Gadgetory

hey guys and welcome back to hardware unbox so ultrabooks here are by far the most popular category of laptops for running enough performance to everyday tasks in a compact portable form factor but there's one crucial thing that these thin and light machines are incapable of and that's high-performance PC gaming most people looking to game on their PC will examine a few options desktop PCs are the best choice in price and performance perspective but they simply aren't portable and can't replace what an ultrabook does gaming laptops are portable equivalent though that are almost always larger and heavier than an ultra portable for a decent level of power plus they tend to be pretty expensive a new option for PC gaming has started to appear over the last few years and that is external graphics boxes which connect to a laptop and provide the power of a fully fledged graphics card when you're at your desk but still allow you to carry around a thin and light ultra portable on the go a couple of options and hidden markets so far starting with the proprietary arian where graphics amplifier and later with the razor core the problem with the amplifier and the core are their price the core is of particular interest because it's compatible with many laptops by a thunderbolt three but it costs a whopping 500 bucks and that's without an include graphics card this makes the total cost of external laptop graphics a very expensive proposition especially if you want decent power from something like an nvidia geforce gtx 1070 this is where the Auris gtx 1070 gaming box comes in it offers a similar features to the razor core it's an external desktop graphics card enclosure that connects two laptops vice underworld 3 but it cost just $600 with a gtx 1070 included inside the razor core with equivalent hardware would set you back at least $300 more the gtx 1070 gaming box which you can see over here is a much more compact unit than either the graphics amplifier or the core and that's because it uses a gigabyte geforce gtx 1070 mini ITX OC along with the slimline 450 watt 80 plus gold power supply this does restrict the upgrade ability of unit but it it's small and portable at just 2.4 kilograms you can pretty easily carry around the entire unit with the provided carry bag and its small footprint is suitable for any desk setup setting up and using the gaming box is extremely simple in fact I was expecting it to be so much harder to get working than it actually is all you have to do is plug in the power cord connected to your laptop via Thunderbolt 3 let your laptop's Thunderbolt 3 Drive utility automatically set up the unit with a few prompts and then install in videos GeForce graphics driver that's pretty much it there the gaming box works exactly as you'd expect when running a game it automatically switches from using internal graphics to the external gtx 1070 and passes the display signal back to the laptops display if you hook up an external monitor that works even better with a small performance advantage and of course you can use the rear USB ports to attach your keyboard and mouse the unit is fully plug-and-play with no on/off switch when you plug in the gaming box the unit will automatically power up and your setup will switch to the external graphics where required disconnect the box and there's a smooth transition back to using the integrated graphics and thanks to power delivery / Thunderbolt 3 the gaming box charges your laptop while connected where supported with up to 100 watts of juice I'm expecting to have some sort of struggle using this device for gaming or some sort of issue with plug-and-play but that wasn't the case at all in fact it worked perfectly with my cable a powered one / ThinkPad x1 carbon which you'll see throughout this video oh and there's a quick note on the noise and thermals produced by the game box just before we get into the performance under load the box is pretty quiet thanks to its large cooling vents on either side providing enough airflow such as the fans and have to spin up significantly unfortunately though there is a bit of coil whine from the power supply noticeable when the GPU is fully utilized as for temperatures the GPU system comfortably around 70 degrees Celsius under load which is what you expect from this sort of desktop graphics card so before I get into discussing any performance information let's talk about the test setup I use the gaming box with base level ultra portable Hardware Lenovo s10 at x1 carbon kitted out with an Intel Core i5 7200 new processor and 8 gigabytes of RAM Ora says you will want to gain with any lower hardware and I definitely agree this is pretty much the entry-level ultra portable experience the core i5 7200 u is particularly interesting here because it's a 2 quart 4 thread 15 watt CPU clocked at 2.5 gigahertz with a boost speed of 3.1 gigahertz this isn't as fast CPU by any stretch in fact it's slower than the intel pentium g 4560 which we recommend for budget pc gaming builds as we'll talk about later the CPU can often run us into a bit of