We RECOMMEND Walmart's gaming laptop!!
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2019-05-06
·
3,651 words · ~18 min read
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now my mama told me a lot of things growing up she said stand up straight if
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you have nothing nice to say don't say nothing at all and
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never kick them while they're down but uh
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i don't see my mama do you and that is why today's video
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is going to be about walmart's overpowered
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15.6 inch gaming laptop could it
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possibly be as bad as their desktop
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well there's only one way to find out isn't there
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and this video is sponsored by elgato the stream deck mini has six fully
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customizable lcd buttons with easy to use programming software check it out at
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amazon or newegg at the link below
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all right so my idea is we crack the box open see you know if it comes with
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anything epic overpowered maybe can we do this pose
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let's do this like this okay hold on hold on i gotta get serious
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i'm smiling okay okay hold on
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sorry what i can't do it so spec wise we're
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looking at a core i7 8750h of the six core processor gtx 1060 six gigs 16 gigs
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of RAM 256 gig SSD one terabyte hard
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drive 144 hertz 1080p display RGB
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backlit mechanical keyboard and Windows 10. i mean
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on paper like specifically this paper right here this ticks
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pretty much all the boxes with the only issue being the price so
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we ordered this actually at around the same time that we ordered our desktop
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but it didn't arrive until quite recently because they screwed up our
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order and when we went to pick it up the laptop just wasn't there with our order
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and it was only because we checked before we left the store we did in-store
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pickup that we were able to point out that hey
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the 1400 laptop we ordered ain't here
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dog so it comes with an external power brick that's kind of big but also not
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too thick so i guess that's nice a quick start guide
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a connect ac adapter's jack into other
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more different jack b the display panel can be opened to a
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wide range of angles for optimal viewing
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c press the power button
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alright so this laptop actually arrived
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in c-sprep mode and there was no bloatware installed
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whatsoever same as with the desktop really so they've got their
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control center but that's it that is the most hilarious animation
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look at it about the game
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what the hell
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who thinks that's a good idea i mean it's the same kind of thing you'd have
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with a normal program they just it doesn't have like an acceleration
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curve it's just like for those who don't know it's called
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disruptive innovation okay so you just got disrupted so in the op control
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center you can turn on and off your led light bar which is right here it's RGB
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you can turn on and off your keyboard backlight you can
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you can turn off the internal display oh crap now what you can do a bunch of
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different keyboard effects you can alter your fan settings so office mode or
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gaming mode it was in gaming mode by default there's also a turbo mode whoa
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you know as far as system bloat goes
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this is really not bad however
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as not bad as it might be this
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is just a skin what is this
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what are they doing there's no way that that is not
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programmed in so what was what was the intent here disruptive innovation i told
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you
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oh um
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oh peel jacketed one can say that your peel
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was not too appealing one can but one
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shouldn't okay what does this mean tap tap twice
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hey there's a little light in the touchpad
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so when you tap this corner twice it enables or disables the touchpad so
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to walmart's credit here there actually are a fair number of features you know
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whether you buy into the RGB hype or not
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that are specifically tailored to gamers
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as for the overall sort of build quality of the machine i would describe it just
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from sort of a fit and finish standpoint here
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as average at best but certainly not the
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worst thing i've ever seen and spec wise the 144 hertz display is
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not immediately disappointing to me not super
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bright or anything but it's not super dim either
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like no okay stop that hey stop that
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so moving stuff around quickly on screen there's pretty good clarity even during
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fast movements so yeah it's not a crt or anything but
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for an ips panel that's not bad
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what do you think of the mechanical keyboard it oh it has a mechanical keyboard
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according to the specs oh
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oh
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uh oh that's stupid
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so the op control center is not tied into the keyboard brightness adjustment
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over here so if you turn it off oh man that is so cringe
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to see if it's actually mechanical we actually pried one of the key caps off
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here and yeah it does appear to be so we've got our
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metal contact piece here that seems to be
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what makes the key itself actuate so it actually does actuate before
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it bottoms out but the issue is that it's almost like
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they implemented this feature without a clear understanding of
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why or what it is about mechanical keyboards that makes them good for
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gaming because they've got kind of a very heavy
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feel towards the top of the key press and then they're quite mushy after that
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so there's no real clear advantage over just a short travel
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scissor switch for example how do you feel about the numpad i think
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it's a little too cramped so i like that they're using all the
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space that they have here for keyboard like they're going almost edge to edge
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keyboard which is nice like the keys are quite big
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um but i i kind of questioned the wisdom actually not just to this one but of our
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other contestants as well of including a numpad
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on a gaming laptop like what do you plan like a counting simulator like
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even line okay that's what i said
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so for i o we've got usb 2 Ethernet
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audio dedicated microphone jack that's kind of nice to see over here we've got
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two usb 3s an sd card reader and then oh
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wow that's not bad a usb type c which is
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over with our display outputs HDMI and then too many display ports that i guess
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is because they figure people will use it as a display out more than as
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just a usb port that's sort of an interesting thought
