We GOT the Chinese Game Console!! - Subor Z+ Early Review
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2019-05-06
·
2,296 words · ~11 min read
0:00
Okay, do I have better weapons?
0:03
Like, oh my God, look at all this.
0:05
These are, they're homing, they're homing.
0:07
You have to shoot them down.
0:08
You know, when you're gaming at, you know, 4K resolution,
0:12
it's easy to forget that under the hood
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of Microsoft's most powerful Xbox One
0:18
is little more than a low power AMD Jaguar processor
0:23
and an aging Polaris based integrated graphics card.
0:26
Oh, and did I mention the mechanical hard drive?
0:28
See, the truth is if the Xbox One X ran standard Windows
0:33
with standard Windows games, it would be dog slow.
0:38
But the other thing that's easy to forget
0:40
is that all of those parts in it
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are fundamentally standard PC components.
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So what would prevent someone
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from building a faster game console?
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Oh, apparently nothing.
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This is the SUBOR ZBOX.
0:59
A game console from China that we got our hands on.
1:05
Let's, let's take this baby for a spin, shall we?
1:10
Right after I tell you guys about GlassWire.
1:13
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1:35
The Zed Plus game console was built by the
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Shanghai branch of a little company
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called Zongshan SUBOR Advanced Technology.
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I'm sure I butchered that, so I'll be referring to them
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as SUBOR from here on out.
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And the packaging is relatively unassuming.
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In fact, you might be forgiven for thinking
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that it's for like a laptop rather than for a game console,
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which might actually be a hint at what's to come.
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Then on the inside, we've got the console itself,
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a manual that is entirely in Chinese, which makes sense.
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This is intended for the Chinese market.
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And a little box off to the side here
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that contains a stand, an HDMI cable,
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and then a standard C13 PC power cord.
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Let's go ahead and get the gaming machine out of this.
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Which you guys paid good money to see.
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This is what you guys.
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So it's got a very console-like appearance,
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as you'd probably expect,
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with this kind of weird angular cutout
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that might go great with your media console,
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but didn't go particularly well with your PC.
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But it did go particularly well with mine.
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Ignoring that then,
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we've got two USB 2.0 Type-A ports on the front,
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and then four USB 3.0 ports around the back,
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along with Ethernet.
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Twin HDMI ports, though both of these are outputs.
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So there's no fancy cable box pass-through
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or anything like that.
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And three and a half millimeter jacks with audio,
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along with a SPDIF connector.
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On the bottom, there's this little latch right here,
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and this is cool.
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It reveals
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two two and a half inch drive bays.
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So they're secured by standard Phillips screws,
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which is nice,
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and occupied by default by a one terabyte Toshiba hard drive,
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which means that this thing is mostly looking pretty good
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for storage expansion.
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Should we fire it up and see what it looks like in action?
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So this is a pretty bog-standard Windows install.
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The only thing that really stands out about it
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out of the box is that everything that you see
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in the installed programs is stuff that we put on it.
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It's extremely clean.
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The only pre-installed application is this,
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what's this thing called again?
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Here we go, Ruyi Assist,
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which tells you your CPU temps down there.
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We're at 50 degrees.
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It's not amazing for idle.
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Then you can switch to low power mode,
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and then there's a grayed out switch to console mode.
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More on that later.
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So this is interesting.
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Eight gigs of SG RAM.
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So this is actually graphics memory.
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Slots used eight out of eight.
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So I guess this is eight chips,
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and then they've got two gigs of it
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that is hardware reserved, presumably for graphics.
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And then our CPU.
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Oh, wow.
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Windows doesn't know what the crap that is.
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2.99 gigahertz, four cores, eight threads.
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So this is Ryzen based,
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but that part number is basically indecipherable.
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Fascinating.
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Maybe we can get some more hints
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out of CPU-Z and or AIDA64 here.
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So yeah, there, confirmation.
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This is Ryzen with SMT, and then graphics.
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Oh, so we've got Vega-based graphics,
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but basically no actual specs for it here.
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So a quick Google search for the part number 15FF
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that we found in CPU-Z shows us that it might be a 28,
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but it's not.
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It's a 28-CU APU.
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So that would put it at about two thirds
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of the raw performance of the GPU in the Xbox One X.
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One weird thing though,
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is all the news we can find about it
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talks about two gigs of HBM2 RAM, like built into it,
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but we already know from Task Manager
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that the one in this system is going to be a little hamstrung
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because it's sharing GDDR5 memory instead.
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The takeaway though, is that this is,
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is basically a PC running basically Windows.
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Like there are some interesting bits here,
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and that's that the pre-installed operating system
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is actually Windows 10 Enterprise long-term support branch.
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So the particular build we're running here
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is actually from 2016,
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but then with current security updates.
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There is more to it though.
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Where is this button?
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Here we go.
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Then just a regular old Windows 10 install.
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Unfortunately though, see this guy right here.
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Half of our boot drive is actually partitioned
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into this BitLocker encrypted partition here.
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So that is going to be
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SUBOR's specially modified IOT edition of Windows,
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but it's not ready for prime time yet.
