Voyo i7

It probably didn’t take Voyo’s marketing team longer than a few seconds to decide that the firm’s new flagship notebook would be called the i7. Why that name? Well, it’s powered by an Intel Core i7 processor, so naturally enough, that’s likely to be the reason.

There haven’t been many high-end, non-gaming laptops originating from mainland China, although that seems to be changing gradually based on recent arrivals. The best known and most popular models until now have been the Xiaomi Mi Notebook Pro and the Xiaomi Mi Notebook Air.

Civiltop, ENZ, BBEN and Mechrevo have been focusing on the fast-growing Chinese gaming community, while Alldocube, Airbook, Jumper, Teclast and Voyo have been vying for the discerning audience looking for more powerful and upmarket laptops.

Design

There’s something eerily familiar about this notebook, which isn’t really surprising, as it’s the umpteenth laptop we’ve reviewed that tries to emulate the MacBook range with the same core design principles. A central hinge? Check. Brushed metallic finish? Check. Tiled black keys? Again, yep.

It uses metal for the chassis, something which helps – to a certain extent – with heat dissipation. A 15.6-inch display means that there’s plenty of space for extra ports: you get a headphone jack, an SD card slot, HDMI, four USB ports and a Type-C port plus a proprietary power connector – and there’s even a numeric keypad, great for spreadsheet aficionados. As expected, this laptop is heavy (1.9kg) and rather big (375 x 245 x 18mm).

You will also notice that there’s no stickers or branding on the notebook other than the ubiquitous Intel sticker. Also absent is the optical drive that adorns so many laptops of this size.

While not an overt aspiration, with this machine, Voyo is attempting to exploit the massive void left by Apple – remember that the MacBook Pro (15.6-inch) costs four times more than the i7.

Specifications

The Voyo i7 is a puzzling laptop when it comes to hardware choices. It has a dedicated graphics card, the Nvidia 940MX, but it uses DDR3 memory rather than the far faster GDDR5 flavor.

But there’s worse: it runs with a hard disk drive rather than an SSD. Yes, a spinning, mechanical, noisy hard drive. Sure, it is a 1TB model, but come on Voyo, this is 2018 – not 2013.

We’d rather opt for a speedy 128GB SSD than a 1TB Seagate hard drive spinning at 5400rpm.

Another example of corner-cutting is the fact that the notebook uses a TN screen rather than an IPS panel, which means viewing angles are likely to be severely hampered and color reproduction below par.

Usage and performance

When it came to our benchmarks, we saw some fantastic numbers, mostly due to the use of a Core i7 CPU coupled with a dedicated graphics card. Its Achilles heel is obviously the hard drive which sends the storage-related test numbers spiralling downwards.

Overall, this is a likable laptop, solidly built, with a great keyboard, a decent numeric keypad and a touchpad that does the job pretty well. The keyboard is backlit and the keys have generous amounts of feedback and spring. The screen, despite being a TN panel, is fine for everyday use.

What irked us most was the noise this notebook makes. The high-speed fan fires up as soon as the processor and/or the GPU tackle a heavier workload, and although Voyo says that it is a ‘smart fan’ with dual copper pipes, the noise it generates is certainly annoying.

To make matters worse, the hard disk often kicks into life and clatters its way through file shifting operations and page-swaps under load. The submachine-gun-like sound it produces reminded us of the glorious days of Windows XP when hard drives still ruled the roost. That said, you can yank it out and put an M.2 SSD in its place.

The machine’s battery life was surprisingly good given the fact that it runs a hard drive and a dedicated graphics card. At just over four hours, it is more than adequate for everyday tasks.

Competition

The market is not exactly awash with Core i7 laptops with a Full HD display, 8GB of RAM and a dedicated graphics chip for less than £500. That said, given the growing popularity of Core i5-8250U processors (which should outperform the Core i7-6500U), we expect that situation to change fairly soon.

As a general rule of thumb, the more expensive a laptop is in China, the more competitors it will have in the UK.

For example, the Dell Inspiron 15 5570 is the closest rival at £653 ($920). It comes with the Core i5-8250U and 8GB of RAM, a Radeon 530 GPU, along with a 256GB SSD plus a very similar design to the Voyo i7.

The Xiaomi Mi Notebook Pro, which has the same specs as above bar the GPU (a GeForce MX150), costs around £640 ($900) when sourced from China, and has a fingerprint reader with another MacBook-like design.

At the time of writing, the most desirable laptop in this price range remains the MSI PL62 7RC which has a much better CPU (quad-core Kaby Lake) but also a faster GPU – the GeForce MX150 – and a price tag of only £600 ($845).

Our business take

The Voyo i7 has an attractive price tag for business users, but a corporate laptop is far more than the sum of its parts. The i7 doesn’t come with Windows 10 Pro, for example, and neither does it have an encrypted SSD (although you can always swap the hard disk for an SED or use a software solution) or a fingerprint reader.

The i7 is a great desktop replacement with ample storage space (even if it does use a hard drive) and screen real-estate, plus a numeric keypad, which is a rarity on laptops these days.

Final verdict

Overall, the Voyo i7 is an impressive laptop with plenty of things to love about it, and a few things that make us frown. It is well designed and built, with a decent set of components, but we still don’t know why the manufacturer chose to use a hard disk when a smaller SSD would have produced a far more potent and balanced portable. For now, let’s just say that it is a fast laptop, slowed down by its storage subsystem.

Let’s hope that Voyo swaps the CPU for a Core i5-8250U and replaces the HDD with an SSD, and we’d love to have a smaller version of the i7. Doing so is likely to bring down the bill of materials and thus reduce the asking price, bringing it nearer to £400 ($560).

• We’ve picked out the best business laptops of 2018

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