WEBVTT

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on the surface the razer core and in fact any other Thunderbolt external

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video card enclosure like the ASUS x g2

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is pretty simple i've got a general review that does a good job of tackling

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the basics here but here's that in a nutshell your laptop is small and

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portable but could use more graphics horsepower for a better gaming

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experience so it's a powered box that uses a desktop video card to boost your

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frames per second see simple

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the problem is that while i was making my simple review of the core i ended up

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with far more questions than answers can

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you put in something other than a video card is Thunderbolt 3 a significant

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bottleneck does it perform better on an external display will it work with

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non-razer notebooks can it be run in a daisy chain configuration can it handle

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the biggest hottest graphics cards on the market what about CPU bottlenecks

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so after three full days of testing i'm

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back welcome to the razer core deep dive

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cooler masters mastercase maker 5 features their freeform modular system

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allowing you to customize adjust and upgrade make it yours at the link in the

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video description first order of business acoustics i

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mentioned in my review that the core should have a power switch to reduce fan

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noise at idle but i didn't quantify why

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and this is why i plan to replace the fans in my

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core and why i think that it's a must-have feature on a gen 2 product

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gaming noise levels are vastly improved

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but i don't want to hear five fans spin

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up every single time i want to use the usb 3 hub or the Ethernet port

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the good news is that no matter what i threw at it thermal performance is

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pretty much on par with an open air test bench it handled the gtx 480 one of the

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hottest most power hungry cards ever made especially when overvolted without

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even breaking a sweat and if the drivers had managed to install i'm sure the

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Radeon 6990 wouldn't have been an issue either given that that monster was able

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to physically fit inside which leads really nicely then into my

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next question what about non-graphics cards razer has

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nothing about this on their product page and even when asked directly said

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we'll get back to you then as of filming this promptly never did so i dug into it

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myself my 10 gigabit network card worked

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perfectly after i hot plugged it in installed drivers and rebooted a

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blackmagic intensity pro and avago raid card were both similar stories and my

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ASUS usb 3.1 card and a 4k capture

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device on the other end of it a usb one even hot plugged without rebooting

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finally i chatted with red tech support who confirmed that their ceo has already

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experimented with the red rocket x accelerator card so while razer hasn't

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done any firmware tuning or proper validation of these and my simple plug

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it in and see if it works for five minutes is by no means a substitute it

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actually wouldn't surprise me if compatibility was pretty strong

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another thing that i'm annoyed that razer wouldn't talk to me about is

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compatibility with other devices yes razer i know the official statement

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is that it is officially compatible with the blade stealth and the new blade at

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launch but what i want to know is

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does it work with other computers so after much digging the answer is

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yes and no if you picked up a machine six months

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ago and you're expecting to just plug and play into your Thunderbolt 3

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port you will be disappointed but there's also good news

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after fighting with needlessly complicated BIOS and Thunderbolt

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firmware updates this is how to do a BIOS update by the way i got the core

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working mostly as intended on a sagar

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np9870 an MSI gt72s and ASUS x99 deluxe

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ii and i've heard reports of it working just fine on the Intel skull canyon nook

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and dell xps 15 2016. so

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everything i've tried it on however while the sega machine and x99 deluxe 2

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both worked perfectly after some initial forced driver installation nonsense my

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MSI gt72s put up a solid fire strike

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score then got crushed in real world

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performance without MSI being able to offer me any advice

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yes MSI i tried asking razer

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well hold on a second then Linus why does this matter

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that MSI laptop and for that matter the desktop motherboard already has desktop

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grade graphics it's because i wanted to know how the Thunderbolt interface is

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affecting performance which can only be achieved through an apples to apples

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test by isolating all the other variables and since there is no way to

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physically install a 970m in the core to

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run against the one in the blade 14 i needed a machine with a graphics card

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that i could so then the strange unrealistic

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synthetic scores continue but in real games we're looking at about a 25

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performance hit with a gtx 980 and significantly more than that with a

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higher performance graphics card overclocking by the way is not limited

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by razer in any way but on the 1080

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other bottlenecks seem to make it a moot point so NVIDIA's suggestion was that

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the pci express gen 3 x4 interface could

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be holding us back but i didn't really buy that and a quick round of benchmarks

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with one of my motherboard's slots forced to 4x speed settled this for me

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while it does seem to play a role it is not the whole story also of note here by