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and actually a lot of ventilation heat sinks here here here and here
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and then basically just wide open mesh across the
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bottom but it still actually has a reasonable amount of structural rigidity
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down here it's not bad should we crack it open well assuming we can put the
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thing back together should be fine
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uh do we have a parts tray or anything that we can kind of use as a
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proxy or give a short
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so i thought we were ready to go but they've got a warranty void if
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removed sticker
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so it uses a similar approach to the lg gram now with lg they were saving weight
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by using a main board and then daughter
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boards with these ribbon cables connecting them
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but uh whether it was a cost or a weight savings they've ended up with a really
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interesting internal layout so without increasing the thickness of the device
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it makes extra room for higher profile like thicker cooling fans and heat sinks
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and stuff like that because they're not fighting with the pcb for space and then
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we get a similar effect over here for m.2 drive now it should be noted that
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this is not an NVMe SSD so this is just
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a regular SATA SSD just in an m.2 form
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factor you can see though if you wanted you could put a PCIe one here or you
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could put a second PCIe one here but not another SATA m.2 that's why you got to
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watch out for this compatibility they could have just expanded the battery
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capacity because this is pretty kinksy you know and that
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is actually a perfect segue into how exactly it is that walmart best known
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for good prices on you know bathroom paper i
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got into the laptop manufacturing business i thought and i would have i
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would have put money on it that what they had done was rebranded a laptop
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unit from the company clevo who is well known for supplying other brands with
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their manufactured laptops but i was wrong
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so to whom do we owe the pleasure of uh
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inspecting this laptop while i'm putting it back together here this is the odm
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known as tongfeng tong i've never even heard of them neither have i up until
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what two days ago and apparently
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turkish reseller monster sells
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laptops based on this exact
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bare bone which is known as gamma kilo5 charlie noob 6's
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xavier am i supposed to have heard of that like is that supposed to add
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credibility or well monster does the fact that origin pc used the same see i
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had thought that origen just used clavo like i i thought everyone just used cleveo to
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be perfectly honest i wasn't aware of these guys at all like sagar
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eurocom origin i thought it was just all clever
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rebrands but then there's this sorry what are they called again
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company that i've hardly ever heard of i say hardly because i have technically
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heard of them in the last three minutes here so here's the thing this approach
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of basically rebranding what someone else
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has already built has advantages like
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allowing a company like walmart who has no experience whatsoever designing
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computers to just jump right into the market with a
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product that might have some flaws like this keyboard is
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very imperfect but is otherwise balancedly specked and
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very functional the disadvantage is that
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it's hard to differentiate yourself so ivan mentioned that origin pc also sells
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this model can you spec out an identical config to this on origin and how much
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does that cost us bear in mind we paid 1400 us dollars for this now
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based on our previous experience were by you know dealing with the origin pc you
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know the 1500 gaming system that they sent us not guess how much this conflict
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would cost origin pc specked out to be pretty much same as this minus one
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terabyte hard drive okay how much fourteen hundred dollars so identical to
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what walmart was charging except that with origin you get to have
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origins customer service which in secret shopper we have established it
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was at least sample size of two i guess but was
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excellent and you'll have the confidence that down the line if you need help with
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your system origin pc will probably still be in the pc business whereas with
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walmart i'm not sure if that's so clear
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either way origin did not score well in
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value which leads us to the question is origin going aggressive on their
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laptop pricing or is walmart enjoying
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origin like markups
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yes well yeah it has to be one of them yeah
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you've probably been asking yourself why do you have these other laptops on the
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table you'd be asking yourself a good question so when we bought it this was
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fourteen hundred dollars but in the time that it's been sitting on our shelf
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walmart implemented a rollback to only 800 us dollars for this thing so
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over here we've got an 800 nitro 5 from
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acer rocking a core i5 8th gen and a gtx
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1050 ti and then over here representing the 1400
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price point we've got an ASUS rog i think this is a scar or something it's a
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last gen processor but in terms of gaming performance it should be quite
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similar and the GPU is a gtx 1060. so in
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cinebench or whatever it won't perform as well as the current gen version of
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this but in games it should be basically identical so let's go ahead and fire up
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our stress test here and make sure that you know there's not any
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egregious thermal throttling issues or anything like that
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were you expecting this to be clocked like 300 400 megahertz lower than the
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ASUS model according to what i researched in prior
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this laptop does have thermal throttling
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issues it runs hot but we cannot hear it at all
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perhaps it's because you set it into like desktop mode and i didn't business
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center oh i was on battery
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well wait so that means then anyway that ASUS on battery performance profile is
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much more aggressive oh i'm still on battery yeah let's take
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a look how much battery is left because they they were owned for the same time
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uh an hour and 14 minutes 60 remaining
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38 remaining so they're both terrible oh there we go 150 165 FPS
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so they've been running long enough to reach equilibrium now bottom line is
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this guy clocks in anywhere from 80 to 100 megahertz slower than this one
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and the performance cap reason given by GPU-z
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is power for both of them but
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our overpowered laptop hits this cap more frequently they're both around the
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same temperature with this one coming in at around 71 degrees we had to stop it
