p670hs-g gtx 1070 from Scan.Co.uk

This review is in retrospect of all events. This is my recent experience with Scan.co.uk and their 3xs system.

This year I have decided to upgrade my laptop from asus g750 with gtx765. It was a good machine which I have taken apart, swaped screen and repasted. I have done what I could to make it better. But time has come to upgrade so I went to Scan.co.uk. They are the pc specialists here in the UK. They are a small company (at least they used to be) with usually good customer support and service. I have always gone to them for anything and always received great service. The spec I went for is the following:

https://www.scan.co.uk/3xs/configurator/3xs-lg17-vengeance-gsync

With:

- p670hs-g shell 1080 g-sync screen
- gtx1070
- i7 7700HQ
- 16GB Corsair (2x8GB) - 2133MHz
- 250GB Samsung 960 Evo
- Qualcomm Killer 1535 M.2, 867Mbps, 802.11a/b/g/n/ac
- Pixel Perfect (extra 28 day pixel warranty for £36)
- Win 10 Pro

Now I have enquired about faster speed ram but was told that they were having issues with machines crashing if faster ram was present. I thought at this point hey they know what they are doing so I did not press the matter.

I have ordered on 15th of Feb and received the unit on 17th of Feb. Super speedy service. I was happy at this point. Laptop looked exactly what I was looking for albeit little bit heavier than I was anticipating.

One of main reasons for going with this particular unit was that it was lighter than my previous unit by some 1,3 kg.

Initially I did not bother with any benching or gaming even I was busy with life haha.

When I have eventually got around to installing Witcher 3 and doing some benching namely unigine heaven and cinebench I have discovered something rather worrying..

The temperatures were out of control waaaay to high even for this unit. I was booting in to Windows and immediatley after boot temp would be over 90C even up to 95C. Witcher 3 after 2 minutes since starting (not even gaming just on) brought the temps up to 100C easily.

At this point I was right, OK maybe I am doing something wrong. Thats when I contacted support online and started the process of troubleshooting. They guided me trough stuff like fan profiles and requested that I use different monitoring program for temps.

I used speedfan, hwmonitor, coretemp. All with the same results and there was no question that the unit was poor in therms of thermals.. I have contacted Scan again they at this point admitted that there is something wrong with the unit.

They suggested I repaste. Which I was considering but decided that why should I have to after just spending 1800£ for brand new unit. I decided to ship it back to them.

At this point I have already discovered NBR and vast amount of information about Clevo in general.

So they booked return courier on Friday 6th of Feb and gone back following Monday. Pretty swift turnaround. Scan as usual great service and I was happy ish.

Now as it went with next day courier and I have not received any confirmation that it has been delivered I got slightly worried. Kept reading on and on and found other users of the forum with problems on certain units sold by Scan.

By Wednesday still no response or confirmation about my unit. As it has vanished. That Wednesday was 14th working day so I pulled the trigger and send cancellation of contract request (14days here for distance selling)

No reply to this email until following Monday 13th of Feb. I did however get email on Friday the 10th that the laptop has been received.

On the 13th I have received a response that unit was cutom made and it does not fall under distance selling regulations therefore I could not invoke that right.

Since then I have been back and forth with emails and I thought that maybe upgrade to p775 with bigger Chassis would be helpful in terms of cooling. Also @Papusan has opened my eyes with regards to BGA and me being stuck with what I had.

Because the whole process was so slow and it took a day for them to reply to my email and so on it took over a week until we got to the point they agreed as `goodwil gesture` to upgrade my unit and of course get more money out of me.

But because it took so long and I had time to discover more things about p775 namely this thread:

**Official Clevo P775DM2/3(-G)/P75xDM2(-G) (Sager NP9152/NP9172) 'WINGMAN 2.0'/'BATMAN 3.0' Lounge**

(I am still reading trough it by the way hahah I am around 270th page)

I learned about what has to be done to make the unit work and realised that scan is not up to the task of doing it. They were very forthcoming in me requesting 6700k being installed instead 7700k but the support guy did not know `of the top of his head` the TDP for 6700k. This has worried me slightly as someone in technical department should have at least remote knwoledge about one of the top cpus of past couple of years..

