Gadgetory

look what I have you know what this is you know what this is I I posted stuff on Instagram Twitter about this I've been talking about this all year it's the VR go backpack from zotac it is finally here look at there's even a retail box look at that I better be able to do that move that guy is doing with with this product otherwise it's otherwise it's false advertising ZOTAC just saying so basically if you guys have no idea what this is it's essentially at its core a gaming desktop PC particularly one that you can throw on your back using this contraption here just basically just some backpack straps that fix this to the back of that I'll show you a little demo on that later but you can wear this on your back for a VR experience and the reason why that's necessary is because with a headset with a VR headset and hmd you've got a big ass tethered cable coming from the back of it that needs to plug into your gaming PC which is you know usually on a desk or somewhere further away from you and that causes a lot of annoyances with your feetsies because that you get tangled up in that cord the cord gets wrapped around you you got to kick it off it's really distracting in game and it brings you out of the whole immersive experience which is what VR is all about so this has been a challenge that vendors have been trying to find a solution for for quite some time ever since VR became a thing and this is so taks first response but the VR go so we're gonna be taking a closer look at it today I'm pretty excited actually I did get to try out the prototype at copy Tech's but I've never tried out the retail version that we have here so should be fun now the MSRP on something like this doesn't come cheap there isn't too much competition in this market as of yet and this is packin some pretty heavy specs I will admit so the MSRP you're going to be looking at is 2000 USD yeah that's that's quite a pretty penny even for the specs that are in here but that said you are getting something very unique you're getting a very unique type of functionality that you really can't find in too many other places so you are sort of paying for that exclusivity of a feature now as far as specs go we've got like I said we're packing some heat here we've got a core i7 skylake platform 6700 T and that's a quad core chip we've also got a gtx 1070 that's a fully fledged desktop GPU no mobile graphics here so that's going to be doing some damage and bear in mind like look look at this the straps are off with the straps off it just looks like a small in fact our gaming PC and that's totally what it is when you take off the strap so even if you're not hugely into VR maybe you've got to be our headset and you want to dabble with it but at the end of the day this can still be used to do some triple-a gaming at you know max settings more or less so that's actually pretty sweet granted you can also go completely cordless if you wanted to not that I don't know why you would unless you were doing they are but you've got a pretty intense battery system here I'm going to get back to that though I'm going to continue on with the specs we've got 16 16 gigs of ram actually give me a second to flip this over and I can show you the internals so here's the backplate that I just removed with five or six little Phillips head screws they came off very easily and that gives us access to our internals here unfortunately we can't see our CPU or GPU they're actually on the other side of the PCB there but we do see our RAM so we've got 2 8 gig sticks these RS o dims ddr4 21 33 megahertz I believe giving us a total of 16 gigs here on the DRAM side of things of course this is expandable if 16 gigs doesn't tickle your fancy you want to upgrade that to 32 maybe 64 I don't know if it's support 64 maybe it does don't quote me on that but you can definitely do 32 if you wanted to then you are free to do that quite easily as well you've also got an m dot 2 slot here with a pre-installed SSD you get 240 gigs right there it is preloaded with Windows 10 64 bit it is the m2 interface once again but not the PCIe nvme protocol unfortunately it's using SATA so it's not going to be quite as fast as something like you know a 960 Pro from from Samsung or anything like that but it is probably going to help keep costs of this unit down overall and then finally you get a two and a half inch drive bay so this is empty this is for you to fill up if you wish to you can install either an SSD or a two and a half inch mechanical drive right there for expanded storage and stuff so moving back over to the front here I did want to point out that the enclosure for the most part is made out of this kind of hard plastic and it's a it's actually fairly durable it seems like I mean I wouldn't want to drop it on a hard surface by any means but I think the reason why they went with plastic is just to keep it more lightweight especially since it's going on your back so that's good for me that I think this thing weighs around 10 pounds I can't remember if that's with or without the batteries installed but you're looking anywhere from like 9 to 12 pounds I would say we're going to find out once I actually strap this on and do some games if that's too heavy from my liking but we'll get back to that in a sec so that's that's the enclosure for the most part it does have some ample ventilation on on these on the front here as well as on the side so we're also going to fire up hardware monitor when we start gaming and I'm going to be testing the thermals in this guy because I'm curious to see if this the cooling solution in here is adequate as well now as of now you can kind of see that we're sort of in the desktop mode of things right we don't actually have the backpack straps mounted onto the unit yet so this is kind of just what you would this is how you would set it up if you were just using it as a regular PC and when you're doing that you