Do you like to game?
Yeah.
Do you like to game at your house?
Yes.
Do you like to game in kind of unusual places?
Hell yeah.
Okay, whoa, dude, okay.
I was kind of thinking like in a hotel or coffee shop,
but anyway, the point is, if you are gaming on the go,
you're gonna have to make some kind of sacrifice,
be it performance, weight, or battery life.
So today, we're gonna investigate
which option makes the most sense for mobile gaming,
but not until after our sponsor, Synergy.
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Now, there are really three approaches for gaming on the go.
Huge honking gaming laptop, thinner gaming laptop,
or thin and light notebook with an external GPU.
And today's objective is to find out
which one is the best, objectively, the best option.
So let's meet our contenders.
Coming in at a whopping 10.35 pounds,
this laptop has been described as a shot of adrenaline,
a big, heavy beast of a laptop, and barely even portable.
The ASUS G703 is possibly the only mobile, asterisk,
device on the market that can actually take advantage of Intel's
Core i9-8950K.
Some people have even gotten it to do five gigahertz
on all six of its processing cores.
And when you combine that with a GTX 1080, 32 gigs of RAM,
and a RAID 0 NVMe storage array,
this laptop spanks most people's gaming desktops.
Then, over on the other end of the spectrum,
weighing in at a featherweight 2.9 pounds,
is the Razer Stealth, which is, well, if we're being honest,
basically useless for serious gaming.
That is, until we hit it with a GTX 1080
in an external enclosure via Thunderbolt 3.
Now it's rocking a quad-core Core i7,
16 gigs of RAM, NVMe storage, and of course,
the GTX 1080 that we just duct taped to it,
helping it kick gaming laptop stereotypes in the balls
by combining extreme portability
with extreme gaming performance.
Also an extremely useful, sometimes, touchscreen.
Finally, the middleweight in our bout is the Razer Blade 2018.
At 4.63 pounds, this laptop is on the heftier end
of what we might call totable,
but it does have the muscle to make up
for that junk in the trunk.
It's got a six-core i7-8750H and a GTX 1070 Max-Q,
which some might say is the perfect compromise for gamers.
But then again, some people also love the Olive Garden,
but, like, you go there and at first you're, like,
stoked about the unlimited bread,
but then you get your pasta and it's just, well, basically,
it's more bread.
So then, we have designed a few challenges
for these machines to compete in,
so without further ado, let's get ready to ride!
Not allowed to say that because I will get in trouble.
Now, challenge number one.
Our three contestants arrive with their laptops
in their backpacks at some destination,
let's say the gym.
Just kidding, these guys.
Then they need to game, so they gotta get it out and ready
as quick as possible.
Ready, set, goldfish!
I don't care, I'm going.
Yeah, screw you, Linus.
All right, so Colton.
Oh, Colton's got the G703.
Whoa, that's gonna be a bit of a challenge here.
The Camara.
The Camara has a whopping two power cords for him to set up,
two power bricks for him to figure out how to manage,
but it does make up for some of that with its massive IO,
pretty much everything else out of the water.
It's got Thunderbolt 3.
It's got USB 3.
It's got an SD card reader.
It's got an actual Ethernet port.
James, meanwhile, is already completely set up.
The Blade Strike's kind of a middle ground,
so he's got ample USB.
He's got no touchscreen, unfortunately, on this machine.
I'll help you out with that there.
He's got Thunderbolt 3.
He's got mini DisplayPort and HDMI,
along with Thunderbolt 3,
so he can do multiple displays,
multiple displays out.
And Alex, are you set up now?
Wow, so coming in first is the thin gaming laptop.
Coming in second, actually,
is the ultralight with the external GPU enclosure.
I mean, you do give up some IO, though.
It's only got two USB ports,
plus that Thunderbolt port and a headphone jack,
so yeah, but then again,
if you're willing to carry this around,
you do get additional ports,
including Ethernet over here.
And coming in dead last, poor Colton.
Are you even at the desktop yet?
I'm at the desktop.
No one can see what you're typing.
It's pretty clear that the winner here in terms of setup
is our thinner gaming laptop.
But now it's time for round two,
the drag race of the computer world, Cinebench,
which hopefully Colton will figure out
how to open at some point.
Look, we had Riley,
we had Riley cast for this spot,
and it just, like, he was busy with TechLink,
so it just doesn't matter.
Anyway, on your marks.
Get set.
Bench it.
