so i am on my fourth international trip in the last like
three and a half weeks i've been all over the place uh new york two or
three times la and now finally
i am in beautiful paris
so it's night time and i was thinking to myself i could go out and i could
see the sights enjoy the night life or
i could show you guys something that i whipped up that i call
the ultimate travel gaming setup
okay so i know what you guys are thinking
that's just a razor blade stealth with a mouse pad a mouse an
international adapter and a power brick
there's nothing ultimate gaming and there's nothing special about it but
i do have a piece
that is special and this was actually kind of inspired by my upcoming review
of the razer blade stealth because as you guys probably know if
you've seen any coverage of a previous blade stealth one of the big
selling points for razer for this device is its compatibility with their razer
core external graphics card enclosure but
i don't think most people are going to buy that kind of thing so i wanted to review the device
standalone but that doesn't mean that i wanted to ignore the capabilities
however as you guys have probably noticed this
is not a razer blade core this is the
secret sauce that actually makes this
travel gaming setup more possible because the core or core v2 now
i guess is really designed to be left at home so you take your notebook around
with you you get home you plug in your Thunderbolt cable and boom you've got a
full desktop grade graphics experience this guy this is the aorus gtx 1080
gaming box and it's actually available with a variety of different gpus
pre-installed in it is so small and
compact that you could be reasonably expected to travel around with it
so it enables a completely
different use case than the razer core which is actually pretty bulky not to
mention it does not come with a handy dandy little travel case
so razer doesn't really advertise this
but their blade stealth and actually their blade for that matter i've tested
them with a variety of different external Thunderbolt and external GPU
enclosures and i've actually found that while they don't guarantee
interoperability between their notebooks and their GPU enclosures and third-party
accessories it's actually been pretty good so your
mileage may vary in terms of which external box you use but
i wouldn't necessarily feel like you have to buy the razer one and that's a
good thing because razer i mean i love you guys and all that but
you guys charge a freaking lot for your external GPU box
the pricing on this one puts it closer to
if you account for that it comes with a gtx 1080 inside and that those obviously
have a cost this guy comes to about 200
only compared to the razer core v2
at about 500
so it doesn't come with this fancy orange cable mod cable that was uh that
was actually something that i added so on the one side you've got a really
large fan that is completely dedicated like all the way from here to here to
here to here to this mini gtx 1080
graphics card on the front you've just got a
aorus logo on this side you've got a built-in power supply a couple of
cooling fans that are bringing fresh air in over here and then around back you
find the business end so there's a standard PCIe 16x graphics card so
feasibly you could actually swap this out in the future if you could find
something that would fit then you've got some included i o so you've got a fast
charging usb 3 three more usb 3s and then the Thunderbolt that you need in
order to power the GPU so it doesn't have the same i o as the core and
honestly i'll tell you guys it's been a little bit more finicky at this stage
than the razer core has requiring a reboot sometimes in order to be detected
but overall the experience has been pretty decent
so we just take our Thunderbolt 3 cable
plug that bad boy in and
what's cool about this is that we actually don't even need
the blade stealth's included power adapter anymore so this takes the place
of your laptop power adapter okay so let's fire it up
the gaming box actually turns on automatically
once you plug in Thunderbolt and power up your machine i just need to give my
setup a second to detect my mouse and all that good stuff
getting a couple issues with usb connectivity this is something that i've
seen with this particular box before
it doesn't affect my use case right now but it is something to maybe keep an eye
out for before you go ahead and jump on this exact setup but but overall this is
about the direction we're heading in terms of
mobile gaming like look how compact and
easy to travel with this whole setup is
okay now before i fire up the game there's one quick thing i want to check
just i want to make sure that this hand shook properly so yes gtx 1080 shows up
here and the NVIDIA control panel shows up so
we should be good to go now i just want to
configure my options here now normally playing on a laptop even a gaming laptop
you'd be setting up like tier options but not today we're going to
crank it to 3200 by 1800 fxaa and we're
turning the graphics to very high with motion blur off now
to be clear the best gaming experience on these
external boxes is had with an external monitor because there's only so much
bandwidth in this Thunderbolt connection there's a PCIe 4x connection and then
some protocol overhead so when you have to communicate from the system to the
graphics card in order to actually render the game then that's a lot of
bandwidth and then when you have to send the graphics cards display output data
instead of actually hooking up an HDMI or displayport connection here when you
have to send it in i think it's called loopback mode back to the laptop's
display then you end up hurting yourself because you're using some of your
bandwidth up for that so you can expect to take anywhere from a 10 to a 20
performance hit is this not incredible like yeah we're only running at
38 to 42 FPS so it's not the smoothest
gaming experience of all time but like i'm being pretty unfair to it like we're
running at 3 800 by 1600 i don't have to
do that on a 13.3 inch display so let's
say we drop it to 1920x1080 let's have a look at what
performance looks like there
there it is my friends ultra
details 65 to 70 FPS gaming
in a reasonably demanding game on a
laptop okay so i know that external GPU boxes
aren't new and the razer blade stealth isn't particularly new obviously
carrying a mouse around with you when you travel isn't new but the reason that
i'm bringing this up now as opposed to before is just because a few things
have all come together and made this sort of this what's been a pipe dream of
mine for the future start to look like it's a lot closer maybe even a reality
today so number one is that these external GPU boxes are getting both
smaller and cheaper
that's awesome number two is that notebooks these
actually legitimately thin and light notebooks with great battery life i use
this on a plane for over six hours with a couple of battery tweaks on my way
here finally have quad-core processors
because that was the issue a lot of modern games are finally getting to the
point where they can actually use more than just a couple of CPU cores so even
though razer's been talking about this use case for well since the blade
stealth launched it never made any sense to me before but check this out so you
can see here the CPU is turboing up as high as like 3.6 gigahertz and change to
keep the CPU from being a bottleneck and this is pretty cool here uh back up a
little bit i'm going to lean in with my microphone which i'm wearing
this whole setup is quiet so in some ways this is
actually better for my purposes than a gaming laptop
with everything integrated because now i can upgrade my super portable notebook
or my GPU separately as my needs change and the
pricing is not that far off especially
when you consider that like this graphics card is non-proprietary so it
could just be moved to like a friend's desktop or resold when you need a new
GPU like ah this is totally
game changing so thanks guys for checking out my video
on the ultimate travel gaming setup if you disliked it
you can hit that button if you liked it hit like if you want to get subscribed do that if you want to check out where
to buy the stuff we featured i'll try and throw links in the video description
for that this is actually available with a number of different gpus i'm not sure if i
mentioned that before also down there is our merch store and our community forum
so you should totally join that