Machenike S15C review: Inexpensive gaming laptop with Intel Core i7 and RTX 3060

Gaming laptops are a handy way to organize your gaming space just about anywhere The Machenike S15C can pair an Intel i7-12700H processor with an Nvidia RTX 3060 graphics card and 32GB of DDR4 RAM. This company is very aggressively occupying the niche of gaming laptops, while the rest are leaving the Russian market.

Specifications Machenike S15C

Packaging, appearance and equipment Machenike S15C

Packaging is typical for a laptop — a cardboard box with a nylon handle.

There is not much information on it, but you can find out the most basic, for example, a complete set. There is no image, most likely it is universal, differing by a sticker. The contents are protected by foam inserts and a plastic bag. There are no additional accessories.

The laptop greets us with Machenike logos on the lid. They are initially upside down, however when the lid is opened they are correctly oriented. The laptop is 15.6 ″ and its dimensions are quite standard, except that it is thicker than ordinary office machines, and thin gaming laptops can generally be counted on the fingers. The laptop is approximately 25.3 mm thick and this thickness is uniform over the entire area. Legs at the rear increase the overall thickness to 30.3mm. There are no frills in the design of the laptop — sharp shapes that are often present in gaming devices, making the design a little more aggressive.

The front end is empty, it has only three standard LEDs. On the left, you can see separate 3.5 mm minijack connectors for microphone and headphones, USB 2.0, USB 3.2 Gen2 and a Kensington lock, next to them there is the first heatsink. There are also connectors at the back, since the thickness allows. There is USB Type-C (USB 3.2 Gen2), a 5.5 * 2.1 power connector, miniDP and full-size HDMI. On the sides of the connectors, there are two more heatsinks that shine with pure copper. The right end has another USB 3.2 gen2 port, a gigabit network connector, and a 4th radiator.

The laptop opens with one hand, which means the hinges are quite light, and the weight holds the laptop securely in place. When you open it, the full-size island-style keyboard, with white ends of the keys, immediately catches your eye. Key travel is approximately 1.5 mm. The font is also white and is well readable even at dusk. Most importantly, finally! there is a Cyrillic alphabet and moreover, it is highlighted, like the main characters, in addition, the arrow keys are full-sized, which is also a rarity. In general, it looks very good and the white color contrasts against the almost black body. In addition, there are small orange stripes, as well as the logo on the lid. The touchpad does not contain symbols and is a monolithic platform measuring 12 by 7.2 centimeters. I don’t like monolithic touchpads, I prefer separate keys. Above the keyboard is a large on / off button. And, of course, there are some stickers.

The 15.6-inch screen, made using IPS technology, has a resolution of 1920 * 1080 with a refresh rate of 144 Hz and a response time of 5 ms, has a matte surface, and its frames are: 7.4 mm on the sides, 9.8 mm on the top, and 20.4 mm on the bottom. I measured from the edge of the frame to the protruding body, in reality the visible part of the frame is smaller. The matte screen is preferred by most, because. it’s just more practical. The top bezel houses a 720p camera, along with microphones and an activity LED. Under the screen is the Machenike logo.

The power supply is labeled LITE-ON, this company has been producing a lot of different equipment and among them PC power supplies since the 70s, and you can also often find their power supplies for laptops. The output voltage is standard 19.5 V, but the total power is 180 watts. And all this is in a fairly compact and flat power supply case. Connectors are all standard, without any proprietary frills. The kit also includes a user manual in Chinese, as well as a letter of appreciation for product selection.

Testing

Machenike S15C Screen

Let’s start with the screen, which has an IPS matrix with a diagonal of 15.6″. FullHD resolution with a 144Hz screen refresh rate, which is visible even with simple use, everything moves very smoothly. It seemed to me that the brightness at the maximum level is not high enough for use with sunlight, although few will argue with it in principle. The colors are not acidic, pleasant enough to the eye, there is no fierce blue or redness. Live, of course, not like in the photo.