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the way is the fact that the 6700 hq

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holds its own head to head with the last generation eight core extreme edition

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except in extremely CPU-bound titles like cities skylines pretty darn well

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as for the dual core 8 gig RAM equipped stealth i would expect that to lag

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behind a lot faster and i probably wouldn't recommend pairing it with a

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top-tier GPU in the core

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anyway it appears that the performance hit more likely comes from the overhead

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associated with converting from pci express to Thunderbolt 3 and or making

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pci express a hot pluggable interface

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something that on Windows anyway it is definitely not designed for the next

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question i wanted to answer especially as someone who

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wouldn't necessarily care about using the core with an external display

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is house performance in loopback mode

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using the external GPU to power the laptop's own display

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actually not bad you'll take a 15

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ish hit less if all you want to do is run 3dmark

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all day which is what i showed back in my first video

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some other general questions now then some GPU features like g-sync freesync

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and cell etc are supported on desktop

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gpus and even notebooks that contain desktop gpus like the gt72s

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but not on notebook gpus so how does

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that work with the core where you can potentially have both

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if you're using an external display you should be able to use the feature set of

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the GPU loaded in the core but that won't necessarily be the case if you're

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using loopback mode next question can you run sli

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no not in any of the traditional ways though that doesn't mean that a system

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with both a d GPU and an external GPU

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couldn't enable both of them for certain workloads

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okay what about daisy chaining Linus great question the core has only one

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Thunderbolt port and this is by design it does not officially support daisy

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chaining even though that's part of the Thunderbolt standard but when i asked

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razer well hold on a second could it just sit at the end of a chain with

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other devices that do razer completely unhelpfully stayed

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tight-lipped thankfully though akitio helped the

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brother out here and hooked me up with their thunder 3 duo pro which is a

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tool-less dual SSD or hard drive enclosure that worked flawlessly both on

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its own allowing me to fully utilize the speed of the ssds i installed and

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in between the core and the system though i should emphasize here that this

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is an unsupported configuration and i cannot promise that drive access

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wouldn't affect gaming performance if you were doing both of them at the same

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time leading us to the last and possibly most

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important question for me to answer does any of this even matter

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ignoring the 100 rebate with qualifying system this is a 500 doodad we're

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talking about here one that i'm not recommending due to CPU bottlenecks

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pairing with a top-tier graphics card on the machine that is arguably more

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purpose-built for it the razer blade stealth given that it can charge off the

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core which is pretty cool a machine though that only costs twice as much as

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the empty core box in the first place i mean who has money for a core

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but not a badass desktop to go alongside

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their portable machine i mean hell you can even build a badass portable desktop

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in the Dan a4sfx case that's the same size as the core but with the entire

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computer in it and this is all valid

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but my fascination with the core comes not from thinking that everyone should

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buy one but from my excitement about what this technology means

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costs will come down and having portability while i'm on the go and

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power at home with the ability to actually upgrade a laptop is very

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appealing and on top of that remember project christine

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i and a lot of other people dismissed it as a pipe dream but core is a huge step

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towards no compromises high speed

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hot swappable pc component modules a

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pretty cool future speaking of no compromises have you ever

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thought to yourself gee this vinyl wrap that i have on my device

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just kind of sucks it doesn't fit well it peels off

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well there's no need for that because dbrand has no compromise as vinyl wraps

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they are precision cut and available in pretty much any authentic 3m vinyl

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finish that you could want and the best

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part about dbrand skins aside from the fact that they're available for laptops

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phones tablets game consoles controllers and more

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is their configurator it is freaking

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awesome you can see your device in a real-time preview from every angle you

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can adjust and customize using different colors and different finishes and then

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boom you confirm the order their robots pack it up ship it anywhere in the world

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and if anything does happen to go wrong they have separate customer service

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robots that will absolutely get you taken care of so check it out over at

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the dbrand link in the video description

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please note dbrand does not require to use a bright pink freaking carbon fiber

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wrap like Linus does you can pick your own so thanks for watching guys if this

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video sucked you know what to do but if it was awesome get subscribed hit that like button or check out the link to

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where to buy the stuff we featured at amazon in the video description

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also linked in the description is our merch store which has cool shirts like this one and our community forum which

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you should totally join now that you're done doing all that stuff you're probably wondering what to watch next so

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click that little button in the top right to check out our latest video over

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on Channel Super Fun