every time we post a video about x-cool
gadget or why most expensive tech
there's a huge influx
of comments asking us to do a build guide for a super budget system or like
a cheap laptop roundup and typically i
respond with uh no that's boring
but today today is a different day we're going to
be looking at the evolution of the thousand-ish gaming laptop over the last
five years and if you enjoy it quietly
without any complaining origen's gonna give away an eon 15s at
the end okay okay
before we begin let's set the scene each of our five
laptops some of which were actually kind of difficult to obtain was priced at a
thousand ish dollars when it was new and has what we would consider
typical notebook graphics for the time
we have representatives from five Intel architectures sandy bridge ivy bridge
haswell sky lake and finally kb lake in
the currently shipping origin pc eon 15s
starting on the outside build quality at this price hasn't really changed much
almost all of our competitors share a decent build typically sporting a hybrid
plastic and metal finish on the exterior deck flex is basically non-existent
since the thin and light gaming machines that suffer from this are usually much
more expensive and both screenflex and
typing induced screen wobble were acceptable save for the lenovo y510p
whose screen's front glossy plastic is reminiscent of a 300
best buy special i'm really glad that whole thing went out of fashion speaking
of casings we've actually done not too bad in that department our three newest
pcs all have almost entirely black exteriors aside from some red accents
while the sandy bridge and ivy bridge models are just about the furthest thing
from a gamer aesthetic that you can get it's safe to say that i wouldn't shy
away from taking any of these into a business meeting again the more out
there gamery aesthetic seems to dominate the higher end gaming skus
onto screens then my eyes have become so
accustomed to ips and high ntn panels
that these older budget offerings induced what i call
a splitting first world problem headache
every laptop we tested features
i mean i guess features is kind of a strong word here a tn
garbo edition screen with the exception
of the eon 15s to be clear that one isn't the most
amazing panel in the world but the falling costs of ips displays overall
has driven a huge improvement industry-wide in the day-to-day
usability of value laptops gaming and
otherwise and full hd 1080p resolution
is a nice touch what a wonderful segue
who could forget about gaming laptops and their historically completely gross
tastic touch pads we actually sort of lucked out on this one every unit we
tested has what i would describe as a decent track pad it's no macbook or
razer blade but none of them are at that deal breaker level connectivity is
pretty strong throughout especially as we get newer and newer the hp elitebook
we picked up even has a full-size displayport connector on the side along
with eseta so that was kind of weird and usb3 first enters the spotlight with
haswell and thank goodness for that i was even a little surprised to find that
not only the eon 15s but also the MSI
gl62 have usb type c as well not to
mention that every one of them has an Ethernet port it's actually kind of
funny to see how the trends that i spend so much time complaining about like the
reduction in i o on computers aren't really affecting this segment battery
life isn't really accurately measurable on used laptops due to degradation but
we ran pc mark 8's battery life test anyway it simulates a light office
workload and to represent an average battery saving setup the brightness was
set to 50 percent and power profile to battery saving mode the results were
mostly unsurprising although origin xeon 15s scored a pretty respectable almost
four hours i guess that's where the power efficiency of each new CPU
generation comes in but none of that is really the point of our investigation
these are gaming laptops after all you didn't think we were gonna forget about
benchmarks did you silly goose for games
we chose one game from each year starting with when our first laptop was
released 2012. so we loaded up borderlands 2
bioshock infinite dragon age inquisition rise of the tomb raider deus ex and
ghost recon wildlands on each laptop
performance in this sector has for a
long time been underwhelming kind of
like no man's sky except more like
no man's frame rate even in the older titles like borderlands 2 at medium
settings the older laptops barely crack the 30 FPS barrier that is until you get
to the modern origin eon 15s this thing
completely wipes the floor with the other systems and for good reason
previous iterations of value gaming
laptops often used mobile variants of
contemporary gpus like the MSI with a
gt940mx and the y510p with a 755 m these
m gpus from my personal experience were
less likely to get driver updates and more likely to cause system stability
issues and crashes even when they did
have enough power by contrast current gaming laptops like our origin pc system
have full fat desktop graphics cards in
this case a 1050 ti that specs to pull a
whopping 70 watts at load with all the long-term support that comes with a more
streamlined product lineup so it basically comes down to this battery
capacities haven't changed much and neither has build quality from our
samples but creature comforts like displays have improved by leaps and
bounds and as for graphics cards both performance and reliability have
improved dramatically while on the CPU side power consumption especially during
basic workloads has improved to such a degree that it's no longer true that a
gaming laptop has to be unsuitable for
other tasks so hopefully you guys stuck around
because like i said before origin pc is giving away one of these bad boys not
this one this one's mine but you can enter to win yours at the link in the
video description it's us only so keep that in mind while entering and good
luck so thanks for watching guys if you disliked this video you can hit that
button but if you liked it hit the like button get subscribed and maybe consider
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