AMD was a little light on the details when they announced their beastly lineup
of stricks Halo laptop processors why so
koi AMD I'm just going to be gaming on it as soon as these shaders are done
compiling oh they are we are here
sponsored by Asus taking a look at their incredible lineup of upcoming gaming
devices I'm talking designs with ryzen AI Max Plus NVIDIA 50 Series gpus and
even a new Thunderbolt 5 external GPU
that has a mobile 5090 in it we're going to kick things off then with the new
flow z13 at its heart is the ryzen AI
Max Plus 395 and I know that name
doesn't mean anything to anybody so let's break it down all the way down to
the bare diey that's at the heart of this machine behind me depending on your
configuration you've got up to 16 of the latest Zen 5 CPU cores right up here at
the top and a Radeon 860 s GPU right
here this is using their brand new rdna 3.5 architecture which we'll be gaming
on in a moment but first give me a bit more time here this is the biggest on
package GPU that I have ever seen in a PC here let me put this in context for
you okay this is a kraken point a ryzen
AI 300 processor that has eight CPU
cores and eight rdna 3.5 GPU cores and
all of the io integrated into that one D this whole thing is smaller than just
the GPU and IOD die that's on that ryzen
AI Max Plus 395 which by the way has a
whopping 40 GPU cores in it and somehow
Asus has this thing running it up to 80
watts in this tiny gaming tablet form
factor I assume 80 watts is going to be kind of loud but who knows maybe they'll
surprise me let's give it a shot shockingly they didn't put any
restrictions on me in terms of what games we could play so obviously I chose
black myth Wukong and they even let me dial in the settings myself so I'll show
you guys what we're running at we've got the panel set to the native 2560 x600
then we've turned our rendering resolution to about 1080p but not 1080p
low or medium I'm talking 1080p high and
guys check this out I'm not allowed to have an FPS
counter but what I can tell you guys is that this is well above 60
FPS on a device this slim using
integrated Graphics to achieve this took some doing though the vapor chamber got
changed from copper to stainless steel so it's the same effectiveness at moving
the heat but less weight and less dissipation of that heat internally
before it can be expelled outside now it's not the quietest thing in the world
in fact I bet you can even hear it on the
trade show floor but the fact that it's doing this at all pretty cool and using
Armory crate which is conveniently accessible with this nice new button
here we can actually change our performance profile on the fly so I'm
running in Turbo right now which isn't even the
maximum but I'm not going to turn it to Max yet first I actually want to try
silent which is 28 watts and see what we
can get here okay now we're looking at something that's probably closer to
about 25 FPS but here let me pop into
the menu again let's turn her down to medium where
now that's more like a smooth 30 if I
had to guess maybe 35 onboard Graphics okay let's try 80
Watts now to do that though the software is still early I've got to come out here
I've got to go into manual I don't know
turbo M nope that button doesn't work okay so let's just let's just crank it
woo all right save and apply oh wow we
are overclocked fing yes I understand the risk the risk is the one working
machine in their Booth can die whoa that fans's going now boys oh
did I even mention the RGB yet look at that so cute oh now she's
smooth dude okay let's turn it back up
very high perhaps W current settings
exceed the recommended settings and may lead to Performance issues oh yeah well
that's very stressful
let's go back to high there we go okay bottom line this thing is sick
but there's more to getting this kind of performance than just adding more GPU
cores for the first time ever I just
gamed on a laptop chip with a quad Channel lpddr 5x memory controller that
means up to double the raw bandwidth compared to dual Channel which is
especially important for high performance onboard graphics and gets
even better this machine right here can be equipped with up to
128 gigs of RAM massive right get better
than that 128 gigs of RAM that can be reallocated as needed so if you wanted
to run large AI models or let's call them moderate sized AI models on device
you can fire up Armory crate and then push your high-speed system memory over
to the GPU what a time to be alive
surely there must be a compromise right I don't know find having a hard time
finding it the screen looks great 180 HZ th000 to1 contrast no HDR unfortunately
but you do get USB 4 dual front-facing speakers stylus support and even the
keyboard feels really good considering
that it's a folio but all right Lon is fair enough onboard Graphics is still
onboard Graphics show me the RTX 5000
gpus I will but first an industry lingo
update as you may know every 50 Series laptop will have the GPU solder directly
to the motherboard but not just any GPU
can go on just any motherboard and the biggest factor that impacts this is
whether the laptop design is made to accommodate board 1 or board 2 board 1
gpus include the mobile versions of the RTX 570 TI 580 and 590 while board 2
covers the 5070 and below so depending
on which board a laptop chassis was designed for you might see high-end
