so you like gaming but you don't like it
which is why ASUS and Acer have
developed gaming Chromebooks the operating system that you're pretty sure
was designed to not let you do anything other than browse the web now let's see
a game apparently and we're not going to cover the ASUS one but just so you know
there's more there's multiples of these now wait ASUS has one it's called the
ASUS got one and but the one we're
interested in looking at today is from Acer the company that everyone confuses
for ASUS including me inside the Box we got is a charger with every possible
vert piece of verification and certification you could ever want 65
Watts which is plenty for a Chromebook Chromebooks don't usually come with so
much power in them that means that they get super great battery life this is
huge this is a big Chromebook it's got a little two-tone Sheen to it brushed
aluminum the bottom
is plastic usb-a full size HDMI love it
a USB-C I believe it's 3.2 Gen 2 of I2
and Ethernet oh that's really nice we got an Ethernet Jack headphone and a
microphone combo Jack and a battery charge light that's pretty big
Chromebooks are usually more focused on portability it's also quite thick which
is interesting because while it is a gaming Chromebook can't really play all
that many games on Chromebook so the main thing that this does is it's going
to be really really good at game streaming why you need a gaming
Chromebook for game streaming I don't know why can't you why can't you just
use a like a normal Chromebook and stream games build quality is a feels
pretty good it feels quite sturdy it's big deck Flex we got
I mean it's kind of I gotta really push on it so far I'm really impressed it
does have a plastic frame up here screen Flex that's pretty good for how thin it
is so when I open it you see they have these little rubber feet back here so
when I pull this back far enough it props up the laptop a little bit allowing you to get a little bit more
airflow keeping things a lot cooler we've got nice big speaker grilles but
that means nothing as to how good the speakers sounds we'll take a look at that wait what four times Force
canceling speakers what the hell is force canceling what does force can
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vesi.com ShortCircuit so the nice part about the gaming Chromebook is that it
has the wasd keys highlighted for you so you never forget which Keys you need to
press when you're playing games interesting that they didn't that they
still make you use the search key instead of the Caps locks key because if
you're like me caps lock is essential for gaming also the up Keys highlighted
up and down silent it's weird why they highlighted some keys in another and how
does it feel to type on it it's fine it feels a little mushy it's not super
clicky bottoming out feels just kind of unsatisfying it's almost like it's
settling into like a foam or something they're not advertising it as a mechanical keyboard so it's probably
just membrane so not so bad I also think that the font's pretty classy I like the
lowercase font it's 2560 by 1600 which means it's a 16 by 10 display so you get
a little bit more of a vertical resolution which typically is reserved
for productivity stuff um that might be a little weird some games don't support 16x10 it's 120 hertz
which is great High refresh rate it's gaming I don't think you'll be able to
find that on any Chromebooks outside of the gaming Uber it looks okay just from
staring at it in the menus but we're gonna watch some videos that I've looked
at before to uh see how it looks and yes
I know it's YouTube there's compression that's not the reverse test if it looks
good enough to watch YouTube then it's a chrome it's a good Chromebook it looks
pretty good I've seen better looking displays nothing's terribly blown out
colors seem relatively calibrated this is obviously just a glance it's not the
darkest black so you'll see but it is an IPS display that so it's a solid white
backlight um now let's listen to crab rate let's see how the speakers are playing okay
already it sounds really bad like just
just hearing that water
okay it's louder now foreign
and completely lacks any significant bass response you could when we're
playing all you could hear is like they do get loud though which is good
um and they didn't sound too distorted
they don't get any worse when you're playing them really loud they just kind
of sound bad across the whole volume Spectrum at least it's consistent and it
doesn't get super distorted um of course they have DTS certification because you
can just slap that on anything at some meaningless badge uh looking at the
Quality it looks about as good as I would expect from a 650 laptop which
means that the webcam quality is not great the microphone quality though I
haven't heard it yet so let me know what it sounds like
so inside this we have a Intel Core i5 1240p which is 12 cores four performance
cores eight e-cores so a maximum of 16 threads good CPU for a Chromebook that's
a lot of uh horsepower actually max turbo 4.4 gigahertz that's a beefy CPU
for what is considered a lightweight platform we also got eight gigs of RAM
which is uh I don't want to say it's par for the course for the for a Chromebook
it should but it's the new standard for Chromebooks you'll see Chromebooks On The Low End having around four gigabytes
a lot of the time we've got 250 gigabytes of NVMe storage which is a lot
for a Chromebook Chromebooks are famous for having like 64 gigabytes so 256 of
NVMe PCIe is great for all the programs
that I guess you're going to have loaded on here which I don't expect to be ton but remember just because we're talking
about game streaming doesn't mean that you can't install Linux using the Linux
subsystem I actually just did it while we were talking earlier I don't know
what the status of it is steam will be running natively on Chromebook soon it
just runs all of the games through the Linux and implementation of the system but soon you'll be really thankful that
you have 256 gigs of storage so that you can actually keep some games on here and
