Gadgetory

hey how's it going guys this is Dave - Dee and this is the Intel skull canyon nook so I picked this thing up about four or five months ago super cool device but I kind of wasted its powers I connected it to a TV and use it as a media device it's capable of so much more but because it had an IR receiver up front I thought it'd be kind of cool to just use it as a media center I totally squandered its powers now a month ago I decided why don't I just use this thing as my main device because I use a laptop normally and I thought I have a screen a mouse and a keyboard at work and have a screen mouse and keyboard at home want to just bring this thing back and forth and use it as if it were a laptop without actually being a laptop so I tried it these are my thoughts aside from emails and regular work I edit videos and I play games so port selection is important to me the important ones are the SD card reader for my video files for USB 3 ports display outputs including an hdmi 2 and a Thunderbolt 3 and this is super important for me for what I want to do with this because I needed an external GPU on the inside we have two RAM slots I have 32 gigs of DDR 4 and then there's 2 m2 Drive slots having two drives is really clutch for editing in Premiere and then not having to use external ones is even better the CPU and the internal GPU can't be upgraded those are soldered on it's running an Intel 6770 HQ and an Intel iris pro 580 graphics chip this thing is a powerful computer in a tiny package so performance wise for regular work stuff obviously just burns through it but the big question I had was how it handles 4k video edits and I was pleasantly surprised importing the footage working with the footage everything in terms of the editing process was fast as long as you had two drives installed but renders were slow the integrated GPU isn't an Nvidia chip so it has no cuda cores and ends up using OpenCL to render the solution is the razor core I have a GTX 1080 in there and when you plug this thing up it just flies I'm getting similar render times to a quad-core desktop with the GTX 1080 so something like a five-minute video would render in they're 12 minutes with the razor core or an hour without it so in my particular case I leave the razor core at home when I can I edit videos at work but they want to get home I can render those videos a lot faster using the razor core if I want to gaming is also not bad obviously with the razor core and a GTX 1080 this thing crushes gains but even if you want to use the integrated chip the iris pro 580 is capable of pushing a decent frame rates it's not for hardcore gaming but if you want to play stuff like overwatch or Starcraft you can get some playable frame rates even at 1080p I wouldn't recommend competing at tournaments with this thing but the occasional casual game runs reasonably well fan noise on idle is audible but relatively quiet fan noise on load is louder but because it's a tiny PC you can position it further away from you unlike a laptop I didn't experience any thermal throttling even when I was editing videos or gaming but running certain benchmarks it does get hot enough to throttle it comes with a backplate to mount it behind monitors and stuff and it also has a second top cover without the skull if you find it too spooky or something so this uses 120 watt AC adapter and it's not huge or anything but if you want to bring this thing back and forth it's a pain in the butt so what I did was actually purchased a second AC adapter just a generic $30 AC adapter and it just makes the whole process a lot easier so now the only thing you get to bring back and forth is just the unit itself the last thing I want to mention is pricing this thing retails for around $600 right now as a bare-bones kit so you need to pop in your own storage and memory so it's not the cheapest computer out there I mean bare-bones kits are never gonna be the best value but you're getting a really unique form factor and for the $150 price premium that you're paying for this it's not a bad value so overall I really like the skull canyon nook it's not something I can recommend to everyone who's looking for a laptop the usage scenario is really specific but I'm sure there's certain people out there who could totally fit this into the workflow and I'm glad that I could share this experience with you guys hope you guys enjoyed this video thumbs if you liked it subs if you loved it it's been nice I'll see you guys next time