Of course, there is fading, nowhere without it, but if we recall the horror of TN matrices that did not tolerate any deviations, then in this case the earth and sky. At the present time, everyone is looking for light, we will look for them too.

They are, mainly in the right side, top and bottom, as well as in the upper left corner. But they are visible only when the screen is filled with black and without labels, just black. This is an artificial situation, in a normal scenario, even with black wallpapers (and I use regular black), the labels completely hide this feature, even if there are few labels. The first two photos were taken at different exposures. The glow effect is a feature of IPS matrices and it also appears with a black fill. During real work and even more so the game, there is simply nothing of this.

Keyboard Machenike S15C

The keyboard has backlighting, which is configured in the Control Center application, it is preinstalled on the laptop, if necessary, you can download it from the official website, but more on that later. There are 12 colors to choose from. It may seem a little to someone, but for myself I found 4 neutral and soft colors, which are quite comfortable to use. In addition, you can adjust the brightness of the backlight in 5 ways.

Synthetic and gaming tests Machenike S15C

The heart of the laptop is the Intel i7-12700H — a processor with 6 high-performance P-cores that are multi-threaded, operating at frequencies up to 4.7 GHz and 8 E-cores at up to 3.5 GHz. The thermal package of the processor is 45 W, with a short-term resolution of up to 115 W, in turbo mode, depending on the temperature and the manufacturer’s values. The company processor is 32 gigabytes of DDR4 RAM, manufactured by Crucial (CT16G4SFS832A.M8FB) in dual-channel mode and a frequency of 3200 MHz CL22. The performance of the bundle is at its best, allowing you to easily engage in video and photo editing, because. the amount of memory is considerable, and the processor will allow you not to wait for hours.

In my version of the laptop, a bundle of a 512 GB SSSTC SC4-8D512 NVME drive (SSSTC is essentially Lite-On, which are now KIOXIA, which are former Toshiba) is installed, as well as a classic WD Blue hard drive (WD20SPZX) 2 TB. It looks a bit odd in a laptop, adding extra noise and vibration, and also makes the laptop more gentle to shaking. It would be more logical to install a SATA SSD on the same 2 terabytes with DRAM cache. However, nothing prevents the user from doing this, and placing the remaining HDD in a USB pocket and getting an external 2 TB drive. The controller in the SSD is SM2267XT, as you know it is DRAMless, i.e. bufferless. Speed ​​performance is typical for a PCIe 4 drive with this controller and a hard drive.

Graphics are represented by two video adapters. Integrated video core Intel IRIS XE Graphics and Nvidia RTX 3060. The latest has 3840 CUDA cores, the operating frequency is in the range of 1283-1703 MHz. 6 GB GDDR6 memory. The performance is enough for most AAA titles in FullHD resolution. In addition, you can always use DLSS, which on the quality preset slightly spoils the picture, while adding FPS, you can take a look at the example of Plague Tale. All games were set to the maximum set of settings. Often the question arises what TDP is allocated for a video card, because. a lot depends on it.

With a pure load on the video card, or mixed, regardless of the heating during the tests, the video adapter consumed 80 watts.

Noise and battery life Machenike S15C

The temperature regime in the stress test, of course, is at the peak of the performance of the cooling system and the heat pack. But the stress test is synthetic, so it simply reflects the capabilities of the CO. It copes with the typical TDP level of the processor and video card, which is held after the turbo frequencies. In games, near-game scenes and rendering, the temperature regime is softer and more jumpy, so the processor and video card work more often at turbo frequencies. In all scenarios where at least some serious load is expected, the laptop noticeably makes noise with the cooling system. That’s really noisy. I observed the passive mode of operation of the cooling system, probably 2 times, and I’m not sure. Even in complete idle, the cooling system works in active mode, but very quietly and smoothly, completely without attracting attention. But when playing it is noisy.

The cooling system operates in an asynchronous mode, i.e. fans work individually with their own hardwired logic. There is a question to this, but we will return to it later.