have them running but let's talk about game streaming that's the main claim to
fame that's why you have the 2.5 gigabit Ethernet or the 120 hits display it's
all about the game streaming I also appreciate that they have the full size
HDMI a lot of laptops will forgo the
full-size HDMI make you use a dongle but if you're going to use this as like
maybe this is your gaming laptop maybe this is your only computer being able to
plug it into a display that you have is awesome I don't know if you can hear it
you can't really but this thing is like just not even sweating
um and it is doing a screen capture we are we are full up on memory and I
only got I mean I can close this YouTube app even with game streaming eight gigs
is not a lot and especially if you're you know if you do decide to play games
locally you might be uh hurting oh that's kind of an interesting caveat I
never thought about if you're using like a gaming peripheral say you have like
your settings stored and it's in the cloud because that's how
so many stupid gaming peripherals work you don't have local storage on your
mouse you're not going to be able to configure it because they're not going to have a Chrome OS app that's kind of
something that you don't really think about until you start using it so you go oh wait if my mouse requires software to
be configured then I'm not going to be able to do that on here I'm going to be stuck with the default settings and the
default DPI settings see here's the thing I don't know I don't know if I have to change this in like the GeForce
Now settings GeForce now is only outputting at 16x9 yeah this is not
using the full refresher to the display I don't think this is just streaming it
however it is whisper quiet projecting two hours of battery life which is a
this is it's a lot more than you will get but playing this game playing
cyberpunk on your actual laptop oh my God excuse me I'm doing illegal stuff
the cool kind of illegal stuff does the gaming chromework have a graphics card
no it doesn't it just uses Intel Ze Graphics which is or XE Graphics which
is actually a good question that we should have not just brushed over earlier despite the fact that this is a
gaming Chromebook it has no graphics card it is just integrated Graphics
which guess that's the Chromebook part of it huh but again we're not doing this
isn't really being pitched or sold as a local gaming Beast it's being pitched as
a Chromebook that also games because it has RGB and because it has a fast
refresh rate that you can't take advantage of because I don't think there's any service that streams in 120
frames per second I just played a little bit of a cyberpunk and most of all it
felt like I was playing a game on a game streaming surface which
you can do on like an Apple TV you can
do it on your smart TV and your smart TV definitely has a worse processor however
your smart TV isn't a laptop this you get a whole laptop and here's the thing
the price is 650 US Dollars which is
actually pretty good for what you're getting but if I'm going against other
gaming computers let's look at the MSI gf63 that's got an Intel i5 10300h a
worse processor than this it's got the same amount of storage the same amount
of RAM it's smaller but it does have a 1650 a GTX 1650 mobile GPU is that
really that much better what about this Lenovo IdeaPad it's in line with PCS
that are in the same price range so here's the thing at the price point of
650. is that a fair price for the specs that you're getting things will go on
sale like currently it's Cyber Monday when we're recording this and there's a
lot of higher spec laptops that are available at a very similar price that
are Windows laptop my word of advice for a long time was that if you are planning
to spend a more than than 500 on the laptop go Windows don't worry about
Chromebooks if you're spending less than that that's what that's the category
where the Chromebook becomes really really compelling is under 500 if you're
looking for a machine that's under 500 what are you really doing on it you're
browsing the web you're like voice chatting with people you're not doing
heavy stuff Chrome OS has is really great in that budget segment when you
push beyond that that's when you start competing with actually competent
laptops it's gonna be better than the in than the integrated graphics on the pros
despite the fact that this comes with a great CPU and Iris XE Graphics are
pretty good for built-in Graphics I am interested to see what Chromebooks are
looking like with similar specs around this price point core I3 8 gigabytes and
128 gigabytes of storage for set for 800 bucks bad yes this is the ASUS one it's
got a ryzen 5 in it eight gigabytes of RAM 64 gigabytes of storage that's it
that's it that's all you got it do have a little number panel 650 50 is actually
a pretty competitive price if you ask me you have to be really certain that you
want to deal with a lot of the issues of Chrome OS like low game availability you
might be missing some of your very uh useful apps like think about this do you
use Discord you'll only be able to use the web app in this right now I think
you might be able to get it do use the Android version on here but then you're dealing with emulation it gets a little
bit wonky until Chrome OS can develop and add more of those native apps to the
operating system like steam that's coming up having steamed directly on the
hardware is going to make your life so much better it's hard to recommend this
at 650. do I think it's cool and I think it's kind of a step in the right
direction for Chrome OS becoming a more versatile operating system is that what
Chrome OS should be if for some reason you're like yes
I would love to game but I need to be on Chrome West this is actually it's a
great price it's a great product the big question as are with all Chromebooks is
Chrome OS right for you but do you know
what would be right for you subscribing to ShortCircuit thanks for watching if
you liked this video maybe you should Mosey on over to our Channel LTT and
take a look at some of the videos I've done on Chromebooks over there