don't really need to be cordless as much as when you're playing VR obviously so instead of running on battery life you could just run on the AC core that they provided there's a port on the back which I'm going to get to that side in just a sec so that's all taken care of but when you are doing a VR experience when you're in VR you're playing the game I looked at the battery LEDs on the on the batteries just lit up cool I'm glad that's working when you are playing a game in VR and you are going to be going cordless in terms of power you are going to be relying on the battery packs so they've included two of them in the package you get you get two gonna have to buy it buy one seperately or anything like that and they basically just slot in to the bays like so that is BAE yo you can see there's actually the battery LED indicator has two strips running down it because there's two batteries that you can install at a time so this represents battery one this one represents battery two and they light up to indicate the battery life however you don't really want to install both batteries at once granted you could you could definitely do that and that would theoretically give you more playtime but the reason why I would leave one out is so that while you're gaming and this battery starts to drain eventually when it gets tapped out right before it dies you can hot-swap this one into this bay here take this one out and start recharging it and just continue playing uninterrupted you couldn't really do that if you had both batteries installed and they both died at the same time you'd be out of luck waiting another two hours for those batteries to recharge so cool little system that they have worked out here oh yeah one more thing estimated play time with one of these batteries is supposed to be two hours in game we're gonna verify that once we actually strap this on and start playing moving to the right side of the system here you get an assortment of different ports including your DC which is where obviously your AC power comes from headphone and mic jacks you get it you get an SD card reader 4 USB 3 ports display ports actually 2 display ports and two HDMI I believe that's HDMI 2.0 and DisplayPort 1.4 I'm going to double check on that though I'll let you up so I'll let you know if that is anything different you also get dual Gigabit Ethernet LAN as well as a 12-volt DC out and let's take a look at the top here now the top is is where your headset would go alright it makes most sense if you're going to be using this on your back and you have an hmd strapped to your face you're going to want to plug in that tethered cable into the top here it's just a bit easier access it makes more sense based on where the headset is located so you get your 12 volt DC out here as well HDMI and 2 USB 3.0 ports and they do have these little rubber covers you don't get any covers for the side there but you do get them for the top is there anything that we missed as far as okay you get some rubber feet you get rubber feet here if you're going to be using it in desktop mode I'm just going to call it desktop mode so it doesn't slip around when you're when you're doing it that way and you also get more rubber feet at the bottom here when it's standing upright like the monolith from 2001 Space Odyssey alright so here we have the backpack strap and I'm gonna go into all the little details that this offers in just a bit when I actually have it suited on but for now I'm just going to strap it on to the back of the device here and show you exactly how that works they've made it super straightforward and simple actually so you get three these notches three holes plus a little slot or a little opening for a locking mechanism and on the back of the strap you get three pegs and the locking mechanism right here so all you do is you kind of line that up the pegs with the holes and you lock it into place like so and to seal the deal they've given you this there's a little velcro door just opens like that it's like it's like a seals chaps alright and then there's a little dial here to put the locking mechanism into place simply close the velcro door and voila she is not going anywhere pretty rock-solid super easy I like how straightforward it is again so that's how you strap that on I think at this point I'm all ready to boot this guy up it's already got a battery in there so why don't we go ahead and do some VR testing see how this baby flies so you strapped in with these little Clips here they are adjustable so even if you have big-ass stomach like myself you should be perfectly accommodated and then there's a strap up here as well so I've got the cables from the hmd all coiled up here and there is a spot to put them actually this little stretchy stretchy pocket thing stretching strap you can just route the cables straight through there the other little stretchy straps are for your HTC buy of controllers the motion controllers can go in kind of like holsters you can see I've got both controllers there this by the way I'm fully aware of how ridiculous this looks but then again you are probably going to be using something like the VR go inside of your own house not in public which I guess makes it a little better but yeah it looks totally ridiculous function function is what we're what we're looking for here today so now that that's all situated I can go ahead and put the headset on everything is looking good I can pull out my controllers let's just go ahead and play ready to rock am I gonna be I'm gonna be facing away from you guys apparently sorry sorry I know I'm like horrible at this so first thing I will say is that the backpack is very comfortable the straps are I mean I don't know it's one of those things where like you're so immersed in in something like VR that you kind of forget that you're actually wearing anything I mean I'm aware that I'm wearing clothes of course I don't think I'm