Gadgetory

Linus tech tips coverage of CES 2014 is brought to you by NCI XCOM your source for great technology selection and service along with Corsair memory and Western Digital better onboard graphics is great for lots of things we can't necessarily all agree on what it's better for I mean some people might go oh well I can use graphics cores and OpenCL to accelerate certain content creation workloads that are more optimal on a graphics core than they are in a CPU core gamers might go oh well hey I can I can you know play games like dota 2 or League of Legends on my onboard graphics rather than getting a dedicated graphics card and then folks who just want to enjoy media content playback might go out well if my onboard graphics can handle a couple consecutive 4k outputs well hey that's great then I guess I don't need a dedicated graphics card for that but I think what we can all agree on is that one of the best things about onboard graphics is the fact that they're tightly integrated with the CPU which enables lower power to go along with that high performance and even lower heat output compared to a dedicated discrete component so we are on a voyage of discovery where we're going to be traveling the show floor and the Suites to find not necessarily as many implementations of intel iris series graphics as we can but definitely the widest a variety that we can find so there'll be like notebooks and all-in-ones and even this thing whatever this is stay tuned for that ok I'll tell you it's a computer fits in my hand and I'm a head ok it's not really good for that now this isn't exactly what I had in mind when I first heard about crystal well or as it became iris pro graphics but this is the Brix Pro from gigabyte and it actually got a full lineup of them but what I want to focus on is the pro so there are two different ones right here that are running a couple of different configurations this one has an Intel Core i7 4770k l' what this thing looks like in my very small hands it really is a handheld PC it's about like 2 knucks stacks together we have both HDMI and mini DisplayPort out Gigabit LAN super speed USB 3 on the back on the front a Kensington lock and what looks like a pretty beefy copper heatsink inside it can accept both an EM SATA SSD as well as a two and a half inch hard drive but what's really impressive about this is the fact that this is battlefield 4 and I'd like to take a moment and show you guys the graphics options that we have running so we were running battlefield 4 at 720p medium details on motion blur off and getting an acceptable gaming experience on onboard Intel graphics that is a first but the core i7 model isn't the only option so this one right here uses a 46 set off rather 4570 R it also has the same expansion you can see we're running a 4k video demo over HDMI yes thank you so on this one we've got a 4k demo running on a seiki TV and I guess the if the objective is to show that iris Pro can handle 4k video playback without any difficulty then mission accomplished one thing I wouldn't mind checking out and this is something that I didn't necessarily mention we were going to do is I would love to see what our CPU usage looks like while this is going on yes friends we are looking at about 29% CPU usage playing back 4k video on a machine that can literally fit in your pocket if your pockets are very large in our quest for Intel iris powered devices you might say that the pickings have become whoop I almost dropped it that would be bad a little bit slim this is the Asus Zenbook ux301 la it is an extremely thin core i7 iris powered ultrabook that features a 2560 by 1440 display and of course the graphics horse power to back it up did I mention it has iris in side on the back it has Corning Gorilla Glass 3 on the inside somehow inside this tiny enclosure they've packed USB 3 SuperSpeed micro HDMI more USB 3 SuperSpeed DisplayPort out an SD card slot and of course well not of course this doesn't this can't take this for granted it's got up to 8 gigs of memory and up to 512 gigs of RAM zero SSD storage making this one fin led-backlit sexy ultrabook iris powered device oh sorry didn't see you there guys I was too busy playing grid to on a battery powered 21 inch all-in-one that's running Intel onboard graphics we're running at 1080p with medium details it actually looks quite excellent and this is the sony vaio tap 21 another unique iris design that we haven't seen before it features a core i7 45:58 you so that is a dual-core 4 thread core i7 processor this particular one has 16 gigs of ram on it it's got a 1080p display it's got NFC and this is the real kicker for me I mentioned it briefly before but this thing is battery-powered you can actually run for a few hours away from wall power should you so desire and on top of all that it's actually quite slim so it's got a nice aluminum backing here it's got a full 10-point multi-touch touchscreen and then it's got a gorgeous little aluminum stand that allows you to adjust your angle either up more vertical like this as would be suitable for more like desktop use or you know if the kids are playing Angry Birds or whatever else you can actually fold it down all the way flat and use it as more of a tabletop style display well display and full computer this is the last stop on the iris train here at the show this is the CyberPower Zeus Hercules it features an Intel Core i7 quad core 47 50 HQ so that is pretty much ok it's like a mobile workstation right so you can use the quad core processor to do pretty much whatever you want in terms of photo editing or video editing you can use the the video decode and video and code features on the GPU so that is the iris pro graphics for those applications as well and all of that is within a very very slim form factor now with that said why don't we just sort of step aside from the workstation thing for a minute ok yeah it's got a 1080p display it looks really great it's very portable it's actually reasonably lightweight when you consider what you can do with it but let's talk about the gaming capability of iris pro graphics ok CPUs with iris Pro do consume a little bit more power but remember guys you don't then need to add a dedicated graphics chip in order to get acceptable performance now I've got a friend over at Intel who is kind of telling me okay yeah iris / you're looking at 30 40 percent better than iris but what does that mean in real life what it means in real life is that they've actually used this very notebook to run professional tournaments with thousands and thousands of people watching them without anybody ever actually realizing so this is a Starcraft 2 1v1 that they were running off of a notebook with integrated graphics so I hope this whole showcase where we've got all in ones with batteries we've got gaming notebooks that don't have dedicated graphics chips we've got little tiny PCs that can hook up and play 4k video I hope this has given you guys some perspective on the variations that can be achieved variations why did I even say that I was doing really well until like I completely jumped off the train of how well that video was going anyway I'm not going to worry too much about it maybe I was just like too too dazzled by all that variety that we just saw I needed to come up with a new variety of word to describe it anyway guys that's pretty much it for our Irish showcase here at CES 2014 like this video if you liked it dislike it if you disliked it as always don't forget to subscribe and the last thing I'd like to ask you guys is out of all the different form factors we saw which one is your favorite in this video just leave a comment under the video and let us know