In 2K60 video playback mode, the laptop lost 94% of its charge in 3 hours and 4 minutes. Those. The total running time will be 3 hours 15 minutes. We used the wireless network connection mode, as well as the maximum brightness of the screen, the power consumption profile is the maximum performance. This is not much, but it is worth remembering that a gaming laptop still consumes a lot. Measuring how much you can play on the battery is a thankless and unnecessary task. From game to game, the results will float. Even in one game, depending on the severity of the scene. Moreover, when running on battery power, performance will drop. Below are two screenshots that you can compare.

As you can see, the heat pack is sharply limited and the iron is simply choked. Productivity drops drastically.

With iron, everything is relatively clear and we learned what it is capable of, it is curious to check other hardware.

Network interfaces, webcam, microphone and speakers Machenike S15C

The camera here is more for occasional video conferencing and video calls. She is incapable of more, some kind of stream may no longer go, except to squeeze it into a small window. We will immediately test the webcam with a microphone and record standard recordings: in silence and with a rustling package on an outstretched hand. So we will check the sound recording as a whole and the presence and capacity of the noise reduction. Also, as a bonus, I will record the sound of silence with alternating fan speeds to find out how much it will interfere.

Ya drive

Network interfaces are represented by: a gigabit wired network based on the Intel l219-V controller; wireless network based on the Intel AX201NGW controller, which has Wi-Fi 6, namely 802.11ax and two bands of 2.4 and 5 GHz; The Bluetooth module is on the same board as Wi-Fi, version 5.2. There are absolutely no complaints about network interfaces. Everything works normally and predictably.

The speakers are not impressive. Typical laptop picks, without any emotions. They are there and fine. The volume is low, the sound quality is the simplest. Against the background of noisy fans, the sound just falls into a mess.

Machenike S15C Proprietary Software

To control the backlight, power profile and fans, there is a proprietary Control Center utility.

The utility allows you to adjust the backlight in one of 15 options, adjust the brightness and turn off the timer. Not forgotten and the possibility of creating macros. Fan control allows you to use three modes: maximum, automatic and manual setting of the fan speed curve, and for the CPU and GPU separately. And the last item is setting up a power profile. To be honest, I did not find a fundamental difference between them. Below I will give screenshots, in the signature of which it will be shown what and where.

As you can see, the most effective was the inclusion of the maximum fan speed. Otherwise, I did not see much difference, everything is at the level of error.

Having run all the tests, let’s move on to nudity.

Machenike S15C disassembly

Let’s open the laptop to see: how the cooling works, how the memory works, what about the drives.

The cooling circuit is connected by heat pipes, so it will warm up, albeit partially, but all. This is what confused me about the asynchronous operation of the fans. If the radiator system is connected, then it makes sense to run both fans, but at lower speeds. And here it may turn out such a situation that one fan runs at 3500 rpm, the other at 2200.

It is noteworthy that part of the power supply is under cooling of the same circuit through thermal pads.

Buy Machenike S15C

You can also watch the video review of the Machenike S15C laptop

Outcome

The Machenike S15C is a great performance machine that will help you organize your gaming space everywhere, but with a small caveat where there is an outlet. The cooling system copes with the base TDP of the processor and video card, sometimes even allowing it to go into a turbo. It would be strange to expect quiet operation, exactly, as well as long battery life. I would like to additionally note the full-sized keyboard, with full-sized arrows, which is equipped with Cyrillic characters. I have seen this claim for about three years, since I began to monitor the activity of Chinese laptop manufacturers.

I would also like to note the fact that the laptop is one of the most inexpensive solutions in this class, or to be more precise, with such components.

It’s hard to find complete copies, but even the cheapest laptop on the list costs over $1,000, but it doesn’t have a hard drive, 16GB of memory, a processor with fewer cores, and no installed system, although that’s nothing special. The reviewed laptop is cheaper at the time of publication.