naked right now but as far as like the backpack any kind of hardware it does feel pretty um pretty lightweight you don't notice it too much the backpack definitely stays on pretty well um oh I got a shield now I'll do it in this hand please ah oh god what is this I don't remember this thing oh I guess this is like a different kind of shield now uh there was there have been some serious updates to this game that I am unaware of become dead alright so that was my first game so far so far so good like no problems it doesn't feel too heavy which is a good sign so what an issue that I want to quickly point out is that I have no idea what the battery life is on this backpack right now I don't know if there's a way that I can see that from within the hmd so I think the only thing I can do is really take the hmd off and either physically look at the battery LED indicator on the backpack which means I would have to turn it off or maybe or maybe have a mirror-like point point the backpack towards the mirror and then look over my shoulder and and look at it that way so that's kind of a interesting interesting thing that might need some some fixing all right let's fire up a different game now let's go - wait what we got alright we're gonna play some raw data so notice I think that I will mention about this experience so far is that the gameplay is super smooth again there's a gtx 1070 in here with a core i7 there are absolutely no stuttering there's there's no signs of stuttering or any kind of lag that I'm aware of it's it's super smooth oh my god what's the hell good lord see that was Oh God what why are they why don't they have plague that's creepiest get the swag oh oh there - oh how do you do that ah no my headsets blowing up whoo alright so um that was fun that was honestly just as smooth as like my GT X 1080 system that I would use and after you remove your headset there's actually a little clip on the left side left strap here which you can use to lock your headset into place so you don't have to carry around voila you kind of look like someone in the military you know with all this stuff hanging on here on your big ass vest type of thing but it works the gameplay experience again with super smooth I definitely felt like I was getting that 90 Hertz refresh rate on both eyes and I think raw data is probably the most graphically intensive game that I have that actually own so I was I was pretty happy with how that was performing if we take a look at the back here what I'm bad so we still have we still have about 80% battery life if you look at the indicator there there's five it's a in increments of 20% and we only have one green dot missing so we still have quite a bit of time I mean I was probably only playing for maybe 20 minutes so I mean I guess that kind of adds up I'm not doing math right now but yeah it definitely feels like there's still quite a ways to go for this battery pack which is awesome so we had to hardware monitor running the whole time while we were gaining and it looks like our CPU again the core i7 6700 T got up to 67 degrees Celsius on the hottest core 66 see on the package that's actually not bad it's actually not bad at all let's see how our gtx 1070 did oh wow 70 degrees it topped out at 70 degrees see guys that's actually pretty good I was I was anticipating high seventies at the very least so theoretically you do have some thermal Headroom there if you wanted to do some overclocking on the GPU you could probably do so no problem just bear in mind that that would shorten the battery life quite a bit I guess it depends on how much you're overclocking but obviously dialing in a hefty OC is going to put more strain on the battery it's going to require more more power to drive more pixels and higher frame rates and all that but you are going to be seeing significantly reduced battery life but wrapping things up with some closing thoughts here overall this is a really solid product I do like it a lot performance is top-notch if you want a high-end vr gaming experience this is definitely capable of that and it's gonna be not just good enough for now but it's gonna be able to play the next generation of VR games as well so that's that's also very key you're gonna be making that initial $2,000 investment the hotspot mechanism is totally on point that was kind of like a make-or-break thing was like how the battery situation was going to work but I think overall they made a right choice also the fact that you can use this as a regular gaming desktop PC is awesome it makes it a bit more versatile a lot more versatile than just if it were like you know can only be in backpack mode that would be kind of a bummer so I think the one complaint that I did have was that I couldn't really tell what my battery life was unless I removed the hmd and looked in the mirror behind me looked over the shoulder I guess if you have someone with you they can easily tell you but that's one thing that I would try to find a solution for the straps work pretty well I think having a good place to hold everything is nice the I think the cable the cabling solution could be a little bit cleaner instead of having to wrap your cables up like that I think there could be a more elegant solution to that but I don't really know what that is at the moment but for a first run I think this is a this is just really nice it's it's a really good product and I would recommend it if you have the budget but I think on that note we can go ahead and wrap this video up so let me know what you guys think of this thing in the comments I'm very curious to hear your thoughts on what you've seen today with the demo as well as like the specs and MSRP especially I want to know do you guys think it's worth the price let me know in the comments be sure to toss me a local in the video if you enjoyed it have a good one you all subscribe if you haven't already and I'll see you in the next video