SO as the story followed I have decided to abandon whole project on grounds of me losing confidence in Scan and them shipping me a laptop that did not perform. And the whole process of back and forth has begun again. No one tried to call me at this point or any earlier stage in this process. We are talking about two weeks since my laptop has gone back.

I have paid with CC so I was protected for faulty goods. I have contacted my bank and started the process. They were very helpful. I will come back to this in a bit.

I did get an offer of an upgrade and reminder that I can not cancel the contract. I was also adivsed that technicians could not find any fault with the unit and that they are running Withcer 3 all day with peak temps 79/80

Lucky for them hey

Fortunately I had temps and transcripts from chat support that show the steps taken to prove that something is wrong.

I waited for a phone call to discuss on the Friday 17th March. The call never came however I received email with apologies. And phone call promised for Monday 21st of March.

At that point I was not interested in talking I just wanted my money back. I preffered to give money to someone who knows what they ared doing and was looking for alternatives. (please see my other review of Obsidian-PC)

On Monday 21st nothing happened until around 20:30 when my phone rung couple of times. I was sat on a pc reading trough NBR of course. My phone was in front of me and I picked it up straight away. The person on the other end put the phone down. I rung number straight away few times as this was local land line number for the area that Scan was based in. No answer.

Around 20 minutes later I have received this:

Mr Kamil Rott,

Hi,

I have tried calling but have been unable to get through to you,

Please advise a suitable time to callback, alternatively my contact details are below,

I look forward to hearing from you,

Kind Regards,


3XS Systems Support Manager
Scan Computers International Limited


Interesting as I have answered and then called back right away. This is new guy on my case at this point and more senior figure than the chap I was dealing with previously. None the less great going..

At this point I was pretty pi$%*d off and started quoting them all sorts of laws that cover my case for a refund. No budging. I went and told them about how poor of an experience I had thus far and how unhappy and disappointed I was with the service and customer support I have received.

On the 27th of March I received an email from Adam offering the refund finally so I was content. I responded with deatiled questions as to how much refund and so on. Since then I had no reply...

At this point my bank already agreed to refund me on grounds that the unit was not suitable for intended use. I do not usually pay with CC but I am glad that I did in this case. The transcripts and email exchanges were enough for them to rule within couple of days that I have the grounds for a refund. Brilliant.

To summarise. I feel what has happened here is that Scan grew over the years and the overall standard had gone down. When company is small and everyone cares and is working together for customer that is when they are at their best.

Unfortunately this is no longer the case with Scan (at least in my case) They might be good for commercial stuff (non custom) something that you can return without hassle but not for their 3xS systems.

I will be staying well away from them from now on and would rather pay more to receive decent service.

I hope this is not too bitter and just reflects the experience I had with Scan recently. As I said previously in the past they always gave me good service. Not this time tho. My suggestion: stay well away and go with someone that has good reputation. When it comes to Clevo re-sellers there are plenty present here on NBR. Just find your best suited one.

PS. I did suggest Scan to join NBR and perhaps get involved but I have not seen anyone present and perhaps they are too good/busy for this

Rant over.

Thanks

Kamil

 

Thanks INFO OUT TO THE PEOPLE!! IMPORTENT!!

 

I haven't read all the way through but Scan are far from a small company these days
Back around 2001 they were fairly small, but their returns policies were awful even back then. I often had to shout down the phone and threaten to report them to get anything done. Now they are probably one of the biggest PC component resellers in the UK.
I know they usually have at least 2 container loads of orders going out via DPD every day (possibly more) as we used to buy a lot of components from them in my old job, but even now their returns side is pretty poor and personally I would never buy a prebuilt system from them as I don't trust their tech guys, they seem pretty clueless.
Unless something was physically dead whenever I sent something back they would never read the fault description, and would often send a message to say 'no fault found' at which point I would have to phone them, explain what the problem was again and then they would find the fault.

 

A lesson for everyone, always buy using CC/Paypal to protect yourself! It helps to have that when your in such a sittuation!