over the years i've developed a pretty good nose for and one of the
smelliest things around tends to be mechanical keyboards on laptops from
ASUS to acer to Gigabyte to MSI and
probably alienware at some point every laptop with a mechanical keyboard
has sucked for one reason or another i mean some of them are okay for certain
tasks but not a single one of them has been better than a quality membrane
keyboard which is why when alienware said they had collaborated with cherry
to make a mechanical gaming keyboard
excuse me sorry i threw up a little bit in my mouth i prepared for the worst
but as it turns out this thing feels
exceptional is that rose petals wow yeah wow well
according to my writing staff anyway it's really good but i have yet to touch
it so best of luck alienware and cherry
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the development of this keyboard started three years ago when alienware
approached cherry and asked if they could design a mechanical keyboard for
their laptops with a small list of requests like
give users the experience they wish they had and provide mobile users the true
feel of a mechanical keyboard it has to be good for gaming and for typing
oh and by the way you have to do it without using up any more space than the
existing membrane key switches do now how exactly did they do apparently i get
a single sentence now to give you my thoughts
i can only type a single sentence on yes one sentence then we're swapping it out
for a bit oh okay choose a good sentence
i'm gonna go with quick brown fox you're not gonna try and plug like LTT Store or
something um no i'm gonna type
i got to evaluate this thing in one sentence i got i got work to do here
okay
am i allowed to backspace and retype things if i make a mistake no
i feel a bit like a wine reviewer right now it's got a strong tactile feel heavy
at the front end and a pleasing mechanical sound
save for the slightly twangy
end um
is that is that what you expected to hear that's actually pretty accurate
now this has been billed as the world's first cherry mx ultra low profile
mechanical keyboard which is true but there have been laptops before featuring
cherry mx switches like this paragon of
practicality this right here is the acer predator 21x
possibly the most bat crazy laptop to
ever exist wait a second you need the wrist rest for the full typing
experience right you're right sorry my bad it's got features that even today you
can't find like a 21 inch curved ultra wide display
two gtx 1080s running in sli more i o than
probably just about any laptop today and
of course a fully mechanical keyboard
of course this isn't here so i can talk about the room filling sound tasteful
lighting effects and integrated toby eye tracking
it's to talk about using cherry mx browns on a keyboard and
this is you know you joke about it but this is a
pretty good solution to the otherwise it works really well wrist breaking you
know difference in height between your table and the and the computer it's
i mean it's really better than any other keyboard on a laptop
because it's full on cherry mx browns with and get this
they weren't even using low profile keycaps or anything
acer went full fat they saved absolutely
no z height of course saving space
wasn't really a priority when acer was designing a product like this one this
is not really a laptop it doesn't go on
your lap this is a desktop replacement and for a number of reasons this is a
product category that has mostly evaporated over the last three to four
years a big part of the reason is that you can fit the same kind of features
and performance not to mention even things like mechanical keyboards into
much slimmer designs take this a sous-strix scar 17
g733 this is probably the closest competitor
to the m17 with matching core specs 360
hertz panel rtx 3080 graphics and an 8
core ryzen processor with the big draw here being that it is
just 3 000 because somehow that's a bargain compared to the
alienware's casual 3600 price tag one
key difference though is that the strix comes with an opto mechanical keyboard
those are actuated by blocking a laser beam as the key is pressed down for
apparently some of the best response times possible
in practice though oh man this thing does not feel amazing
no no i will i will give it some more time i will give it some more time
i'm to boot up like do maternal or something i think it's not too bad for
gaming yeah i'll i'll give you that alex it doesn't feel nearly as bad for gaming
but what it doesn't feel like is
mechanical now to be clear mechanical doesn't mean
anything other than the method by which the switch actuates and you can have
mechanical switches in all shapes and sizes and sounds and feels it's just
that in the context of computer hardware
people have an expectation that a mechanical switch is
cherry mx-like in some way so you've got
a longer travel or you've got a tactile bump or a more satisfying
consistency in the feel and the sound right
so it might be mechanical in its way of operating
but it doesn't feel very good yeah so i think i know why it doesn't
feel very good yeah i made this graph here ah
the force curve so this is how far we have pressed down and this is how much
force we're applying so it goes from actuation to really
quickly bottoming out because you have that much force on it to actuate it
that makes a lot of sense it's too non-linear well but i think the
problem also is that it's too linear like you don't know where the actuation
point is going to be wait so the actuation point doesn't require more force it's just there well
we'll just press it you can feel like there's a click in the middle
and it doesn't really make any sense yeah
yeah so there are a couple of problems here number one is that this doesn't
really feel like much it feels really soft then you get to this actuation
point this is the click so down down down
click it's a really strong click and by the
time you've applied this much force you're basically going to jump straight
to here because it's not like you can ride it out by applying just a little
bit more a little bit more and then this is a big problem too because your bottom
out feels extremely mushy so you've got mush here this really strong click that
on paper might seem nice and sounds nice and then you've got this kind of mushy
bottoming out and the whole thing just doesn't feel very good you combine that
with the inherent small amount of deck flex that you're going to have in any
laptop that isn't just made out of a solid machine piece of aluminum and it
contributes even more to the mushiness yeah so now you finally get to use this
again okay let's let's go back to the alienware this is a very cute little
chart that you made thank you alex yeah it's those extra little bits of
effort that set you apart from the other alex's jk prime you're great too he also
