This morning, Kogan lifted the lid on its latest laptop line, centred around what it calls “flagship gaming and performance”. Sure, it’s a laptop that can play a game or two — as long as that game isn’t an especially graphically demanding one.
It’s called the Kogan Atlas Pro — and first and foremost, it’s bland.
It’ll cost you around $999, and for those dollars you get a 15.6-inch 1080p display, a 2.5GHz Intel Core i7-4710MQ processor, 8GB of RAM, a 1TB spinning plate hard disk, and 802.11ac Wi-Fi. Of course, a gaming laptop wouldn’t be complete without a sick discrete graphics card, but for some reason the Kogan machine is packing a 2GB Nvidia GeForce 940M.
For those playing at home, the Atlas Pro’s GeForce 940M is not a hardcore graphics card, sitting very close to the bottom of Nvidia’s current-generation 900-series mobile chipset line-up. As a point of reference, Nvidia’s “GTX” graphics chips — the ones it touts for their gaming credentials — start at the GTX 950M, and go all the way up to the properly hair-raising GTX 980.
The punchline is that this so-called “flagship gaming and performance” machine isn’t going to set your hair on fire when it comes to AAA games released in the last two years. It’ll play a 1080p game at moderate visual quality settings, but that’s about it.
On top of the disappointing graphics card, you’re getting an old processor, too. The Core i7-4710MQ came out over a year ago, and absolutely eats power. And despite what the press release says, the processor features a 2.5GHz clock speed as opposed to a 3.5GHz Turbo Boost which it maxes out to occasionally.
At least the Kogan Atlas Pro does you the service of being relatively cheap. We’d stress the word relatively there, as spending only a couple of hundred dollars more gets you a more powerful gaming laptop from the likes Metabox or Clevo.