Gadgetory

what's up guys Jays $0.02 here in gaming laptops are usually one of those love it or hate it type of categories but you know given the fact that computers are getting more powerful and less power draw and power demanding it's no surprise that we are seeing a whole bunch of new laptops especially with coffee lake so we're gonna be kicking this off right here by well our series of gaming laptops coming up here by starting with the digital storm 15.6 inch Equinox gaming laptop it's thin its lightweight but more importantly is it powerful we're gonna find out do you want to be cooler you want to be more desirable well you're in luck because right now you can own your very own Jace to send swag and immediately be the cool kid on the block max out your sex appeal by following the link down below its with the launch of Coffee Lake late last year meant that we obviously had new mobile platforms coming and this is our first one we're taking a look at here in the studio the equinox s89 55 this is a 15.6 inch IPS 1080p gaming slash productivity laptop what I love about this is you can see it is a very minimalist design you have a very sleek digital storm logo a matte black cover with some silver accents back here on the hinge nothing gaudy no LEDs everywhere no bright red or orange or colors to be like hey I'm a gamer but on the back you can see we've got a massive amount of cooling and ventilation because this is also a 1070 max-q Nvidia discreet graphics card in here so that means it has a very strict criteria of both acoustics and thermals that have to be maintained if you guys have used any small form factor or a thin laptops before you know you usually sacrifice connectivity but not the case here you have our charger port right here which uses our 150 watt charger brick this is also thin and lightweight you can carry this in a backpack it's not going to weigh you down a full size HDMI 2.0 which is going to give you a HD r10 capability so you can connect it to an external HD RS or TVs and get that playback too many display ports right here and two USB type-c and then to us the 3.0 and moving to the other side you got another USB 3.0 a headphone and microphone jack and a full-size SD card reader which is perfect because if you're using this for content creation video editing on-the-go which I will be at Computex this is important of course we have our Ethernet jack right here with this little fold down door keeps it nice and sleek and kind of out of the way when you're not using it once you open it up though we are going to expose the best part of this laptop which is the 15.6 inch 144 Hertz 1080p IPS 5 millisecond panel and the fact that this IPS makes it perfect because of color accuracy and color recreation when it comes to video editing or picture editing but the 5 millisecond 144 Hertz 1080p make it also a good mix for gaming we've got our membrane keyboard right here it is full RGB backlit customizable backlit via software that's built into the unit got our speakers right here which are up fire in front of the monitor our trackpad is placed off center to the left a little bit that's fine with me it has a fingerprint reader on there though which shows you that they're taking security in mind I've not personally set up the fingerprint reader but it's here on the trackpad and then of course we've got our left click right click buttons which I do feel is a little bit spongy but they're also not easy to bump why are you using the trackpad and before we get into performance here though I'm going to go ahead and crack this one open because upgradability is something that's important when it comes to laptops this particular model comes with a 500 gigabyte samsung 960 Evo nvme SSD which I think's a little bit lacking so I'm gonna personally expand this to one terabyte not today but I'm gonna do it before Computex and it has 16 gigabytes of ddr4 that's and they need to be upgraded to 32 gigs for me as well but I also want to take a look at what's going on with cooling in there so that's what we're gonna do next alright we're gonna crack this apart I'm gonna be using my eye fix-it kit to do this I know this seems like an advert but it's not actually bought these so if you guys are curious about the tools I'm using and you want these also for yourself there will be a link into the description of an amazon link where you can go and check them out every single teardown I do pretty much I use this kit for actually I think my wife got it from for my birthday last year so there's that good old wifey I have not taken this apart before so I guess if I break it at least I already did my benchmarks Wow so this is actually using Corsair Vengeance ddr4 in here Oh check this out we can actually put a three and a half inch or two and a half inch right here that's perfect so I'm not even gonna bother taking this out now I'm actually gonna stick in an SSD right now so you can't expand this with this you can do a two and a half inch drive or there'll be a hard drive or an SSD but it does look like we only have room for two sodium sticks right here now I didn't under in this so do as I say not as I do this is the hold down here just with one screw this is such a delicate like ribbon cable we've now expanded another 500 gigabytes and that's it so we just put it back together in reverse order make sure it's all snapped into its place so I figured we start things off here with the performance test with an actual boot timer so I just pushed the power button and we can fill put a little timer up on the screen in post there would you because I'm bad at counting but it's 960 Evo nvme SSD so as you can see it boots up pretty quickly yeah not bad at all so here's we're gonna do I went ahead and did a gambit of benchmarks on this I spent about eight hours going through testing various games on this is it is a ten seventy max Q with eight gigabytes of gddr5 and we do have of course the eye 78750 h6 core 12 thread cpu so let's see how it performs so what you're looking at here is the control center 2.0 this is kind of like their little well I guess control center for the laptop I don't see myself really using this over time like you can see the fan profile for the GPU is on the left side CPU temperatures and fan profile on the right side and what I think is kind of interesting here is it's got an automatic setting which I guess you give an offset to the fan curve which is interesting the maximum speed the max Q and then the custom you can make your own fan curve this appears to be a button that does nothing whatever let's go and start with CPU temperatures shall we we're using crap which is close to a massage we are using MSI Afterburner though to actually monitor the CPU temperatures because when you use the control center for the temperature reading and then you start something like Cinebench which loads the CPU this stops updating now you guys already solved my Cinebench score was what we're looking for here