No, Colton, wrong one.
Fortunately, you have a super-fast machine,
so we can just cancel that, run the CPU one,
and you'll probably still finish before them.
So you can actually see here,
Colton's six-core, 12-thread processor
has already overtaken the Blade Stealth's
quad-core, eight-thread processor,
because remember, there's more to it
than just how many cores and how many threads you have.
There's how high it'll turbo and how long it'll stay there.
In fact,
it's even closing in on the Blade,
although this one does look like
it's gonna come in slightly ahead,
with about 1,000 points.
Finishing, well, second in time,
but that's only because of Colton.
With nearly 1,200 points,
the Chimera is clearly the fastest machine here
when it comes to multi-threaded CPU-intensive processes,
and the Blade Stealth does show some of its weakness,
because there's only so much cooling,
and therefore turboing up that you can do in such,
thin and light chassis.
There we go, about 530 points.
So, when it comes to getting serious work done on the road,
you're pretty much stuck with something at least this class,
with more serious work being most suitable
for obviously the most powerful machine.
Now, it's time for the main event, gaming performance.
So, let's get Shadow the Tomb Raider fired up here.
Make sure you guys are all on the high preset.
And fight!
Whoa, did Colton get the game launched
well before everyone else?
Looks like that RAID 0 NVMe is working out for him over there.
All right, everyone's set up and good to go?
Everyone's on high?
Yeah.
Everyone's on DirectX 12?
Go!
Let's see who manages to load in first.
Pull out wide so we can see.
All of them at once.
Whoa!
Colton's out ahead with the loading times!
Followed by, I mean, this is basically what we expected.
I can't act too surprised right now.
Now, what's interesting here
is that even though our Camara has the same GPU,
a desktop-grade GTX 1080,
as our Blade Stealth does in its external enclosure,
the frame rates that it's seeing are significantly higher
because you're gonna be limited,
not just by the PCI Express 4X interface
over Thunderbolt 3 here,
but also by the fact that the data has to be sent back from
the core to the display over that same link,
causing a little bit of bottlenecking.
Also, this processor doesn't turbo up to five gigahertz
or whatever.
So what that means in the real world is that the Blade,
which also has the benefit of a nice, fast 120 Hertz display
compared to our Blade Stealth,
ends up with better real-world FPS at the same resolution,
even though it has a GTX 1070 Max-Q.
So that's like a neutered 1070.
So no real surprises, in short.
In Shadow of the Tomb Raider,
or in any of the other games that we ran while we're at it,
bigger is more badder when it comes to gaming performance.
But with that said, our Razer Blade Stealth,
and therefore the Ultrabook category in general,
is not down for the count yet,
because our final category is portability.
As I alluded to before, the G703 has terrible battery life.
Like, you could put the largest battery
allowed in it,
and it would still barely have juice for over an hour.
As for the Razer Blade, well, it does a bit better,
but even if you're just watching YouTube videos
or using Excel,
you're still looking at around four hours of battery life max,
not to mention that both of those laptops
are heavier than I'd like to carry around with me all day.
The Stealth, on the other hand, is easy to cart around
and has a battery that lasts over eight hours
with light to moderate use.
That is over double the Blade and almost eight times,
and that's a lot of battery.
So if you're looking for a laptop that's as heavy
as you're looking to carry around,
then you're gonna need more than one.
I'm gonna go with the G703.
And this is where things kind of get a little bit tricky.
So we set out to determine which one
was the best gaming laptop,
but you could make a pretty strong argument
for the clear winner being having a gaming desktop at home
and a thin and light for when you're traveling.
With that said, for people that travel a lot
or are on shift work, or are truckers,
So for me personally, a big part of me is leaning towards the external GPU because I hate carting around a gaming laptop a lot and probably 80 to 90% of what I use my notebook for is kind of writing scripts on the go.
So that gives me the flexibility to do what I need to do during the day without running out of battery, but still be able to have the full experience when I'm able to get to a desk.
With that said, it's just hard to recommend to most people because first, you need a notebook with a Thunderbolt 3 X4 port, then you need to buy an expensive enclosure, then you need to get a GPU knowing that there isn't going to be enough bandwidth over Thunderbolt to take full advantage of it.
Meaning in the end, you have paid top dollar for a middle-of-the-road gaming experience.
So for the time being, I'm going to keep rocking this.
But we'll have to let you guys decide, and let us know in the comments below, who do you think ultimately won the game off?
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