Gadgetory

what's up everyone Eber here with hardware connects and external GPU enclosures have been an interesting topic to discuss because for one it is an awesome add-on for your portable setup especially if you're someone who always carries an ultrabook on you and if that is your primary device and if you want to get you know some extra performance out of it especially when it comes to gaming or just other productive tasks adding or harnessing the power of a desktop class GPU can definitely come in handy when it comes to you know better frame rates or just lower render times and all that kind of stuff so as you can clearly see I've been testing the Razer core X with the Razer Blade stealth and of course if you're the devices which I'll get to later on but I wanted to talk about my experience using this guy and overall talked about why it even exists and why would someone or why would you even consider spending you know three hundred dollars for an enclosure and of course the extra investment when it comes to the graphics card so I'm gonna walk you through my experience using the Razer corex right after message from our sponsor menu and there Mac slick fusion is their first addressable RGB all-in-one cooler with a standard 240 ml rad and absolutely beautiful RGB ring elimination on the fans and the pump to highlight that unique flow indicator through the transparent top check out the lake fusion down below alright so let's quickly go over the design of the Razer core X so if you're familiar with the Razer core v2 they should feel like home albian it's a lot bigger than the core v2 because it can accommodate larger graphics cards but this whole thing is crafted in a gorgeous cnc anodized aluminum finish the fun panel is made out of plastic materials but the whole thing is it blends in really well with the aluminum finish of course and it looks stealth I mean you're not going to notice there are no fancy gaming elements throughout the chassis it's just pure it's minimalistic I love the design of the core X you've got mesh materials on the side for air flow which is great and this thing weighs 15 pounds which is a lot but considering that you're going to be placing this stationary at your desk it shouldn't be a big problem for size comparison here's a shot of it sitting beside an ass Rock decima need GTX this thing is 2.7 liters in volume and of course as you can see the core X is certainly not small it is a huge enclosure so you definitely have to find some room in your desk space to accommodate this guy not to mention this thing is just as big as a fully loaded ITX system which is just ridiculous in terms of features the cortex is certainly lacking a lot of that when compared to the Corby - remember this is a $300 enclosure compared to $500 but there are a few improvements when it comes to powering ultrabooks so the USBC power delivery is at a hundred watts when compared to 65 on the core v2 this thing can also support up to three slot graphics cards without a problem so if you do end up picking up aftermarket solutions like the ROG Strix series you shouldn't have a problem accommodating that large graphics card inside the core X whereas with the Corby - it's only compatible with 2.2 graphics cards so ideally your best bet would be reference based GPUs or even ITX base GPUs that are much smaller in size as for connectivity well as I mentioned earlier you're not going to be getting a lot with the core X so the only port on the core X is a USB see venerable three port that you can use to connect or establish a connection between the core X and notebook and that's pretty much it you are not going to be getting extra USB 3.0 ports or LAN port like what you would get with the core v2 and of course you won't get things like a chroma RGB lighting so those are some of the things to keep in mind and getting into the core X is fairly simple all you have to do is gently pull the lever located at the back then pull out the compartment from the enclosure you can then remove the PCIe slot cover that's installed by default install your graphics card into the PCI slot just like installing one onto a motherboard and tighten the bracket with the included screw the last step is obviously to connect the power cables into the GPU and slide the compartment back into the enclosure and lock the system with the lever and that's it now Razer is integrated a 120 millimeter fan for intake to bring in cool air for the GPU you can technically replace the stock fans with aftermarket solutions from Noctua or be quiet or your preferred brand the core X comes with a built-in 651 PSU where it can supply up to 500 watts for the graphics card and hundred watts for powering your notebook this means you wouldn't have a problem with power delivery issues with NVIDIA based graphics cards like a Titan xB or even GTX 1080i you wouldn't also have a problem with envy AMD based graphics cards like a Vega 56 or 64 and what's even interesting is that the cortex can also support quad row based graphics cards and if you're looking to see if your graphics car is compatible with the core X make sure to head over to razors website they do have a compatibility list under the tech specs so just make sure that it makes it is compatible but nonetheless I think you should be ok when it comes to installing you know Nvidia or AMD based graphics cards now the included 0.5 metre Thunderbolt 3 type-c cable is pretty short in length and one of the challenges when it comes to routing this open your setup is that you need to have a notebook right beside the core X because the cable is pretty short so if you're looking to place a core X on the left side and have the notebook on the right side well you're definitely gonna have a lot of challenges with short cable Razer does offer a two meter cable rated at 40 gigabits per second speed for $60 but do keep in mind that the maximum power delivery