Gadgetory

man it is super windy here today I can definitely hear the wind sounds in here hopefully it's not too bad for you guys let's get right into it welcome back to hardware on boxed external GPUs is something I touched on briefly last year when I looked at the Auris gtx 1070 gaming box when attached to a cable a power ultra portable in this video and perhaps a couple more over the next few weeks i wanted to revisit a GPUs and determine whether the latest laptop CPU hardware from intel solve some of the problems we saw with the cable a can a GPU pairing last year so as a quick recap last time I tested the gtx 1070 gaming box attached to all the Novo ThinkPad x1 carbon / Thunderbolt 3 the gaming box does contain a fully fledged desktop GTX 780 PU but the weak core i5 7200 year with just 2 cores and 4 threads presented a bit of a bottleneck in a number of games the a GPU did transform the ThinkPad from a sleek ultra portable into a genuine gaming machine with decent enough performance but the full power of the gtx 1070 wasn't unleashed by any stretch in fact the GTX 970 GPU + ultrabook combo was typically 30 to 50 percent slower than an actual gtx 1070 gaming laptop and could be up to 65 percent slower and really sleepier limited titles stuttering was also noticeable issue in some but not all games I tested with which contributed to week 1% low frame rates in most games when comparing these crucial 1 percent low results the GTX 10 7 EGP is actually a fair bit slower than a GTX 1060 gaming laptop again a lot of this came down to the hard CPU bottleneck and also the bandwidth limitations of thunderbolt 3 so in this a GPU revisit of sorts I'm continuing my quest to find the ultimate portable gaming setup and upping the ante in several regards firstly gigabyte kindly swapped out our gtx 1070 gaming box for their newer and faster GT X 1080 gaming box these even GPUs come with a graphic card installed and is supposed to retail for around 700 us though you know with the current GPS shortage and price hikes these boxes are pretty rare but hopefully at some point soon everything will calm down this sort of boxes will become more available the GTX ternary gaming box it is pretty similar to the gtx 1070 more in verse regards so i'm not going to talk about the design build much because it's basically the same as what i discussed in my 1070 gaming box review the key things to note is it's the same extremely compact size and it's still plug-and-play / Thunderbolt 3 and will charge your laptop in the process provided it supports USB power delivery secondly and most importantly I'm testing with new ultra portables that use Intel's 8th gen cable ayk refresh CPUs with 4 cores 8 threads and a more than 50 percent performance leap over the previous generation there's hope that the new CPUs in these laptops will help deal with the CPU bottleneck we originally experienced so the laptops are used are the HP Spectre x-360 and the razor blade stealth both of which used the core i7 8550 you the most commonly used high-end 8th gen laptop CPU both have full ends of PCIe / Thunderbolt 3 unlike some laptops that have just two lanes and both have 16 gig of ram the spectre x360 is configured to use the default 15 watt TDP for this CPU and is a bit thermally constrained at times you'd say the razor blade stealth is also a 15 watt laptop it manages to sustain better clock speeds around 200 to 300 million it's higher across the board also it's important to point out I tested everything using an external 1080p display hooked up to the GPU display outputs on the GTX 1080 performance is noticeably reduced when sending the display signal back to the laptops display and I wanted to avoid any such slowdowns also I recommend anyone using the external GPU to use an external display for this reason so let's get to the results starting with grand theft auto 5 this is a game that played reasonably well with the old AGP you set up achieving 36 FPS in 1% lows however the faster GPU and CPU with this new set up does help out here average frame rates up by 23% but crucially 1% loads have improved by 38% the performance doesn't matter ajit X 1080 gaming system here though we are getting 1070 max-q like frame rates we have intestinal lock with Batman Arkham Knight but it's back for this round of testing the old a GPU setup couldn't run the game maximum detail levels however we are now seeing those 1% lows for above 30fps again 1% low performance from this ultraportable plus a GPU combo is around the level of the 1017 max Q rise of the Tomb Raider is a punishing game at its maximum detail levels but again we see this new DG / you take it to a playable level where previously 1% lawyers with sub 20 fps performative is actually really good from this heavily GP eliminated game essentially matching the gtx 1080 max q if a little bit slower Deus Ex mankind divided is a rare title that doesn't benefit significantly from the extra CPU or GPU power while average frame rates do improve by 22% 1% lowest jump up by just 10% which leads performance between the 1060 & 1070 max Q a bit of a disappointing result for the a GPU combo in this title the next couple of games are heavily demanding on the CPU so they could be quite interesting hitman benefits strongly from the quad-core power of the core i7 8550 you pushing 50% more frames than the older a GPU combo looking at the one percent low results the CPU limitation still gives proper gaming laptops a significant advantage the gtx 1060 for example pulls ahead in 1% Louis despite falling behind in average frame rates however this combo does make the game playable at max settings for the first time