vapor chamber cooling or more basic heat pipes you might also see a difference in
thickness to accommodate the greater thermal output of higher-end board one
gpus confused yet great making matters
more complicated there is no hard and fast rule for the power envelope of
these new gpus so there will be a wide range in the real world performance of
say a 5070 TI depending on how much
cooling and how much power you can deliver to it so in summary four fact
impact gaming performance in these 50 Series Laptops the board it's designed
for the GPU die that is soldered to that
package the power delivery that's built into the motherboard and the thermal
design all need to be optimized to get the most possible FPS with that in mind
then let's throw to one that seems to be quite
optimized was I not holding a mic the whole time check these out we've got the
strix scar 16 and strix Scar 18 both are
equipped with up to a core ultr 9 275x up to 64 gigs of user upgradable ddr5
and a panone certified 2560 x600 nebula
HDR mini LED display at 240 HZ with up
to 1200 nits Peak brightness dang I mean
even the back of these things looks good check this out meanwhile Apple can't
even manage to bring back the glowing logo pathetic both of these machines can
be configured with up to an RTX 59 Mobile in its maximum power
configuration of 175 WTS game on it yeah
we asked NVIDIA is not letting anyone do
that but here's what we can do we can all imagine
together you guys imagining right now good because realistically with
mobile 590 starting at $28.99
USD which I promise you this one will cost more than that that might be all
most of us are going to do has a bunch more cool stuff though sick keyboard
giant trackpad all around RGB lighting with woo dual Thunderbolt five ports and
a redesigned thermal solution that intakes air all across the bottom of the
machine and then blasts it out of this gigantic heat exchanger at the back
maybe we can at least open it and show you here before anyone stops me let me
just take out my Precision screwdriver set from LTT
store.com no way I don't even need it a
toolless bottom latch on a
laptop it's that fast check this out 90w
hour battery dual Gen 5 SSD slots and
there it is those upgradeable sodium slots we focused on the 16 because the
18 is almost the same bigger display
obviously and a number pad and a bit more space for the speaker drivers so it
ends up sounding a bit better that's about it now it's time to
check out the redheaded stepchild of this generation strix G I mean the Intel
version looks pretty sick but the AMD version has AMD's new fire range mobile
processors which look nuts with up to 16 full fat Zen 5 cores add up to 55 Watts
there's even a 3D vcash variant that should be the fastest mobile gaming CPU
on the planet which makes it all the more disappointing that the GPU maxes
out at a 570 TI I mean look I know this
is sponsored or whatever Asus but what the heck those of you listening closely
will know that the 57 ETI is board one
so a 5090 would be pined compatible with
the motherboard why not make that available ah well those of you who were
listening even closer will know that power delivery and thermal design also
play a major role in GPU compatibility and this motherboard wasn't built with
enough for the bigger chips it also has
a non-HDR display smaller trackpad Etc which is a shame because I'd like to see
fire range get the proper high-end laptop
treatments maybe in the future finally it's time for the machine
I'm probably most excited about see I've been really enjoying my Snapdragon X
Elite you know great battery life and all that but I'm hungry for something
with some gaming oomph and the zephrus G14 looking kind of sick this generation
it's the same great chassis we know and love but now with a strix point CPU and
a slightly more betterer chassis to love even more see there's a board 2 version
that is going to be able to support up to a 5070 and a board one version that
is a little thicker than before like a millimeter plus that'll do up to a
5080 I'll be it at just 110 Watts it
also launches alongside a new XG mobile
that is both very exciting and also a bit of a kick in the teeth to the
customers who previous ly bought into the XG mobile ecosystem on the one hand
Thunderbolt 5 looks like it is going to fuel a Reawakening for external gpus
according to Asus only about 60 gbits of the 80 gbits is directly available for
GPU data transfer which is actually lower than the previous XG mobile which
is PCI direct but on the other hand being Thunderbolt means better hot swap
support and broader compatibility including backwards compatibility it's
just that ditching the old standard leaves anyone who bought an old zephrus
or a first gen Ally high and dry for ausa's part there is still something
they can do I've already seen some Community efforts to reverse engineer
the XG mobile connector but a step further would be to just open source the
bloody thing and give these folks an upgrade path it would be a great PR move
and it would go a long way towards showing that you really care about your customers in the long term just like I
care about you guys watching some more of our CES coverage this year I'd
strongly recommend starting with our summary of AMD's keynote which has some
more information on their incredible ryzen AI Max and fire range CPUs