does nice little bits of extra effort so we ran out of desk pad space fortunately
we have these super wide ones lttstore.com
before i give any more impressions i want to actually game on this thing
though because a good typing experience does not necessarily mean that it's a
good gaming keyboard and
i prefer it but i don't know that i can
objectively say it's better i just tend to prefer that
well more desktop cherry mx feel with typing
and gaming impressions under my belt i can say with confidence that i like
these a lot better than these but
these aren't necessarily my favorite style of switches for either typing or
gaming because if you look closely
they don't they're quite stiff at the top of the keystroke i can press on it
quite a lot before there it goes
right can you hear that click brandon or is the whoosh of the fans too much
there it is the bottom out is much more satisfying not nearly as mushy feeling
but i do tend to prefer a tactile bump that's somewhere below the very top of
the keystroke and actually alex has a
force chart that i can share with you guys so you can see that's exactly what
yeah yeah i have typed on a lot of keyboards over the years so you're
pretty much putting all the force here and then it falls away on you
but the good news is that when it bottoms out it doesn't have that same
kind of mush to it from a strictly performance standpoint
if all i did was game i would probably have to take these but
if i was me and i know that i actually do type sometimes as well i would
absolutely take these first now let's talk about how these work because while
i have used kind of front loaded heavier switches like these i've never used
these ones before because they are brand new we got a little tester here from
cherry number 39 of 80 apparently that gives you a really good look both with
some clear key caps over top of them as well as an exposed one so it's actually
a butterfly style mechanism that
if we look at our microscope footage we can see there's a little piece that
slips off and there it is that's where you get your
click then the spring in the middle brings it back to rest so you could
easily that's actually interesting you could easily adjust the tension on this
thing by adjusting that spring that's kind of a cool thought not that you
would want to cherry always impresses me with their attention to detail like are
these steel yeah
15 million clicks and if cherry rates it for 15 million
you better believe it as good as a key switch might be though
as i touched on earlier
it can easily be let down by a chassis that is not stiff enough and we saw a
great example of this in the galaxy book pro on ShortCircuit about a week ago
fortunately delay alienware has done a great job of this with a unibody
magnesium cnc chassis but it is something to keep in mind especially as
these switches start to show up on other laptops as an option because they're
going to cost you about 150 another challenge for del alienware is
that they already had some of the best mobile key switches on the market before
this collaboration with cherry can they possibly be worth that kind of money
oh wow look at this we are so prepared for this video to find out i've got an
m15 r3 on hand this is still not my favorite style of
keyboard because i type a lot and that front loaded actuation curve is not
ideal for it but if you like that style and for gaming a lot of people do
the cherry version is definitely better if it's 150 dollars better that's more
up to you but for a lot of people a good feeling keyboard is absolutely worth
that kind of money and this is definitely a lot better feeling my notes
just say somehow use the OLED screen to segue into the fact that a keyboard is
attached to a laptop and the rest of the laptop has to be good for that to matter ah yes
so the m15r3 uses an OLED display oh
inky blocks so good whereas
the m17r4 does not as far as i can tell it's
using the same 1080p 360hz ips panel as
what we had in the asustrix car now you might think
1080p 360hz doesn't make a lot of sense in a laptop with an rtx 3080 because
you're going to be CPU limited in basically everything you might say oh it
probably makes more sense to get a 30 70 and save a couple bucks or better yet go
for a 1440p display but if you are primarily planning on
playing competitive shooters and then just occasionally want to turn rtx on in
cyberpunk this not a terrible config
what's really impressive about the m17 r4 though is just how freaking powerful
it is especially the GPU with
watts of power on tap this is the fastest mobile GPU we've ever tested and
in games it wins against the scar every single time for productivity the core i9
Intel processor does hold the alienware back a bit with the ryzen 9 in the strix
pulling ahead but in the coming weeks we're expecting alienware to be launching an AMD version
of the m17 that should be the fastest gaming laptop on the market
period now of course with power like that comes cooling
responsibility and also airflow responsibility so when
you're using the m17 expect the fans to
always be on and during gaming well
don't even think about using the speakers however good they might sound
or open back headphones but what alienware has done with cooling
here is still impressive even if the CPU regularly gets close to 100 degrees
celsius i mean look it's not even that thick also inside we've got an 86 watt
hour battery and alienware did warn me that this system
was not optimized for battery life but holy crap i thought the days of gaming
laptops with around two hours of battery had finally ended
not here maybe the AMD version will be a little bit better but my hopes aren't
super high which means that even though it doesn't look as clunky as
its predecessors did this is still the modern day equivalent
of a desktop replacement
and you know what i kind of like this future you still have to be plugged into
the wall pretty much all the time but dang you got a lot of i o they even
worked in their proprietary external GPU dock thing which is freaking awesome you
can all of course go Thunderbolt if you prefer that sort of thing wired Ethernet
dang impressive if you have 3 600 to spend of course
mind you mind you that pricing looks downright reasonable compared to what
the predator 21x got closest thing like 10 grand yeah
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if you guys enjoyed this video maybe you'll also enjoy checking out you know
what go check out our original review of this thing it truly is an utterly unique device
anyone want to buy one no we're not selling that line it's
craigslist no never it's useless it's beautiful it belongs in a museum
donate it someone takes up so much space i mean look at this remember this the
track pad you could flip it around to be a number pad