civilization 6 sees gains of more than 50% in both average and 1% lower frame rates thanks to the faster CPU bringing the 1 percent low frame rate above 30 FPS for the first time again performance isn't quite as good as some gtx 1060 laptops we've tested but it's still very playable watchdogs - it's a visually beautiful game but like a lot of Ubisoft games it tends to push the CPU and GPU very hard here where once again see a 50% improvement to 1% low frame rates and these frame rates push above 30 fps just for the first time still we are limited to around GTX 1060 performance here Mass Effect Andromeda runs really well on the GTX 1080 plus I 78552 combo doubling the one percent lower frame rate we saw last time with the older age APA combo this allows the system to outperform the GTX 1017 max Q by a good 15 percent though it can't raked the 1080 max Q pray is one of the best performing games on gaming laptops but it does struggle massively with a 15 watt CPUs were used with the a GPU here while one percent low frame rates again are almost double what we achieved with the older AGP combo performance is still below the level of a GTX 1060 which is typical of the more CPU limited titles we've tested so far Middle Earth shadow of war is the final game we'll be looking at today and this game did come out after we tested the older AGP combo so unfortunately don't have data for that system what I can tell you is the GTX 1080 eg pew plus I 78550 you record similar performance to the GTX 1017 max Q and delivers perfectly playable performance at 1080p with the ultra quality preset overall results are very interesting for this new a GPU plus ultra portable combination with the GTX 1080 and Core i7 8550 you in hand across the games we tested there was a 61 percent performance improvement on average compared to the GTX 1070 and Core i5 7200 u combo we looked at earlier a lot of games that were previously unplayable at maximum settings are now playable plus stuttering was less of an issue as evidenced by far more tiles with 1% lowers above 30fps this is also a much larger gain that would normally see when comparing the GTX 1080 and gtx 1070 with a typical desktop or laptop system with the same cpu the gtx 1080 is only 20 to 30 percent faster than gtx 1070 but here we're seeing more like a 60 percent gain on average it's quite clear that the additional cpu power helps to improve performance in a significant way and those with older Jukka laptops won't necessarily be able to achieve large performance gains simply by pumping in more GPU power while results are really good for the most part in every game we tested with is very playable at high quality settings at 1080p or even higher resolutions we still aren't seeing the full power of the GTX 1080 unleashed with this a GPU set up and there's a couple of reasons for this firstly the 15 watt core i7 a 550 u is still relatively weak among faster 45 watt gaming laptops and of course even more powerful desktop CPUs the move from 2 to 4 cores at 15 watts does alleviate some of the cpu bottleneck enough to see great performance gains but the sort of ultra portable + e GPU setups are unfortunately still CPU bottleneck for the most part and secondly the Thunderbolt 3 interface still doesn't deliver quite enough bandwidth to the GPU even with a full length under walkthrough so providing pcie 3.0 x 4 stuttering is present in some games that can't be attributed to extreme CPU loads or memory allocation issues granted the number of games that stutter is less with the faster ultra portable CPU but a game like The Witcher 3 which we tested with last time still experiences performance hitches when the CPU is only at 60% load and memory allocation is well below the limits of the system it is possible that this is a latency issue rather than a bandwidth issue though either way I'm confident it's related to the Thunderbolt 3 interface which makes it a hard problem to solve by simply throwing in more CPU power the end result is the GTX 1080 gaming box hooked up to a core i7 8550 laptop provides performance most similar to a gtx 1070 max-q particularly in more GPU heavy games across the tiles we tested the e GPU combo was 4% slower than a gtx 1070 max-q laptop with the core i7 7700 HQ inside it's also 7% faster than a gtx 1060 laptop on average which is great news for 1080p gaming however the GTX 1080 a GPU paid with the current gen 15 watt CPU ends up 24% slower on average there the GTX teri max-q and that's not even a fully-fledged GTX 1080 so if you're thinking of buying the GTX 980 gaming box or a similar a GPU to used with an ultra portable laptop don't expect to get gtx 1080 performance instead you'll be throwing a lot of extra GPU power at what is essentially a CPU limited system don't let the performance difference take away from what is still a great setup for gaming though thanks to external GPUs you can carry around a feeling like gaming laptop for productivity on the go then return home to a desk where you just plug in one cable to unleash very respectable gaming performance you know gtx 1070 max-q performance is certainly no slouch it's not as good as a proper gaming laptop or desktop just yet but there's a bright future for this sort of technology and some of the early issues get ironed out I do have a couple of other a GPU gaming test coming up so stay tuned for those and a big shout-out to gigabyte for sending over the GTX to a gaming box so guys is taking song for us to look at this in depth but I do think EG appears are a really interesting product segment right now anyway that's enough I hope the wind noise wasn't too bad and I'll catch you next time