Venom is back. Last time around with the BlackBook 15, I told them I loved the
performance and loved the aluminum chassis, but I felt like the price was
pretty expensive. I also confessed that
13 to 14 in is my ideal size and that no
15-in really had a fair shot at stealing
my heart. So, now they've come back swinging with the BlackBook 13, which
targets a more aggressive price point and looks, at least on the surface, like
an absolute stunner. Let's see how it fares.
Cooler Master's new Master Keys ProL and Pro S keyboards provide 16.7 million
color RGB backlighting, genuine Cherry MX switches, and an industryleading ARM
Cortex processor. Learn more in the link in the video description. Now, I could
say that zero means something like zero compromises or so thin and light as to
feel like you're carrying nothing. But
based on that, I know that the Venom guys are a bunch of gamers with a focus
on selling gaming laptops. I suspect it means zero dedicated graphics card. So
the zero, whether it carries Intel's Ultrabook certification sticker or not,
is pretty much an Ultrabook. Sorry gamers. With that said, it's clearly a
better than average Ultrabook from the outset. It's available in a variety of
configurations all the way down to a very attractive
$999 model with a Core i5 and a 120 gig
SSD OS drive with a 500 gig hard drive
all the way up to the topofthe-line
$2500 midnight edition with a Core
i76500U 8 gigs of RAM a top-of-the-line
512 gig Samsung 950 Pro M.2 2 PCI
Expressbased SSD and a 2 terbte Samsung
850 EVO SATA SSD for storage. It's got
an Intel 8260 2x2 AC wireless card that
managed over 20 megabytes per second sustained transfers in my tests. It's
got Windows 10 Pro and a healthy 45watth
lithium ion battery. It features an all
aluminum chassis design with perhaps a greater propensity for picking up greasy
fingerprints and a little bit more flex
than I'd like. Not to mention that the hinge isn't the premium one finger
style, but it makes up for at least some of all of that by being crazy light,
right around 1.4 kilos or 3 lb. Overall,
I'd say the device feels pretty darn good. IO is a pretty good mix with a
single type-C port and a headphone jack
and nothing else. Sorry, I was thinking of the MacBook. That's right. No, it's
got power in a USB 2.0 port and a
headphone microphone combo jack on the left with a USB 3.0 port, an HDMI port,
a type C 5 GB USB 3.0 port, not
Thunderbolt unfortunately, and an SD card reader on the right. I love the SD
card reader. I mean, the number of times I have needed one of those in the field,
let me tell you, not good. Flipping this puppy open reveals something that may
feel like a compromise to some, but that I don't actually mind. I actually
ordered my customuilt XPS15 with a 1080p
display because I don't feel like at this size the higher DPI makes enough of
a difference to justify the battery life that I'm giving up. And apparently Venom
agrees because every model of BlackBook
130 is equipped with a 1080p IPS
display. But while the resolution spec
of this panel is not that impressive in
other ways, it's among the best that I've seen. The blacks are midnight black
and there is astonishingly little
backlight bleed even though Venom has the guts to ship it with a black desktop
background. As a communications device, the 130 is a bit of a mixed bag. On the
one hand, the microphone actually sounds pretty good, but on the other, the one
megapixel camera doesn't perform particularly well in either back lit
or even front lit scenarios with the
subject ending up quite washed out and pale looking. So, while the speakers are
okay, about all you'd expect for a notebook this size, making it fine as a
casual movie watching device on the couch, it is not ideal for regular video
conferencing. The keyboard is what I would characterize as pretty good. The
key caps wobble more than I'd like on a truly premium device, and the stroke
action is a little bit mushy. But for me, there are really more important
things on a thin and light. The adjustable backlight is great, and the
130 delivers on typing speed and accuracy, as well as the overall layout.
The arrow keys have that annoying up down combo close together thing that I
think Apple started. But it's otherwise bog standard with
function modifiers available for pretty much anything that I would need to do,
including one to disable the touchpad.
Which leads us to that, I guess. The touchpad has some high points and also
some low points. From a things that I like perspective, it's got the full
range of gesture controls which can be set up within the Elant control panel.
It's got a satisfying pad click with no discrete buttons, and it does a pretty
darn good job of rejecting both palms and my click finger when I'm operating
it two-handed. But it comes with what is
for me a bit of an annoying flaw. Hopefully, one that can be addressed
with a driver tweak or something along those lines. There's a for me
perceptible lag between moving my finger across the trackpad and seeing my
actions on the screen. This is true with the notebook plugged in or running off
battery. And I even went as far as to reinstall Windows using the included 16
gig USB drive, which is nice to have by the way. I prefer that to a recovery
partition as an enthusiast, which resolved this issue when I encountered
it on the Blade 14 2015. Moving on,
though, there is more good stuff. The bundled software package is very
Spartan. Basically, some alternate browsers and not much else. Norton is on
there, but it's a full year subscription rather than a 30-day subsidized trial.
So, I'll give that a a neutral rating, leaving really only a few things to talk
about in the part of this video where I would normally talk about gaming
performance. Haha. Acoustics are better
than I expected with the 130 managing to run fanless quite frequently, even with
the i7 installed. So, you'll do better with an i5 skew. And while the battery
takes over four hours to charge, which is agonizing when you're waiting around
for it to run a battery life benchmark, the good news is that in PC Mark 8's
productivity suite, it managed to run for well over 3 hours continuously,
which is a pretty darn solid score. Leading us finally to the conclusion. In
a market that did not contain the Razer
Blade Stealth, the BlackBook Zero would be a savior to folks who wanted a great
Ultrabook experience without dealing with the hassle of running Windows on a
MacBook Air. There are some minor quirks. In the real world, it's a less
obvious choice, but not an entirely invalid one. While the Blade Stealth
features an undeniably stronger, thinner
industrial design, Thunderbolt, an RGB
backlit keyboard, and a higher resolution display across all SKUs. Its
thinner fans will work harder to control CPU thermals. And it's much less
configurable spec-wise with a maximum of 8 gigs of RAM soldered to the main board
and only the M.2 drive being upgradable.
The BlackBook 130, by contrast, and this
one hits pretty hard for heavy Google Chrome Tab users like myself, manages to
cram the same capacity battery, a 2 and 1/2 in drive bay, which is pretty nice
if your Ultrabook is your primary machine, as it is for so many people
these days, and a so dim memory socket
into its only marginally thicker shell. And while Venom doesn't advertise the
capability of the 130 to run a single 16
gig DDR3L sodium, I tried it with a 1333
MHz intelligent memory branded stick that I had lying around and it worked
perfectly. That right there is a huge
win from my perspective on what is already a very compelling little
product, provided that they can quickly sort out the touchpad lag. So, thanks
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