on the surface the razer core and in fact any other Thunderbolt external
video card enclosure like the ASUS x g2
is pretty simple i've got a general review that does a good job of tackling
the basics here but here's that in a nutshell your laptop is small and
portable but could use more graphics horsepower for a better gaming
experience so it's a powered box that uses a desktop video card to boost your
frames per second see simple
the problem is that while i was making my simple review of the core i ended up
with far more questions than answers can
you put in something other than a video card is Thunderbolt 3 a significant
bottleneck does it perform better on an external display will it work with
non-razer notebooks can it be run in a daisy chain configuration can it handle
the biggest hottest graphics cards on the market what about CPU bottlenecks
so after three full days of testing i'm
back welcome to the razer core deep dive
cooler masters mastercase maker 5 features their freeform modular system
allowing you to customize adjust and upgrade make it yours at the link in the
video description first order of business acoustics i
mentioned in my review that the core should have a power switch to reduce fan
noise at idle but i didn't quantify why
and this is why i plan to replace the fans in my
core and why i think that it's a must-have feature on a gen 2 product
gaming noise levels are vastly improved
but i don't want to hear five fans spin
up every single time i want to use the usb 3 hub or the Ethernet port
the good news is that no matter what i threw at it thermal performance is
pretty much on par with an open air test bench it handled the gtx 480 one of the
hottest most power hungry cards ever made especially when overvolted without
even breaking a sweat and if the drivers had managed to install i'm sure the
Radeon 6990 wouldn't have been an issue either given that that monster was able
to physically fit inside which leads really nicely then into my
next question what about non-graphics cards razer has
nothing about this on their product page and even when asked directly said
we'll get back to you then as of filming this promptly never did so i dug into it
myself my 10 gigabit network card worked
perfectly after i hot plugged it in installed drivers and rebooted a
blackmagic intensity pro and avago raid card were both similar stories and my
ASUS usb 3.1 card and a 4k capture
device on the other end of it a usb one even hot plugged without rebooting
finally i chatted with red tech support who confirmed that their ceo has already
experimented with the red rocket x accelerator card so while razer hasn't
done any firmware tuning or proper validation of these and my simple plug
it in and see if it works for five minutes is by no means a substitute it
actually wouldn't surprise me if compatibility was pretty strong
another thing that i'm annoyed that razer wouldn't talk to me about is
compatibility with other devices yes razer i know the official statement
is that it is officially compatible with the blade stealth and the new blade at
launch but what i want to know is
does it work with other computers so after much digging the answer is
yes and no if you picked up a machine six months
ago and you're expecting to just plug and play into your Thunderbolt 3
port you will be disappointed but there's also good news
after fighting with needlessly complicated BIOS and Thunderbolt
firmware updates this is how to do a BIOS update by the way i got the core
working mostly as intended on a sagar
np9870 an MSI gt72s and ASUS x99 deluxe
ii and i've heard reports of it working just fine on the Intel skull canyon nook
and dell xps 15 2016. so
everything i've tried it on however while the sega machine and x99 deluxe 2
both worked perfectly after some initial forced driver installation nonsense my
MSI gt72s put up a solid fire strike
score then got crushed in real world
performance without MSI being able to offer me any advice
yes MSI i tried asking razer
well hold on a second then Linus why does this matter
that MSI laptop and for that matter the desktop motherboard already has desktop
grade graphics it's because i wanted to know how the Thunderbolt interface is
affecting performance which can only be achieved through an apples to apples
test by isolating all the other variables and since there is no way to
physically install a 970m in the core to
run against the one in the blade 14 i needed a machine with a graphics card
that i could so then the strange unrealistic
synthetic scores continue but in real games we're looking at about a 25
performance hit with a gtx 980 and significantly more than that with a
higher performance graphics card overclocking by the way is not limited
by razer in any way but on the 1080
other bottlenecks seem to make it a moot point so NVIDIA's suggestion was that
the pci express gen 3 x4 interface could
be holding us back but i didn't really buy that and a quick round of benchmarks
with one of my motherboard's slots forced to 4x speed settled this for me
while it does seem to play a role it is not the whole story also of note here by
