Okay, do I have better weapons?
Like, oh my God, look at all this.
These are, they're homing, they're homing.
You have to shoot them down.
You know, when you're gaming at, you know, 4K resolution,
it's easy to forget that under the hood
of Microsoft's most powerful Xbox One
is little more than a low power AMD Jaguar processor
and an aging Polaris based integrated graphics card.
Oh, and did I mention the mechanical hard drive?
See, the truth is if the Xbox One X ran standard Windows
with standard Windows games, it would be dog slow.
But the other thing that's easy to forget
is that all of those parts in it
are fundamentally standard PC components.
So what would prevent someone
from building a faster game console?
Oh, apparently nothing.
This is the SUBOR ZBOX.
A game console from China that we got our hands on.
Let's, let's take this baby for a spin, shall we?
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The Zed Plus game console was built by the
Shanghai branch of a little company
called Zongshan SUBOR Advanced Technology.
I'm sure I butchered that, so I'll be referring to them
as SUBOR from here on out.
And the packaging is relatively unassuming.
In fact, you might be forgiven for thinking
that it's for like a laptop rather than for a game console,
which might actually be a hint at what's to come.
Then on the inside, we've got the console itself,
a manual that is entirely in Chinese, which makes sense.
This is intended for the Chinese market.
And a little box off to the side here
that contains a stand, an HDMI cable,
and then a standard C13 PC power cord.
Let's go ahead and get the gaming machine out of this.
Which you guys paid good money to see.
This is what you guys.
So it's got a very console-like appearance,
as you'd probably expect,
with this kind of weird angular cutout
that might go great with your media console,
but didn't go particularly well with your PC.
But it did go particularly well with mine.
Ignoring that then,
we've got two USB 2.0 Type-A ports on the front,
and then four USB 3.0 ports around the back,
along with Ethernet.
Twin HDMI ports, though both of these are outputs.
So there's no fancy cable box pass-through
or anything like that.
And three and a half millimeter jacks with audio,
along with a SPDIF connector.
On the bottom, there's this little latch right here,
and this is cool.
It reveals
two two and a half inch drive bays.
So they're secured by standard Phillips screws,
which is nice,
and occupied by default by a one terabyte Toshiba hard drive,
which means that this thing is mostly looking pretty good
for storage expansion.
Should we fire it up and see what it looks like in action?
So this is a pretty bog-standard Windows install.
The only thing that really stands out about it
out of the box is that everything that you see
in the installed programs is stuff that we put on it.
It's extremely clean.
The only pre-installed application is this,
what's this thing called again?
Here we go, Ruyi Assist,
which tells you your CPU temps down there.
We're at 50 degrees.
It's not amazing for idle.
Then you can switch to low power mode,
and then there's a grayed out switch to console mode.
More on that later.
So this is interesting.
Eight gigs of SG RAM.
So this is actually graphics memory.
Slots used eight out of eight.
So I guess this is eight chips,
and then they've got two gigs of it
that is hardware reserved, presumably for graphics.
And then our CPU.
Oh, wow.
Windows doesn't know what the crap that is.
2.99 gigahertz, four cores, eight threads.
So this is Ryzen based,
but that part number is basically indecipherable.
Fascinating.
Maybe we can get some more hints
out of CPU-Z and or AIDA64 here.
So yeah, there, confirmation.
This is Ryzen with SMT, and then graphics.
Oh, so we've got Vega-based graphics,
but basically no actual specs for it here.
So a quick Google search for the part number 15FF
that we found in CPU-Z shows us that it might be a 28,
but it's not.
It's a 28-CU APU.
So that would put it at about two thirds
of the raw performance of the GPU in the Xbox One X.
One weird thing though,
is all the news we can find about it
talks about two gigs of HBM2 RAM, like built into it,
but we already know from Task Manager
that the one in this system is going to be a little hamstrung
because it's sharing GDDR5 memory instead.
The takeaway though, is that this is,
is basically a PC running basically Windows.
Like there are some interesting bits here,
and that's that the pre-installed operating system
is actually Windows 10 Enterprise long-term support branch.
So the particular build we're running here
is actually from 2016,
but then with current security updates.
There is more to it though.
Where is this button?
Here we go.
Then just a regular old Windows 10 install.
Unfortunately though, see this guy right here.
Half of our boot drive is actually partitioned
into this BitLocker encrypted partition here.
So that is going to be
SUBOR's specially modified IOT edition of Windows,
but it's not ready for prime time yet.
SUBOR says that that platform will launch in Q1 2019
with a slew of demands,
and then a few months later,
they've actually made a list of FOR難
for its current Chao Jahr famous
Domestically-produced games as exclusives for their console.