trouble here so testing the gtx 1070 box i first decided to run every game i wanted to play on just the laptops integrated graphics to see if even a single game was playable on the lowest possible settings as you'll see in this list a couple of games like Batman Arkham Knight refused to play at all on integrated graphics while others like Deus Ex mankind divided and The Witcher 3 were completely unplayable even at 720p low settings the only two games are considered playable with Sleeping Dogs and tomb raider both games from around 5 years ago and only when set to the lowest possible quality I think it's pretty safe to say an ultraportable is not a gaming machine though most of you out there have probably we've already known that so let's go through what the performance I actually achieved with the gtx 1070 gaming box hooked up to my laptop i use an external monitor for all of the gaming box testing as it provided a few extra frames per second as it didn't have to send the display signal bathrooms on the ball free cable and all the captures have seen this video we're done by a shadow play for convenience note that shadow play on limited hardware did come with the performance set which you'll see in the captures though i'll be discussing my experience playing these games without the capture running so starting off with batman arkham knight which was very playable on the gaming box set to 1080p ultra settings with no game works the in-game benchmark spirit at 877 FPS average and flying around in the game was excellent especially as the game simply refused to run on integrated graphics Deus Ex mankind divided only achieved 20 frames per second best on integrated graphics but with the gaming box I push this up to 55 FPS with 1080p high detail settings switching to ultra came with the 10 FPS performance hit pushing into the 40 FPS zone so I prefer to use the high settings instead I get a very playable experience here fallout 4 is the worst optimized game I tested with so I opted to use 1080p ultra detail settings with shadow distance set to medium which helps solve some random slowdowns throughout the game frame rates did fluctuate a fair bit depending on where I was playing and needed a CPU nor GPU were pegged at 100% utilization so I mostly achieve 50 to 60 FPS of these settings or integrated graphics again the game is pretty much unplayable prey isn't a hugely demanding game on gaming hardware though it's still unplayable an integrated graphics but with the gaming box I was hitting around 50 to 70 FPS or maximum quality settings depending on the area of the ship I was in this is another game that runs really well on the external graphics solution at 1080p of the two older titles I tested with sleeping dogs hid around 90 FPS in the in-game benchmark running at 1080p ultra settings tomb raider hit a playable 80 FPS 1080p ultra settings again with four times super sample anti-aliasing both of these games were playable at 720p low settings but the jump up to 1080p ultra with better frame rates is massive as you might have noticed throughout many of these tests the CPU is pegged at 100% utilization or close to it for most of the game while the GPU isn't always being fully utilized so with The Witcher 3 I decided to test about 1080p and 1440p and it wasn't hugely surprising to see just a three to five FPS drop moving from 1080p to 1440p but running its 1440p ultra settings with no hair works beginning box doing it around 45 fps I also tested Mass Effect Andromeda about 1080p and 1440p it's a roughly 7 FPS drop when increasing the resolution and ultra detail settings the game didn't get past the loading screens on integrated graphics so being able to hit 45 or FPS or thereabouts with the gaming box is a decent effort there was one game though that remained unplayable on both the integrated graphics and the gaming box and that's battlefield one 64 player multi there is a massive CFU bottleneck while playing which limited the framerate around 25 to 35 FPS at all times when I was playing on 1080p medium settings or 1440p ultra settings I seriously plot tried to play this game for a long time but it's bloody hard when the frame rates are dipping below 30fps oh and it wouldn't be a proper look at gaming performance without mentioning eSports games I don't normally play these sort of titles but I did download csgo in the laptop just to see how the gaming box group improve the experience I was surprised to discover are not particularly intensive title like csgo is largely unplayable and integrated graphics only hitting 40 fps on 720p low settings but when switching to 1080p low settings on the gaming box we push that well into the 150 to 200 FPS level which i think is what most people like to see aside from the unfortunate battlefield 1 multiplayer result the general experience provided by the gtx 1070 gaming box here is very good it comfortably transforms the ThinkPad x1 carbon and similar Thunderbolt 3 equipped ultra portables into a capable gaming machine for the most part the graphically intensive games I tested were playable at 