the way is the fact that the 6700 hq
holds its own head to head with the last generation eight core extreme edition
except in extremely CPU-bound titles like cities skylines pretty darn well
as for the dual core 8 gig RAM equipped stealth i would expect that to lag
behind a lot faster and i probably wouldn't recommend pairing it with a
top-tier GPU in the core
anyway it appears that the performance hit more likely comes from the overhead
associated with converting from pci express to Thunderbolt 3 and or making
pci express a hot pluggable interface
something that on Windows anyway it is definitely not designed for the next
question i wanted to answer especially as someone who
wouldn't necessarily care about using the core with an external display
is house performance in loopback mode
using the external GPU to power the laptop's own display
actually not bad you'll take a 15
ish hit less if all you want to do is run 3dmark
all day which is what i showed back in my first video
some other general questions now then some GPU features like g-sync freesync
and cell etc are supported on desktop
gpus and even notebooks that contain desktop gpus like the gt72s
but not on notebook gpus so how does
that work with the core where you can potentially have both
if you're using an external display you should be able to use the feature set of
the GPU loaded in the core but that won't necessarily be the case if you're
using loopback mode next question can you run sli
no not in any of the traditional ways though that doesn't mean that a system
with both a d GPU and an external GPU
couldn't enable both of them for certain workloads
okay what about daisy chaining Linus great question the core has only one
Thunderbolt port and this is by design it does not officially support daisy
chaining even though that's part of the Thunderbolt standard but when i asked
razer well hold on a second could it just sit at the end of a chain with
other devices that do razer completely unhelpfully stayed
tight-lipped thankfully though akitio helped the
brother out here and hooked me up with their thunder 3 duo pro which is a
tool-less dual SSD or hard drive enclosure that worked flawlessly both on
its own allowing me to fully utilize the speed of the ssds i installed and
in between the core and the system though i should emphasize here that this
is an unsupported configuration and i cannot promise that drive access
wouldn't affect gaming performance if you were doing both of them at the same
time leading us to the last and possibly most
important question for me to answer does any of this even matter
ignoring the 100 rebate with qualifying system this is a 500 doodad we're
talking about here one that i'm not recommending due to CPU bottlenecks
pairing with a top-tier graphics card on the machine that is arguably more
purpose-built for it the razer blade stealth given that it can charge off the
core which is pretty cool a machine though that only costs twice as much as
the empty core box in the first place i mean who has money for a core
but not a badass desktop to go alongside
their portable machine i mean hell you can even build a badass portable desktop
in the Dan a4sfx case that's the same size as the core but with the entire
computer in it and this is all valid
but my fascination with the core comes not from thinking that everyone should
buy one but from my excitement about what this technology means
costs will come down and having portability while i'm on the go and
power at home with the ability to actually upgrade a laptop is very
appealing and on top of that remember project christine
i and a lot of other people dismissed it as a pipe dream but core is a huge step
towards no compromises high speed
hot swappable pc component modules a
pretty cool future speaking of no compromises have you ever
thought to yourself gee this vinyl wrap that i have on my device
just kind of sucks it doesn't fit well it peels off
well there's no need for that because dbrand has no compromise as vinyl wraps
they are precision cut and available in pretty much any authentic 3m vinyl
finish that you could want and the best
part about dbrand skins aside from the fact that they're available for laptops
phones tablets game consoles controllers and more
is their configurator it is freaking
awesome you can see your device in a real-time preview from every angle you
can adjust and customize using different colors and different finishes and then
boom you confirm the order their robots pack it up ship it anywhere in the world
and if anything does happen to go wrong they have separate customer service
robots that will absolutely get you taken care of so check it out over at
the dbrand link in the video description
please note dbrand does not require to use a bright pink freaking carbon fiber
wrap like Linus does you can pick your own so thanks for watching guys if this
video sucked you know what to do but if it was awesome get subscribed hit that like button or check out the link to
where to buy the stuff we featured at amazon in the video description
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