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for a second here because i had a microphone issue don't worry about it anyway 71 degrees and this one at 74
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with the overpowered being about as loud maybe a touch louder
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let's see how it goes in actual games though so performance wise
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it is already falling behind the ASUS machine but by like
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two to four FPS here and there and it is way ahead not just in terms of
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FPS but also just in terms of playability like with how dark this
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display is it's really hard to make out details in the shadows
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and there goes the power outage that we were sure was probably coming at some
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point today oh boy winds peaking at a hundred kilometers an
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hour blasting trees and knocking down power lines a houseboat adrift after
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being torn from its moorings bc hydro warning that some homes and businesses
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may not get their power back for days
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so i'm gonna make my best attempt at an ivan joke so you might say that
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the laptop was so op that the power went out no i would
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usually eq into like you know this laptop is so full of penis
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so we had to throw out the results we were getting last time because they all
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switched to battery power in the middle of the run we'll be back with you in a moment here so this is interesting our
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similarly priced nitro 5 comes in at just two thirds the average frame rate
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of our overpowered machine and with other significant well
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disadvantages as well including a weaker CPU as well as a worse screen but then
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moving up into the original pricing of our overpowered well it wasn't really
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that competitive because due to the faster clock speed of our GPU over here
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we still ended up with higher frame rates even though this one has an
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inferior CPU um so this one is i think the
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official msrp is actually 1600 but you can find it for about 1400 on amazon
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just to validate what i was saying before we popped out of the game and had
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a look at what core clocks were running at during the benchmark and yes in fact
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the overpowered machine is running at anywhere from 50 to about 80 megahertz
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slower on the GPU in actual games last
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result just came in for deus ex mankind divided and this is interesting so
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average frame rates again
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our 800 machine like true 800 machine is
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way slower than our rolled back 800 machine
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and that one it falls a little bit behind ASUS's
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particularly in the minimum frame rates
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interesting let's do one more game so i'm sitting in the 130 140 FPS range
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what are you sitting at right now 160 150 160. so when we're running into a
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CPU bottleneck we can see here that our core i5 8th gen is actually not that far
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behind so we're running at 1080p and
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all high with 16x anisotropic filtering
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so okay so only about 20 FPS difference
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now let's take our two 1400 gaming laptops man that high refresh rate
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display makes a big difference hey holy
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crap so not only am i lower than last time but the ASUS machine is absolutely
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crushing it it's well over 200 frames
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per second 240 but here let me stand the same spot it's like 80 FPS higher did
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you know this was gonna happen nope so there's clearly
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some power management or
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some kind of profile issue going on here
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so here i'm not going to have uh task manager running in the background let's
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make sure that you don't have extra background crap running
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um how will we analyze isn't it well i just want to know what the frame rate is
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because honestly task manager you think affects things not much but it's a
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little bit i think it can use a couple percent yeah but not the two nor this is
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like tell you what that means both have it yeah fine what's sucking up all my
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memory cs goes using 1.3 only that doesn't even make any sense i know what
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it is no it's not what the hell
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okay well single channel you thought yeah but they're both single channel and
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this one's running faster that's only 2 400 megahertz what is going on here
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okay let's just go ahead and launch the game so let's make sure we're running
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the same settings though okay it's all the same so let's go back
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let's try again oh snowballs
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so i'm back up to like 160 like we had on our first run i just i mean i also
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want to just kind of feel the experience because to be clear
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even if it runs at a lower frame rate than that one it's only got a 144hz display like it's
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so i'm still at 130 140 150-ish 91-80
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damn it i'm getting shot and you're at really okay so why don't we stand here
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and uh smoke this doorway so i'm at 140
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and you're at 170. honestly i think we're ready to draw the conclusion at
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this point compared to another 1400 laptop with
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some of the weirdness that we've encountered i wouldn't take the overpowered with the
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keyboard being honestly the biggest issue for me personally because i do do
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a lot of typing with that said compared
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to an 800 laptop this is crazy because i am about to
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recommend a walmart
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op gaming device because compared to what
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you get for 800 bucks this absolutely
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mops the floor with it both in terms of the features like the 144 hertz display
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and in terms of the performance at anywhere from nearly double to about 50
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percent better so that just happened that just happened
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right now but only because they rolled back the
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pricing so you heard it here first folks get them while they're hot
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and uh then otherwise don't don't get them
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don't get them when they're not hot and on sale
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speaking of hot this video is brought to you by our hot sponsor your favorite
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e-tailer oh yeah memory express whether you're a gamer business owner or anyone
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else who just like needs electronic stuff from time to time memex is the
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place to go in canada if it runs on electricity there is a great chance that
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they've got it in store and with their uber price be guaranteed they'll beat
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the price of any authorized canadian retailer by 10 of the difference both in
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store and online so go check them out at the link in the video description so
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thanks for watching guys if you disliked this video you can hit that button but
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if you liked it hit like get subscribed or maybe consider checking out where to buy the stuff we featured at the link in
21:40
the video description also down there is our merch store merch store oh yeah i
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know you guys usually just like kind of gloss over during this part but but
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these these circuit board shirts that i've been wearing for the last like
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three months you can finally get them merch store what no
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oh no not that one where'd that even come from