section of the keyboard, where your hands are typically resting. For longer gaming sessions at home, you'll probably be using an external gaming mouse anyway.
Because the large air intake grilles occupy the entire rear of the laptop, the ports are relegated to the left and right edges. On the right, you'll find a headphone jack, an audio input and output, a full-size SD card slot, two USB 3.0 ports, a gigabit Ethernet port and a Kensington lock slot. On the left are two more USB 3.0 ports, a USB-C jack that supports Thunderbolt 3, two Mini DisplayPort outputs, an HDMI port, and the power jack.
This port selection is more than adequate for a gaming rig, and people with gargantuan external hard drives full of games will especially appreciate Thunderbolt 3 support. If your game collection is more modest, you'll do fine with the PowerSpec's internal storage, comprised of both a 1TB hard drive and a speedy 250GB NVMe M.2 SSD. Wireless connectivity includes 802.11ac Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 4.1.
For more casual, headset-less gaming sessions, you'll appreciate the PowerSpec's 1710's speaker position in the display hinge. This allows for speakers that fire upward and slightly forward, an orientation that greatly increases audio clarity. Unfortunately, the bass is pretty much nonexistent, as you'd expect from laptop speakers, even though there's a dedicated subwoofer that fires through one of the grilles on the laptop's bottom.
The HD webcam is fine for streaming to services like Twitch, although you won't get great still image quality from its 2MP sensor.
A one-year parts and labor warranty comes standard.
Excellent Graphics Performance
Gaming performance on this machine is excellent, as you'd expect from a GTX 1070 graphics card. I consistently recorded frame rates above 80 frames per second [fps] and often much higher on both our Heaven and Valley gaming simulations as well as during a brief session of playing Sleeping Dogs, all with G-Sync enabled.
You can get a sense of just how much GPU power the PowerSpec 1710 has relative to its similarly priced competitors on the chart below. Most GTX 1050 Ti-powered systems, including the Lenovo Legion Y520, the MSI GP62X Leopard Pro, and the Asus ROG Strix GL753V post frame rates in the mid-40fps range on maximum quality settings. That's too low for quality gameplay. Meanwhile, the PowerSpec 1710 posted 100fps on the Heaven test and 95fps on the Valley test at maximum quality settings.
The superior results continue on the synthetic 3DMark benchmark tests, which truly tax the graphics subsystem. With a score of 7,593, the PowerSpec 1710 performed slightly better on the Fire Strike Extreme test than the GTX 1070-powered HP Omen 17 [$899.99 at HP] did [7,118], and light years better than the 1050 Ti competition. During these tests, fan noise was quite loud, but the fans spooled back down to virtually silent once testing was finished.
It's all peaches and cream up to this point, but unfortunately there is a potentially significant drawback [depending on your gaming habits] to stuffing such immense power into such a small space and charging a bargain price for it: heat. During the benchmark tests, the underside of the PowerSpec 1710 was too hot to place on my lap, reaching a temperature of 111 degrees. The exhaust outlet, located along the left edge, measured an even hotter 118 degrees.
These heat problems are a primary driver behind Nvidia's Max-Q technology, which is expressly designed to more effectively cram high-powered GPUs into tight, thermally suboptimal spaces. Including Max-Q here is likely out of the question due to the PowerSpec's price point, and fortunately the heat won't matter much if you plan to always game on a desk or table, but it makes the laptop virtually unusable without some sort of external solution like a cooling pad if you plan to game on your lap. It's also a problem if you plan to overclock the GTX 1070 or program custom fan speeds using the included software utility. Given the excellent results I experienced at factory settings, though, this won't be necessary for all but the most hardcore tinkerers.
With the PowerSpec 1710's light effect on your wallet, you could potentially justify using it just for gaming and maintaining another system as your everyday computer for other tasks. But thanks to the Intel Core i7-7700HQ and 16GB of RAM, you could just as easily use the laptop as your primary workhorse for intensive computing tasks like video and photo editing, not to mention everyday actions like web browsing. Its score of 3,507 on the comprehensive PCMark 8 benchmark is proof of this, as are the excellent times on our Handbrake video-encoding [1 minute, 1 second] and Photoshop image-editing [3:04] tests. Note, however, that these aren't substantially faster or slower than any of the competing systems, since they all use the same processor, with the exception of the HP Omen 17.
Battery life is good for a gaming laptop, clocking in at a class-leading 5 hours and 52 minutes on our rundown test, which involves playing a local video at 50 percent screen brightness with Wi-Fi and Bluetooth turned off. You won't get anywhere near 6 hours of battery life while gaming, of course, so this is a system that should be plugged in most of the time.
A Top-Notch Deal, If You Can Get It
The PowerSpec 1710 is such a good value that it's understandable Micro Center is requiring you to visit a store to buy it. The stores are mostly on the East Coast and in the Midwest, which limits the laptop's appeal and prevents us from awarding it an Editors' Choice award. For those who aren't near a store, we recommend the HP Omen 17, which retains our Editors' Choice for midrange gaming laptops.
If you can get to a Micro Center, in addition to getting a good deal, you're also getting an excellent performer if you buy this system. It's got more than enough graphics horsepower to run the latest titles at maximum quality settings at its native full HD resolution. The cooling system struggles to deal with this immense power, but that will only be a problem for small subsets of buyers, like overclockers and those who game on their lap. For most other gamers, the PowerSpec 1710 is worth a look.
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