Illegear Selenite review

Main specs:
A few notes before reading:
1. This is a quick review; thus, not everything will be covered in here
2. This review will mainly focus on thermals instead of performance
3. I will often compare this model with its smaller brother – Onyx

Product page: Illegear Selenite 9th gen, Illegear Selenite

Part 1: Build quality, input devices
Build quality is excellent overall, only just slightly behind Onyx. The lid has aluminium brush on top of it. There is only little flex when force is applied at the center. There is some flex when the lid is twisted, but not as much compared to Onyx. The lid has a bit of wobbling. You can open the lid with 1 hand. The body is all hard-plastic+soft touch build. Despite that, there is no flex on the entire keyboard deck and it cannot be twisted with force.

The mechanical keyboard (GENESWITCH v2, cap 2, brown switch) has low actuation force (slightly lower than the one in Onyx) and 2mm key travel. The switches are surprisingly quiet when pressed. Should be usable in quiet conditions such as in library. There is one complaint: The keycaps have some wobbling which makes typing a little uncomfortable (update: another unit doesn't have wobbling keycaps). Like the Raven, the layout is a bit special (especially right CTRL and SHIFT keys) and I can sometimes mistype the up key when trying to press right shift. You can set the effect, brightness and speed of the keyboard lighting via the Control Center software.

The large Clickpad has Precision driver. The plastic surface has satisfactory smoothness but can be a bit rough when you have wet/oily fingers. Like the Onyx, you can disable the clickpad by double tapping the left top corner of the clickpad. The L/R click feel is OK, nothing special. Take note that the clickpad is located directly below the space bar; therefore, it’s aligned more to the left side. One minor issue: The clickpad has some noise when tapped hard on it.

Part 2: Display, Audio, Battery
The display is a 144Hz IPS panel from BOE (display ID BOE07B6). As you can expect from a high refresh rate panel, everything feels smooth. It gets bright enough, colours are vibrant and has good contrast.

The 2 down firing speakers has good audio (with a bit of bass too); however, you need to tune the audio via Sound Blaster software (otherwise the sound quality is terrible). Tuned audio profile: Music profile, bass 0, treble 3, surround 80, crystalizer 50, bass 40, smart vol 0, dialog+ off. Volume is a bit soft/quiet. Overall, the sound quality is slightly worse than the one in Onyx (with tuned audio profile too).

I don’t have time to test the battery life, however don’t expect much from the 46.74Wh battery.

Part 3: Cooling performance
The cooling design consists of 3 heatpipes with 1 shared on CPU+GPU. The heatsink is stretched to both left and right.

Notes on all thermal testing:
CPU Undervolt profile: -100mv on core and cache
Blue highlighted part is CPU undervolted result

CPU temp - Cinebench R15 multi core
Max 95C, ~3.4-3.6GHz, ~80W
Max 95C, 3.8-3.9GHz, 82-85W, 1200+cb
Almost full fans for both

CPU temp - Aida64 FPU 70W
Max 90C, 3.0-3.1GHz
Max 90C, 3.3-3.4GHz
Almost max fans for both

GPU temp - Unigine Valley (extreme HD profile)
Clock speed fluctuates, at least 100MHz higher than boost clock (1440MHz)
Max 75C, max 125W
Slightly reduced fans (compared to almost max fans)

FPU (with undervolt) + Valley (extreme HD) with max fans
CPU: Max 94C, 3.0-3.1GHz, ~50W
GPU: Max 75C, same clock speed behaviour, ~120W

Apex Legends 1080p all max, 6GB budget, 90 FOV (with undervolt)
Mid 70s, clock speed fluctuates at 3+GHz, 20-25W (see video below for explanation of the clock speed fluctuation)
GPU: Max 75C, clock speed fluctuates mostly sit at 1500-1600MHz range, 115+W
Slightly reduced fans

Unigine Valley benchmark (extreme HD, 1 run only)
FPS: 95.9
Score: 4011

The chassis stay quite cool when it’s under load. Core temp differential is ~10C

In Illegear Command Center, there are 2 modes to choose from: Game mode or office mode. Office mode gives you access to control fan speed but has a 35W CPU power limit.

There are also 4 power profiles to choose from:
Here's a good video on how all the power setting works. Very informative. Basically, just keep it to game mode and equilibrium

The included power adapter is a 230W unit from Chicony. Take note that temps might be a little higher when running dual channel memory.

Part 4: Miscellaneous
The laptop is very portable for a 17-inch gaming laptop while not sacrificing thickness for cooling room – 2.35kg and 25mm thickness. The footprint is also relatively small, just like typical 15 inch device.

You need to press about 2 seconds to power on the laptop.

For the pictures of positioning of ports, cooling solution etc, you can refer Notebookcheck review on XMG Neo 17

Other settings in Illegear Command Center:

Update: i7-9750H model


Update: 2080MQ model


Conclusion: Well-cooled and well-built 17 inch RTX light weight gaming laptop

Pros:
Cons:

Bcoz almost every laptop out there has tuned audio via software out of the box...for custom laptops you just have to do it manually via Sound Blaster