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SUBOR says that that platform will launch in Q1 2019
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with a slew of demands,
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with a slew of demands,
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with a slew of demands,
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with a slew of demands,
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and then a few months later,
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they've actually made a list of FOR難
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for its current Chao Jahr famous
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Domestically-produced games as exclusives for their console.
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So let me know in the comments
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if you guys wanna see like
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a Let's Play update with some Chinese games next year.
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A Let's Play update with some Chinese games next year.
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For now though,
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even though we can't actually try that aspect of it,
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we can discuss why SUBOR would bother
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with this console mode thing
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instead of just leaving it running regular Windows.
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has eight gigs of RAM that's shared
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between the CPU and GPU, just like an Xbox One.
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And it's even, as we mentioned before,
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GDDR5, just like an Xbox One.
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That means that Windows is eating a significant chunk
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of available memory,
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and that makes for a less than ideal experience
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when you're trying to run big AAA titles,
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hence the need for a slimmed down IoT version of Windows.
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The other less obvious reason is DRM.
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Subor says that they're able to use their customized OS
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to enable a form of DRM that's not possible
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under standard Windows,
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which they say is required to attract
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some of the exclusive titles
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that they've got lined up for the platform.
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Now, as much as DRM is a dirty word,
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they're positioning themselves as an early pioneer
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for dedicated gaming platforms in China,
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and they feel that they need to do everything they can
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to build developer confidence.
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So this entire process
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and this entire product honestly might look highly unnecessary
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to folks in regions with established console markets,
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but you might not realize that home game consoles
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were actually banned entirely in China
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way back in the year 2000
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because of fears of how they could affect
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childhood development.
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And the traditional companies that you might think of,
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like Nintendo, have struggled to find a strong foothold
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in China even with the easing of restrictions back
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in 2015.
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So then, with Mainland China nearly 100% reliant on PCs
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for non-mobile gaming,
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and the console market pretty much non-existent,
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Subor is trying to combine a console with a PC
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to give us the Z Plus that we have right now.
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It'll be a genius move if it works.
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So let's test it out and see just how well it works,
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at least today,
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by comparing its performance,
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against a low-end Ryzen desktop
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with a roughly comparable graphics card.
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Well, right out of the gate,
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it seems as though having just two gigs of memory
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set aside for the GPU is gonna cause us to run out of RAM
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during complex scenes,
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like in Shadow of the Tomb Raider's GPU-heavy forest scene,
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despite the graphics core itself
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having more than enough horsepower to keep up.
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And we know it has more than enough horsepower
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because we can actually drop the in-game settings
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a little bit,
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and we can increase the resolution significantly.
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This confirms that we're not running
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into some kind of a bandwidth problem here,
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we are just running out of VRAM.
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So the sweet spot seems to be medium details
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at about 1440p.
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The main takeaway, though, really,
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is that the system's not quite stable,
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and we ran into problems particularly in DirectX 12.
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So it's clear to us that the hardware has the power,
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and that with a more optimized driver and OS, along with,
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a bit of developer effort,
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this experience could be a lot better.
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More physical memory would certainly go a long way, too.
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For now, though, we can only talk about what we can measure.
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And when we look at the numbers,
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the Z Plus, in spite of its faster CPU,
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just cannot match the Xbox One X
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in terms of either speed or visual quality in most titles.
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And it couldn't even break past the performance of our,
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Holiday PC Buyer's Guide, $500 system.
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And that's a problem when you're closer to $620 to $725
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with tax.
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Now, moving on,
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Subor is marketing this thing as also a PC.
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So we fired up some productivity benchmarks.
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Compared again to our Holiday Gaming PC at $500,
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we are actually looking at inferior
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single-threaded performance,
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but superior multi-threaded performance
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as a result of,
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not only the addition of SMT,
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so that's eight threads to go along with our four cores,
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but also the use of faster GDDR5 memory.
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This is especially apparent
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when we look at the relatively large disparity
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in handbrake encoding performance.
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These tests also revealed
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that our GPU is being held back
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in more ways than we thought by poor driver optimization.
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Its performance is all over the map.
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Look at how it trounces even the GTX 1060
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in most of Luxmark,
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then takes losses in Blender and V-Ray.
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Overall, the Z Plus performs pretty admirably
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with the biggest bug bears being its GPU performance
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and lack of dynamic memory allocation.
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Now the graphics performance
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is going to be harder to overcome
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since it's just flat out a weaker chip
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than you'd find in a top tier gaming console even today.
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But its CPU performance is superior
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and the new OS could give the Z Plus,
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the ability to cut back GPU memory
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during CPU intensive tasks and vice versa,
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improving performance in both once the new software arrives.
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With all this in mind,
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this type of chip is almost certainly
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what's going to make up the entry level
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of a new breed of console.
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And in spite of the Z Plus's incomplete state
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and poor Windows gaming performance,
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it's a very big market they're going after
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with next to nothing in terms of direct competitors.
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So with the right software improvements
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and developer relationships,
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they could be onto something,
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but I don't expect them to make any headway
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into the North American, European,
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or Japanese markets anytime soon.
12:48
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