The ULTIMATE Travel Gaming Setup - LTT Classic
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2018-05-06
·
1,696 words · ~8 min read
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so i am on my fourth international trip in the last like
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three and a half weeks i've been all over the place uh new york two or
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three times la and now finally
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i am in beautiful paris
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so it's night time and i was thinking to myself i could go out and i could
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see the sights enjoy the night life or
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i could show you guys something that i whipped up that i call
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the ultimate travel gaming setup
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okay so i know what you guys are thinking
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that's just a razor blade stealth with a mouse pad a mouse an
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international adapter and a power brick
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there's nothing ultimate gaming and there's nothing special about it but
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i do have a piece
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that is special and this was actually kind of inspired by my upcoming review
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of the razer blade stealth because as you guys probably know if
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you've seen any coverage of a previous blade stealth one of the big
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selling points for razer for this device is its compatibility with their razer
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core external graphics card enclosure but
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i don't think most people are going to buy that kind of thing so i wanted to review the device
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standalone but that doesn't mean that i wanted to ignore the capabilities
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however as you guys have probably noticed this
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is not a razer blade core this is the
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secret sauce that actually makes this
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travel gaming setup more possible because the core or core v2 now
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i guess is really designed to be left at home so you take your notebook around
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with you you get home you plug in your Thunderbolt cable and boom you've got a
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full desktop grade graphics experience this guy this is the aorus gtx 1080
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gaming box and it's actually available with a variety of different gpus
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pre-installed in it is so small and
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compact that you could be reasonably expected to travel around with it
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so it enables a completely
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different use case than the razer core which is actually pretty bulky not to
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mention it does not come with a handy dandy little travel case
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so razer doesn't really advertise this
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but their blade stealth and actually their blade for that matter i've tested
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them with a variety of different external Thunderbolt and external GPU
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enclosures and i've actually found that while they don't guarantee
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interoperability between their notebooks and their GPU enclosures and third-party
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accessories it's actually been pretty good so your
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mileage may vary in terms of which external box you use but
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i wouldn't necessarily feel like you have to buy the razer one and that's a
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good thing because razer i mean i love you guys and all that but
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you guys charge a freaking lot for your external GPU box
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the pricing on this one puts it closer to
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if you account for that it comes with a gtx 1080 inside and that those obviously
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have a cost this guy comes to about 200
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only compared to the razer core v2
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at about 500
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so it doesn't come with this fancy orange cable mod cable that was uh that
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was actually something that i added so on the one side you've got a really
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large fan that is completely dedicated like all the way from here to here to
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here to here to this mini gtx 1080
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graphics card on the front you've just got a
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aorus logo on this side you've got a built-in power supply a couple of
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cooling fans that are bringing fresh air in over here and then around back you
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find the business end so there's a standard PCIe 16x graphics card so
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feasibly you could actually swap this out in the future if you could find
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something that would fit then you've got some included i o so you've got a fast
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charging usb 3 three more usb 3s and then the Thunderbolt that you need in
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order to power the GPU so it doesn't have the same i o as the core and
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honestly i'll tell you guys it's been a little bit more finicky at this stage
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than the razer core has requiring a reboot sometimes in order to be detected
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but overall the experience has been pretty decent
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so we just take our Thunderbolt 3 cable
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plug that bad boy in and
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what's cool about this is that we actually don't even need
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the blade stealth's included power adapter anymore so this takes the place
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of your laptop power adapter okay so let's fire it up
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the gaming box actually turns on automatically
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once you plug in Thunderbolt and power up your machine i just need to give my
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setup a second to detect my mouse and all that good stuff
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getting a couple issues with usb connectivity this is something that i've
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seen with this particular box before
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it doesn't affect my use case right now but it is something to maybe keep an eye
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out for before you go ahead and jump on this exact setup but but overall this is
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about the direction we're heading in terms of
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mobile gaming like look how compact and
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easy to travel with this whole setup is
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okay now before i fire up the game there's one quick thing i want to check
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just i want to make sure that this hand shook properly so yes gtx 1080 shows up
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here and the NVIDIA control panel shows up so
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we should be good to go now i just want to
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configure my options here now normally playing on a laptop even a gaming laptop
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you'd be setting up like tier options but not today we're going to
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crank it to 3200 by 1800 fxaa and we're
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turning the graphics to very high with motion blur off now
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to be clear the best gaming experience on these
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external boxes is had with an external monitor because there's only so much
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bandwidth in this Thunderbolt connection there's a PCIe 4x connection and then
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some protocol overhead so when you have to communicate from the system to the
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graphics card in order to actually render the game then that's a lot of
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bandwidth and then when you have to send the graphics cards display output data
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instead of actually hooking up an HDMI or displayport connection here when you
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have to send it in i think it's called loopback mode back to the laptop's
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display then you end up hurting yourself because you're using some of your
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bandwidth up for that so you can expect to take anywhere from a 10 to a 20
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performance hit is this not incredible like yeah we're only running at
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38 to 42 FPS so it's not the smoothest
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gaming experience of all time but like i'm being pretty unfair to it like we're
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running at 3 800 by 1600 i don't have to
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do that on a 13.3 inch display so let's
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say we drop it to 1920x1080 let's have a look at what
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performance looks like there
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there it is my friends ultra
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details 65 to 70 FPS gaming
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in a reasonably demanding game on a
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laptop okay so i know that external GPU boxes
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aren't new and the razer blade stealth isn't particularly new obviously
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carrying a mouse around with you when you travel isn't new but the reason that
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i'm bringing this up now as opposed to before is just because a few things
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have all come together and made this sort of this what's been a pipe dream of
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mine for the future start to look like it's a lot closer maybe even a reality
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today so number one is that these external GPU boxes are getting both
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smaller and cheaper
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that's awesome number two is that notebooks these
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actually legitimately thin and light notebooks with great battery life i use
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this on a plane for over six hours with a couple of battery tweaks on my way
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here finally have quad-core processors
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because that was the issue a lot of modern games are finally getting to the
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point where they can actually use more than just a couple of CPU cores so even
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though razer's been talking about this use case for well since the blade
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stealth launched it never made any sense to me before but check this out so you
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can see here the CPU is turboing up as high as like 3.6 gigahertz and change to
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keep the CPU from being a bottleneck and this is pretty cool here uh back up a
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little bit i'm going to lean in with my microphone which i'm wearing
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this whole setup is quiet so in some ways this is
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actually better for my purposes than a gaming laptop
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with everything integrated because now i can upgrade my super portable notebook
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or my GPU separately as my needs change and the
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pricing is not that far off especially
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when you consider that like this graphics card is non-proprietary so it
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could just be moved to like a friend's desktop or resold when you need a new
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GPU like ah this is totally
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game changing so thanks guys for checking out my video
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on the ultimate travel gaming setup if you disliked it
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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
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to buy the stuff we featured i'll try and throw links in the video description
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for that this is actually available with a number of different gpus i'm not sure if i
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mentioned that before also down there is our merch store and our community forum
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so you should totally join that