our temperatures so when I click run they immediately shoot up into the 70s upper 70s when this becomes a little bit more heat soaked it will reach 90 91 ish 86 85 88 so it definitely gets warm but not too warm I mean laptops are designed to run warmer they truly are and what we saw was not a huge drop-off in terms of thermal throttling our highest score was a 1095 this score right here was a 1064 we have been doing some gaming and stuff on here right now so the temperatures are a bit warmer we also have msi afterburner running a few other programs running in the background but our max temperatures we looks like we hit 91 and a couple cores so i'm gonna have msi afterburner up because i want to see what kind of over clocks we can actually get with this unit I'll be using heaven to test this only because it's a bit consistent but because of the max-q nature of thermal and power draw and temperatures even though we have a button available to us and a slider that we can utilize an MSI Afterburner it does take effect but the thing is once the temperatures reach about 55 C we start to see a reduction in core clock in order to keep from breaking out of that max-q setting that is basically hard controlled by Nvidia so let's go ahead and do a plus 100 on the core clock we can see what happens to our core speed right here and it jumped up into the 1600s but watch now that where temperature is gonna go up right here 57 c 58 c this is starting to come back down towards the 1300s as this hits 60 this will drop back down into the 13s periodically and a lot of our overclock see there's our 13s again is being negated because this temperature is going up but if you look at our FPS right here for heaven with high bent or high settings and tessellation is on and 2x msaa this FPS is actually pretty damn good in the 90s and up into the hundreds but what about an actual game okay so here we are in doom undoubtedly one of the most fun replay value games in terms of graphical fatica graphical graphical yeah graphical quality but what I want to point out here real quick is we do have MSI Afterburner hooks to Vulcan which is showing 289 290 FPS which is exactly double what the actual in-game FPS counter is showing so I think we should ignore the Vulcan counter here and go with the in-game here we're gonna be running the highest settings possible to start because doom does not require a crap ton of hardware to run really well we are set to Vulcan custom because everything is on ultra with nightmare applied where applicable so as you can see we are currently well over 100 fps and 1080p Ultra Plus nightmare in Doom where are you at where there we go I mean 100 and 200 FPS there for a second I mean grant we're in the Titans lair I mean it's not really rendering like a huge world right these guys like ow ow ow ow ow oh yeah I think a lot of people would agree that Doom has one of the best soundtracks the one thing that's kind of lacking on this laptop honestly is speaker quality I mean I think they did an okay job considering this size at which you have to work with but I think a lot of gamers at the same time and I'm not answering for all gamers but I think most people would play with headphones anyway yeah I think there's no doubt that this thing can game and look at the GPU temperature it still runs cooler than a Founders Edition desktop card while gaming flat on the table alright some final thoughts here on the digital storm equinox the 15.6 inch form factor to me is the perfect sweet spot 17-inch has always been a little bit large to try and fit in a backpack especially if it's a thicker laptop and then 13-inch it's perfect size for on the go but it can't play games so I feel like this is the perfect sweet spot I'm still in love with its minimalistic design when it comes to laptops I am a huge fan of less is more in terms of just how sleek it looks but the level of performance that this has the gaming capability the CPU performance on this on top of it the acoustics and the temperatures on this are fantastic now all of the testing that I did was just sitting on a flat surface like this which most people would use it if you're going to be using it on your lap I don't recommend doing that because you will plug up a lot of the vents on the bottom obviously using it on a bed or something keep that in mind you're going to want this on a flat surface it does not pull in much air from the sides that would have been I think one improvement in terms of cooling is that it could have done more side Inlet the keyboard is nice to type on the keyboards nice to play on I didn't find myself accidentally clicking on things or moving the trackpad around with my wrist which is often a problem with very sensitive track pads but this one seems to be just right in terms of sensitivity here's the bottom line good gaming laptops make good productivity laptops the amount of GPU offloading that's taking place now and a lot of modern software in terms of business solutions means that anything with a discrete GPU is going to give you a good performance now I didn't do battery life testing on this because my main focus on this was going to be content creation and/or gaming which is something you're always gonna want to use on plug power AC power because that's going to give you the max performance now there's a couple of things I would've liked to have seen let's think of what it looks leaker if they could have gotten a more edge-to-edge panel in this you can see the bottom here does have a bit of Lexx in there but when you're not touching and pushing that and you're just opening closing the lid it's pretty rigid in fact one thing I want to show here real quick they've got the actual tension and the hinge just right and when you open it it tilts back you can see that hinge is just right I hate when I go to open a lid and the whole thing flips back on me one other thing I'm not a huge fan of is the way the matte black attracts fingerprints the moment you consider touching it a fingerprint pops up get me a mint touch - yeah it's just really efficient at it they show up before you even touch it but guys that has been my first look here at the new 8th gen intel 6 core laptop CPUs you guys tell me what you think I think digital storm has done a great job at minimalistic but high performance and at a price point that I think makes sense it's just under two thousand US dollars as tested I would have liked to have seen larger hard drive capacity and memory capacity at that price point but given how easy this actually upgrade this I don't think that's too much of a problem but what's more important than my opinion is yours so guys sound off in the comments below let me know what you think about this if you got any other laptops you think I should take a look at then make sure to sound off down there as well or head on over to Twitter and hit me up there at JS T sense again guys thanks for watching and as always I'll see you in the next one