1080p or even 1440p at high to ultra detailed settings with respectable framerate however many of the tests ran into CPU bottlenecks thanks to the relatively weak core i5 7200 you are used for testing often this left the gtx 1070 underutilized so i'd expect you to get a better experience with a faster core i7 7500 u which has a 13% higher boost frequency even better results will be had with a quad-core CPU like the i7 7700 HQ though not many laptops without dedicated graphics use that cpu due to the cpu bottleneck and your expectations of gaming on a gtx 1070 i'm sure you have a number of questions about the gaming box's performance which i'll try to address right now you're probably wondering how the gaming box hooked up to an ultraportable compared to an actual gaming laptop with a gtx 1070 inside i've run a few tests and it seems there with a much faster quad-core cpu and no potential funderbolt free concerns a gtx 1070 gaming laptop is around 30 to 40 percent faster on average than my test system though this mountain decreases those games are more GPU limited a fully fledged gaming desktop with an over cocked core i7 7700 K and a gtx 1075 will outperform the Ultrabook plus gaming box combination by a larger margin somewhere around 40 to 45 percent on average and of course that will make games like Battlefield 1 multiplayer actually playable I haven't followed up videos soon that we'll look more closely at the differences between the external gaming box like this Oris unit and a similar gaming laptops and desktop so I'd stay tuned for that it's also worth mentioning French I'm performance throughout most of the testing so far I've only been discussing average frame rates which don't illustrate how smooth the experiences with the gaming box smoothness can vary a lot with the gaming box much more than a gaming laptop or a gaming desktop due to the inherent hardware limitations of ultra portables like the slow CPU limited memory capacity and bandwidth and so forth some games run really smoothly for the most part like Mass Effect Andromeda Batman Arkham Knight and pray with only the occasional slowdown other games like The Witcher 3 stutter more frequently often when the CPU is bouncing around 100 percent utilization these stutters are not something I've experienced on gaming laptops or desktops so it's something to note about the external graphics solutions in fact here's a frame time graph so you can see exactly what I'm talking about again it does depend on the game but just be warned that you may not get a smooth experience in every game with an entry level ultraportable I respect the experiences a little bit better if you haven't have a faster unit than my test system so there's a lot to like about the Auris gtx 1070 gaming box and then all stems from the performance and price though it's with an ultraportable other laptop with that a dedicated graphics card will see the gaming box transform their system it is something genuinely capable of playing modern games and it doesn't just make games playable you'll be able to run intensive titles a high to ultra quality settings at either 1080p or even 1440p while maintaining respectable frame rates the gaming box is extremely simple to set up as well with plug-and-play functionality making it faster switch between a dock syrup for gaming and a traditional ultra portable for work on the go power delivery extra USB ports and a very compact design are great complementary features as well though does have some RGB wiring and to be honest it's it's a little bit laughable in there the best aspect to the gaming box though is its price at $600 with an ink your gtx 1070 it's a lot cheaper than the razor core it even manages to undercut some other external graphics solutions by around a hundred dollars making it a highly attractive option for those looking to game on their existing ultra portable there are some cases where I wouldn't recommend the gaming box if you're tossing up between this solution and a gaming laptop the gaming laptop will provide better performance in most cases at a similar price to the cost of an entry-level ultra portable and the gaming box you won't get the portability advantages by gaming laptops are still a decent choice for some buyers I also had a few concerns during my testing which you should be aware of like the tendency for the core i5 7200 new in my test laptop to cause a bottleneck and some stuttering issues in a handful of games external graphics is still far from a perfect solution right now and your experience may vary depending on what laptop you hook it up to in general though the Auris GTX 970 gaming box is the best external graphic solution I've seen so far it should definitely be on your radar if you want to transform your Thunderbolt 3 equipped laptop into a genuine gaming machine anyway that's it for this look at the origin 1070 gaming box really impressive what it brings to the table if your interest you can check prices links in the description below if you like our work check out that on patreon and we'll catch you in the next one you