is only at 60 watts versus a hundred watts with this stock point 5 meter cable remember there's a lot of bandwidth to transfer between the core X and the notebook with just a single type C cable over here so length could be a discerning factor when it comes to bandwidth limitations so that's something to keep in mind I think the only thing that you should need to be worried about is power delivery for the notebook the blade stealth shouldn't have a problem because it is rated at 60 watts in terms of power delivery so you could technically get away with a 2 meter cable and not experience bandwidth issues or performance issues in that mom but if you're connecting a slightly powerful no bug that requires 100 watts for power then obviously a lot on cable wouldn't make a lot more sense and one of the suggestions that I do when it comes to setup or setting up the blade stealth or any ultrabook with the core X is perhaps get a vertical docking station more like a stand or something where you can place a notebook like that and have the core X where I decided so that would obviously eliminate the clutter and make it'll sort of clean things up so ideally I'd highly recommend planning out your setup before you even considering investing on the core X or if you do investor if you do decide to invest on the core X then obviously you would have to make few setup changes within your space so that's something to keep in mind now the setup process was actually a lot easier than I thought I had the blade and open in the background and all I did was just plug in this cable from the cortex the blade stealth and the Thunderbolt 3 software automatically detected the core accident asked me to allow it for access so as soon as I did that it started installing the PCI drivers and all that kind of stuff and after a quick restart I saw in video drivers right on there which was absolutely fantastic so I didn't have to go in and download them directly which was great the one thing that I did do is actually update the Nvidia drivers because it was running out of the drivers so I went into the Nvidia website and I downloaded the latest updated it just fine and it ran perfectly so why don't we talk about gaming performance to give you some context I ran battlefield 1 at 1080p set to low settings and the integrated UHD graphics inside the stealth dished out 18 frames per second on average well that's obvious expected considering this is and demanding title after plugging in the GPU I bumped up the settings to ultra and it was comfortably able to achieve over 80 frames per second now that's an upgrade over watch at 1080p set to low averaged around 72 frames per second with the UHD graphics mind you this isn't as demanding as battlefield one but after plugging in the e GPU I got around 117 frames per second at 1080 P set 2 epic settings lastly I ran tomb at 1080 P set to low using the Vulcan API and I gotta be honest it was a terrible experience the UHD graphic struggled a lot dishing out just a tad above 10 frames per second so that was yeah that was that was pretty bad but hey e GPU to the rescue right after plugging that in I got around 110 frames per second at Ultra settings which was just amazing now just for your information I did decide to test the core X with a gtx 980ti reference based graphics card so the performance numbers would vary depending on the type of GPU that you decide to invest in and pair up with the Razer core X so keep that in mind and I guess from all the results that we've seen so far it's obvious that investing in an external GP solution would make a lot more sense especially if you're an ultrabook owner because the performance benefits especially when it comes to gaming is so much better you can cane comfortably at 1080p with the highest possible settings without a problem but what about real-world applications so since I am a content creator I do render videos for work so I decided to perform a premier Pro render test and the results were actually surprising so I took a one-minute 4k h.264 video and then exported it to the YouTube 4k precent using Adobe Media encoder and what's interesting is a media encoder automatically detected CUDA thanks to the gtx 980ti and the you HD graphics rendered it the whole video in roughly 12 minutes when compared to 1 minute and 41 seconds with the external graphics card paired with a gtx 1080i that's 7 times faster guys it's just incredible alright so this is another use case scenario for the razor core X so right now I have it plugged into an external display because I wanted to see if we're going to be getting any performance benefits by plugging or by literally just sending the display signal to an external display to say for beginning that extra performance when compared to just plugging in the blade stuff to the core X and sending back the signal to the display or the built-in display on the blade stealth so that'd be interesting to see another cool or I guess another odd situation that I'm encountering right over here is a lack of i/o so right now I plugged in my a wireless mouse and the receiver is right over there so that's occupied one USB port and I have an external drive plugged into the blade itself and that's pretty much it I can't really plug in a mechanical wired keyboard I mean I could go wireless if I want to take that route but nonetheless you would still need an extra is report to plug in the receiver and that is unfortunate so after plugging in the external display to the core X and disabling the built-in display on the Stealth's all I did was just close the lid on the laptop I reran the gaming benchmarks with the same settings so battlefield 1 at 1080p set to ultra settings gave me ninety three point six frames per second overwatch at 1080p again set to epic settings gave us one hundred and thirty eight point three frames per second and finally doom at 1080p set to ultra