So let me know in the comments
if you guys wanna see like
a Let's Play update with some Chinese games next year.
A Let's Play update with some Chinese games next year.
For now though,
even though we can't actually try that aspect of it,
we can discuss why SUBOR would bother
with this console mode thing
instead of just leaving it running regular Windows.
has eight gigs of RAM that's shared
between the CPU and GPU, just like an Xbox One.
And it's even, as we mentioned before,
GDDR5, just like an Xbox One.
That means that Windows is eating a significant chunk
of available memory,
and that makes for a less than ideal experience
when you're trying to run big AAA titles,
hence the need for a slimmed down IoT version of Windows.
The other less obvious reason is DRM.
Subor says that they're able to use their customized OS
to enable a form of DRM that's not possible
under standard Windows,
which they say is required to attract
some of the exclusive titles
that they've got lined up for the platform.
Now, as much as DRM is a dirty word,
they're positioning themselves as an early pioneer
for dedicated gaming platforms in China,
and they feel that they need to do everything they can
to build developer confidence.
So this entire process
and this entire product honestly might look highly unnecessary
to folks in regions with established console markets,
but you might not realize that home game consoles
were actually banned entirely in China
way back in the year 2000
because of fears of how they could affect
childhood development.
And the traditional companies that you might think of,
like Nintendo, have struggled to find a strong foothold
in China even with the easing of restrictions back
in 2015.
So then, with Mainland China nearly 100% reliant on PCs
for non-mobile gaming,
and the console market pretty much non-existent,
Subor is trying to combine a console with a PC
to give us the Z Plus that we have right now.
It'll be a genius move if it works.
So let's test it out and see just how well it works,
at least today,
by comparing its performance,
against a low-end Ryzen desktop
with a roughly comparable graphics card.
Well, right out of the gate,
it seems as though having just two gigs of memory
set aside for the GPU is gonna cause us to run out of RAM
during complex scenes,
like in Shadow of the Tomb Raider's GPU-heavy forest scene,
despite the graphics core itself
having more than enough horsepower to keep up.
And we know it has more than enough horsepower
because we can actually drop the in-game settings
a little bit,
and we can increase the resolution significantly.
This confirms that we're not running
into some kind of a bandwidth problem here,
we are just running out of VRAM.
So the sweet spot seems to be medium details
at about 1440p.
The main takeaway, though, really,
is that the system's not quite stable,
and we ran into problems particularly in DirectX 12.
So it's clear to us that the hardware has the power,
and that with a more optimized driver and OS, along with,
a bit of developer effort,
this experience could be a lot better.
More physical memory would certainly go a long way, too.
For now, though, we can only talk about what we can measure.
And when we look at the numbers,
the Z Plus, in spite of its faster CPU,
just cannot match the Xbox One X
in terms of either speed or visual quality in most titles.
And it couldn't even break past the performance of our,
Holiday PC Buyer's Guide, $500 system.
And that's a problem when you're closer to $620 to $725
with tax.
Now, moving on,
Subor is marketing this thing as also a PC.
So we fired up some productivity benchmarks.
Compared again to our Holiday Gaming PC at $500,
we are actually looking at inferior
single-threaded performance,
but superior multi-threaded performance
as a result of,
not only the addition of SMT,
so that's eight threads to go along with our four cores,
but also the use of faster GDDR5 memory.
This is especially apparent
when we look at the relatively large disparity
in handbrake encoding performance.
These tests also revealed
that our GPU is being held back
in more ways than we thought by poor driver optimization.
Its performance is all over the map.
Look at how it trounces even the GTX 1060
in most of Luxmark,
then takes losses in Blender and V-Ray.
Overall, the Z Plus performs pretty admirably
with the biggest bug bears being its GPU performance
and lack of dynamic memory allocation.
Now the graphics performance
is going to be harder to overcome
since it's just flat out a weaker chip
than you'd find in a top tier gaming console even today.
But its CPU performance is superior
and the new OS could give the Z Plus,
the ability to cut back GPU memory
during CPU intensive tasks and vice versa,
improving performance in both once the new software arrives.
With all this in mind,
this type of chip is almost certainly
what's going to make up the entry level
of a new breed of console.
And in spite of the Z Plus's incomplete state
and poor Windows gaming performance,
it's a very big market they're going after
with next to nothing in terms of direct competitors.
So with the right software improvements
and developer relationships,
they could be onto something,
but I don't expect them to make any headway
into the North American, European,
or Japanese markets anytime soon.
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