the AMD ryzen 9 3950x blew us away with
its 16 CPU cores and 4.7 gigahertz boost
clock humiliating Intel's fastest offerings
so what would happen if someone put it in a
laptop
we'd get the apex 15 the newly crowned
fastest laptop ever at this point it's not a question of whether it will wreck
the competition but rather by how much it'll wreck the competition let's get
into it today's video is brought to you by
glasswire keep track of the weird stuff that's connecting to your pc even when
you aren't using it you can see if strange devices join your wi-fi and
block them instantly get 25 off at the link below
the original plan was to compare the apex 15 to other laptops from the blue
team but given that Intel's best was
just eviscerated by the thin and light zephyrus g14 here we figured we needed
to up the ante so on every single one of our performance charts you're gonna find
the desktop core i9 9900k to show you
just how overpowered this thing is
at the time of writing the core i9 9900k is Intel's fastest consumer desktop CPU
and unsurprisingly its eight cores were
no match for the 16 course in the apex
15. if you are looking for pure CPU
power on the go there is absolutely nothing like this you're not reading
that wrong unless you think the blender classroom render didn't finish five
minutes earlier than the 9900k maybe the biggest surprise though is not
only that the apex 15 beat the core i9 900k but that in some tests even the
zephyrus g14 beat big blue reinforcing how much of a
beast it is as for single threaded performance well
the 9900k is still the king of the hill
but not by the margin that i was expecting in cinebench just five percent
moving on to gaming tests though Intel does manage to hold on to the top two
positions on our chart although i would most certainly hope so given that one of
those chips is a desktop one and that the other one is equipped with the new
super variant of the mobile rtx 2070.
the 3950x then is without a doubt the fastest mobile gaming CPU that we've
ever tested and the apex 15's cooling system which you probably just heard
spin up right there performed admirably keeping our GPU at around 1700 megahertz
and our CPU above 4 gigahertz that's
dang impressive so surely there must be some compromise then right how does the
apex 15 fare against a desktop r9 3950x
well unsurprisingly there's just not enough
power or cooling for the apex 15 to keep up with a true desktop or with my
underwear photo shoot LTT Store.com so the r9 3950x is running in eco mode
knocking the TDP down from 105 watts to
just 65 watts now originally there was
actually a suite of overclocking tools in this laptop's BIOS until
their bower took things a little bit too far and cleveland locked the BIOS down
to prevent overzealous tuning
anywho hopefully soon there will be an expert BIOS mode down the road that puts
the options back in with some warnings that it could void your warranty etc etc
the apex 15 is also slowed down by the 16 gigs of 2666 memory that we
unfortunately had to use the original plan was to use 32 gigs at
3200 megahertz but ryzen 3rd gen desktop
chips and sodium memory sort of
uncharted territory so over the next few months we're hoping a BIOS update should
add support for loads more RAM with an accompanying performance boost
back to the thermals though the CPU does get up to about 90 degrees celsius when
it's under heavy load at which point the clock speed does drop to three gigahertz
and that might sound kind of slow but guys remember there are 16 cores and 32
threads in this laptop i mean we will regularly see six or
eight core laptops that have to drop to the mid 2 gigahertz range when they're
under heavy load so this is still very impressive
sort of because something's got to give right
so what has xmg well i mean really clevo
the original designer done to keep the thermals of this beast in check in short
the apex 15 moves a shocking amount of
air for a laptop and it creates quite a
bit of noise while doing it surprisingly i didn't find the noise too
annoying there's no high-pitched wine and last half full since the fans are
going full tilt pretty much all the time the laptop is kind of easy to tune out
to really figure out how they kept the apex 15 cool though we'll need to take a
little trip inside first you're going to want to take out the battery by removing
these two screws and pulling up we were only able to get about an hour of time
away from the wall by the way with this 62 watt hour battery but putting a
larger one in would have been more expensive made the laptop bigger and
heavier and let's face it guys it's not like 1.5 hours of battery life is
suddenly going to make the apex 15 viable for use anywhere that you don't
have easy access to an outlet five more screws which are different
