Alright well everything is set up now and I'm actually quite impressed with this laptop, it's actually better than I expected it to be.
Firstly build quality is pretty good, the chassis is solid and the plastics used for the keyboard tray is really nice as it doesn't show fingerprints and smudges easily. The keyboard is good, not excellent but the typing experience is pretty enjoyable and provides enough feedback. The touchpad is usable but coming from a Macbook I would rather use a mouse on this laptop, but it isn't annoying to use at all. The touchpad buttons are a bit mushy and not very clicky.
The screen is pretty excellent for a laptop at this price with these specs. It doesn't get super bright and some ghosting is apparent on fast moving objects but for general productivity it's really nice as colours pop and viewing angles are very good with very little glare (screen is coated). I'm glad I went for the IPS panel variant and not the TN ones even though gaming won't be as good on this one. Talking about gaming, it does this pretty well too but as I mentioned earlier you will notice the pixel refresh rate is a bit slow which causing some smearing and ghosting but I'm being really nit-picky here and it's completely usable for gaming casually every now and then (which is what I wanted). I fired up SWBF2 and it was able to play at 70fps+ on high settings at 1080p, screen tearing was pretty bad though without vsync.
The fans on the system are audible but don't have a annoying sound to them. I find they kick on a little too much though even when I'm not doing much and they don't seem to ramp up as much as I thought when stressing the CPU.
The speakers are the absolute worst thing about this laptop and they sound absolutely terrible, make sure you pack headphones which at least sound good from the 3.5mm jack (it has a Creative audio chip).
Battery life is unknown at this point but I don't expect it to be all that good and it's really not what I bought this laptop for though in the first place as I plan to have it plugged in most of the time.
Overall I'm really happy with it so far, we'll see how it handles my overseas trip next week.
Let me know if anyone has specific questions about this specific model (the one I linked in the OP).
)
