Gadgetory

oh that could have been incredibly bad I totally just stepped on this Thunderbolt cable I still plugged in and slightly bent it that's okay you want to fake the video hey guys saw sting thin and light laptops like this Dell X just thirteen are great but the graphics are never going to be the strong suit that's where this comes in this is the razor core X and it is the latest external GPU enclosure from Razer now external graphics are nothing new I recently did a video on an Alienware laptop from 2014 that did have external graphics as an option and more recently we did a little gaming on a Mac comparison where we use the gigabyte gaming box to be able to actually play decent games over a Thunderbolt 3 interface on a macbook the only issue is that doing external graphics over Thunderbolt 3 can get pricey very very quickly so first of all you're going to need a computer with a Thunderbolt 3 port ideally you're going to have one that does have a full four lanes of PCIe something that's not always going to be advertised particularly well by the manufacturer next you're going to need an enclosure such as the core X although there are of course other options but one of the most expensive parts is always going to be your GPU put this all together and well it could be a nice setup it can get really expensive very quickly Neuticles to the original razor core which is still going to be on sale by the way you're going to be getting a lot of extra features including USB ports Ethernet as well as a second Thunderbolt out but the issue is price 500 ollars this can be as expensive as a lot of really high-end GPUs that you would normally pick up which is where the Razer cortex comes in well you're going to be losing most of those features most importantly you can still fit a full sized graphics card inside and it's going to be a full two hundred dollars less put the 4x side by side with the original razor core as well as the tiny little gigabyte gaming box and you'll see that it is uh well it's a little bit large however that is going to be for a reason it is a very generic looking black box so it is still going to be made out of aluminum but you're not going to have any of the bells and whistles of the core including stuff like chroma RGB lighting take a look around back and you'll see it's about as simple as it gets so you're going to find a single Thunderbolt 3 port as well as your power connector whoever use the coolest mechanism which is about as easy as it gets to open up you'll see why this guy is so big it does not support a full triple slot graphics card and that's not going to be super common and however some cards especially the higher-end one with giant coolers we'll need a little bit of extra space and the corex does provide you're also going to find the upgraded power supply so we now have a 600 watt unit as opposed to the 500 watt in the previous core and it's also not going to be a full ATX power supply that's going to be mostly useful if you ever want to upgrade it in the future although with 600 watts of capacity that means that the graphics card itself is going to be able to get 500 watts and there's going to be a full hundred watts available for USBC power delivery to your laptop so it should be good enough for a while but there is that flexibility as well as you're also going to find a 120 millimeter fan for cooling installing a graphics card is about as simple as it gets so what you do is open up your enclosure and just drop it right into place just like you would with a standard desktop and it should clip end so for power you do have a pair of six plus two pin connectors the cable management out of the box is a little bit tight so I had to undo that just to get a little bit more slack but you just have to plug these guys in and then if I can actually get it into place uh hmm use a little screw to make sure the whole thing doesn't come flying out of the slot then all you do is take the entire assembly line up into the enclosure slide it into place pop the handle and you're gonna be good for some external graphics action now I am using Vegas 64 for this demo but you can use the vast majority of current AMD and NVIDIA graphics cards Meucci keep in mind that you're going to be using this on Mac which is now supported you are going to be needing to use an AMD graphics card if you want official support nvidia cards will work but it worked choirs just a little bit more work from you it's pretty straightforward just take the fender ball three cable and plug it into your laptop and then you will want to use an external monitor so I'm just gonna hook up the DisplayPort cable to the back of our graphics card you actually don't have to do this but it will give you much better gaming performance when you're not having to fight between the graphics card sending video back and forth to the internal laptop display something like this going out over DisplayPort is going to give you much better performance but with that we have our full Thunderbolt 3 setup ready to game here when it comes to gaming of course the graphics card and the actual CPU is inside your laptop is going to make a huge difference so something like Vegas 64 is honestly a little bit overkill but we are still going to see a huge huge performance gain over playing on integrated graphics so using the Vegas 64 as well as the core i7 8550 you that's going to be inside this guy we're getting on full epic settings of 1080 around 70 to 80 frames per second so you're always going to be giving up some performance when you're using Thunderbolt 3 as opposed to an actual dedicated solution but if you put it side-by-side with something like integrated graphics as both - like 720p on like low settings 30 frames this at full epic settings is just a totally different looking game although one of the slight downsides to most edible enclosures is that the Thunderbolt 3 cables have to be fairly small which means that I'm getting like cooked right now by the graphics card but I guess I could just do that so again you will definitely want to use an external display so right now we're actually recording it using an HDMI capture card so we're not affecting the performance but this is gonna be super playable so frame rates jumping around a little bit that is generally in the 70 to 80 frames per second range know why I didn't have anything yet why let's try fortnight round 2 which of course is the game that I'm playing is that somehow you're watching this video without knowing that game fortnight exists no because of course you do have to have a fundable 3 port it does mean the genetics Act we're going to be using this with a super old-school laptop but I actually would recommend either an eighth gen Core i5 or i7 now the previous dual cores will be fine but when you have a full quad-core CPU it actually does make a pretty big difference to gaming performance next up we have pub G this is another game there's absolutely no problem to run with something as high-end as a Vegas 64 card at 1080p with everything maxed out we're averaging in the 70 to 80 frames per second range it's really cool when you consider that with a single Thunderbolt 3 port we're turning a thin and light ultrabook into a proper gaming PC now sure you're gonna need some other stuff like a monitor and a mouse although technically but it makes you came a lot better but it's so cool people have a small thin and light laptop that you can carry around all day have no problems with and then when you get home just to hook it up and turn it into a full dedicated gaming PC and of course the reason core is also going to be supported on Mac OS so support is a little bit odd right now mostly because a lot of games aren't going to be particularly well optimised on the Mac so we tried fortnight it didn't really want to load yeah however rocket League is fearing a bit better so on full maxed out settings were somewhere around 70 frames per second but we're doing this weird text thing you can game on the Mac but not super well although you won't know more about that we did an entire video on why gaming on a Mac is a questionable idea but I mean the Razer core does work and it's mostly just on software to actually support it if $300 the raise of cortex actually is going to be pretty reasonably priced as far as these Thunderbolt 3 enclosures go I guess you do need a little bit of extra hardware but if you do have a Thunderbolt 3 equipped Mac or especially an ultrabook it's a great way of turning it into a pretty decent gaming laptop