gaybies averaged around 125 point three frames per second so you can definitely see there is a performance improvement when you see both the integrated GPU because all the cortex is doing is communicating or it's creating that pci link with the core with the blade stealth and the GPU and then it's displaying or it's literally just displaying an output to an external monitor so it reduces the bandwidth of sending back that signal back to the display which would obviously which gave us that extra FPS boost so in one way it is beneficial you obviously have to consider investing in an external monitor and there are a lot of prices to factor in when it comes to you know using this hybrid set up but just for fun I decided to test the core X with the LG Graham 15 ultrabook and my to my surprise I was pretty disappointed with the gaming performance with the grin when paired with the core X featuring a gtx 980ti so for instance battlefield 1 averaged around 17 point two frames per second with the same settings that I used for the blade stealth I made sure that the drivers were up-to-date I even made sure the connection was established the 1080i was detected by the Graham and it was really surprising to me even when I ran overwatch the frame rates where I had 41.5 frames per second and the doom with the same settings I used for the blade stealth were averaging around 61 point 5 frames per second so gaming performance with the Graham was definitely terrible especially when you decide to plug in an external GPU so I think there is an issue when it comes to the communication between the Thunderbolt 3 cable I think that's ideally where the issue is or it could potentially be the integrated cooling solution from the threat from the grand notebook that could be causing a bottleneck not really sure but I wouldn't recommend you know investing in an external GPU with if you're an LG grand owner because the gaming performance is definitely not impressive and for those of you have watched my Intel Hades Canon review I'm sure a lot of you in the comments were wondering how an external GP solution would work with this nook surprise is that I've good news is that it actually does detect so as soon as I plugged in the core x2 the Hades Kinyon the tombow 3 software automatically detected the core X with the gtx 980ti and i did run some tests so battlefield 1 at its the same settings averaged around ninety point one frames per second overwatch the same settings averaged around 102 7.7 frames per second doom unfortunately was not playable for some reason the game engine crashed every time I've tried launching it I've restarted the system I made sure the drivers are up-to-date I did all sorts of troubleshooting stamps could be a driver limitation there's probably something wrong in terms of drivers especially since this has you know until you HD graphics along with Radeon Vega M graphics so the fact that you know it has to disable those GPUs and basically just connected directly to the 1080i could cause some driver limitations or some driver issues so nonetheless you could technically pair the nook with the core X but again this by itself is an awesome product so I just wanted to put it out there so to conclude extol GPUs are awesome the fact that it can harness the power of desktop-class graphics cards with an ultrabook through federal three is just marvelous now the processor could be a determining factor in terms of performance and if you have an ultra-low voltage processor you may not be getting optimal performance from a high end GPU like a gtx 1080i with an enclosure that could turn into a serious bottleneck the razor core by itself is an amazing product to work with installing the graphics card didn't require too much of a hassle all you had to do is just pull out the lever popping the graphics card put in plugging the power cables and then you know bring back the compartment and that's pretty much it it was just a simple set of process and it's just a plug-and-play solution all you have to do is just plug in this cable from the razor core to an ultrabook like the stealth and the Thunderbolt 3 software automatically they text the coax you'll start downloading the drivers automatically and you're ready to go right away and that to me is just great I mean you don't have to worry about drivers or crashes or anything which is which thankfully I didn't experience while gaming so that's awesome so I guess you know the last thing I want to talk about is pricing because this is certainly not a cheap investment because the core X by itself costs $300 and if you add the value of a graphics card which is another thousand dollars depending on what you want to get and of course when you pair that up with an ultrabook you are looking at a solid you're looking at an investment that's way over two thousand dollars so you're much better off of course billion desktop gaming PC and getting those performance but again this is targeted towards a certain type of audience someone who is looking for a hybrid solution someone who's looking for an ultrabook with great battery life and of course great bill quality and when they come home if they just want to casually sit back and relax and play some games you know something like the cortex commit very beneficial all they have to do is just plug this in plug to plug in their ultra book to the coax and they can start gaming at higher frame rates had higher resolutions so that to me is just awesome I'd love to hear your thoughts on the razor core ex what do you guys think about external GP enclosures do you see yourselves utilizing something like this with an ultrabook if you are and if you are someone who is you know an ultrabook owner and if you are looking to invest into an external GP solution let me know in the comments down below I'm Eva with Harbor connects thank you so much for watching and we'll see you in the next one