lengths by the way so be careful when you're reassembling and we can slide the
bottom cover off revealing oh
look at that copper and the heat pipes
those are some of the largest heat pipes that i have ever seen at 11 millimeters
wide which i guess means it makes a bit more sense how the processor didn't have
a complete meltdown underneath the heat pipes and a generous
dollop of thermal grizzly cryonot is the motherboard and this is cool almost
everything in here can be upgraded there are two m.2 slots a two and a half inch
hard drive bay and easily accessed RAM
even the CPU uses a standard desktop am4
socket so adding another level of craziness here it could actually be
possible to upgrade to future processors
assuming that a BIOS update were provided that means the graphics card
that's an rtx 2070 is pretty much the
only bit that can't be swapped out in the future it's kind of like the the
anti-macbook back to the exterior though the apex 15 is built like a brick a 5.69
pound brick to be exact and although the chassis construction is
plastic there's enough copper on the inside that it gives it a pretty solid
feel with my only complaint being that the keyboard the like wrist rest itself
and the keys themself are a little bit squishy now it didn't stop me from
liking the keyboard reasonably well it's not top tier but the key switches never
actively annoyed me so i'll give it a solid b the bad news is that the track
pad did actively annoy me overall the
tracking and click feel is mediocre but
it's the poor palm rejection that really made me want to outright disable it and
just use a mouse with that said on a different laptop that would be a
straight up deal breaker do not buy but
with this i suspect that most of the time where you can plunk down this thing
and your power brick you can also plunk down a mouse i mean the thing is less of
a laptop and more of a desktop that can be moved around easily i mean even the i
o is desktop-like you have three display outputs on the
back i mean you don't do that if you intend for this thing to be used on the
go but all of that positive stuff aside
assuming you're after something like this should you spend your money on it does
come with some compromises remember that you're only getting 65 watts of CPU
power you're getting a lot more noise than a desktop and if you're willing to
give up some CPU performance basically any other laptop out there is going to
beat this for portability and battery life however if you're after a high
performance rig the value of this machine is something that i don't know
if i've ever seen before our config right here will run you about
five hundred dollars which is a lot of money but consider this an equivalent
desktop is going to run you close to two grand and unlike the apex 15 that
desktop doesn't come with a 144hz ips
gaming display or with a keyboard also the performance per dollar of this
machine can be improved by settling for
12 cores instead of 16. the r9 3900x
variant drops the price to around 2 grand which is only about 200 more than
an equivalent desktop that is pretty compelling i'm used to
seeing big price premiums on these weird low volume high performance skus but
it's not really here this time so if pci express expansion cards aren't
really your thing this is a heck of a lot of performance
in a well relatively portable container isn't it
so if you got a crush big calculations or renders on the go this is it guys
nothing is gonna get it done faster
just like nothing can get a segue out there faster than this guy
anytime we buy anything online we give access to our personal information to
merchants and their data partners and this happens without our clear consent
so it's important that your online presence is kept safe and secure and
with privacy.com you can do that it's a free tool that makes it easy to manage
your financial life online by keeping your most important information out of
the hands of people who might have it stolen from them by generating virtual
numbers privacy masks your real bank information so you never have to worry
about giving it out to people you don't know online you can create up to 12
cards a month on their free personal plan and pro is 10 a month which gives
you access to everything in the free plan plus 1 cashback on all purchases up
to 36 cards a month and more security and privacy features privacy.com is pci
dss compliant and since they make money from merchants there's no cost to you so
sign up today and you'll get five bucks it's privacy.com forward slash Linus
that's privacy.com forward slash minus and have that linked below if you guys
are looking for something else to watch maybe check out our review of zephyrus
g14 a laptop that has no asterisks on
its recommendations so this is cool
this is like more well-rounded