Gadgetory

on the surface the razor core and in fact any other thunderbolt external video card enclosure like the Asus XG 2 is pretty simple I've got a general review that does a good job of tackling the basics here but here's that in a nutshell your laptop is small and portable but could use more graphics horsepower for a better gaming experience so it's a powered box that uses a desktop video card to boost your frames per second say temple the problem is that while I was making my simple review of the core I ended up with far more questions than answers can you put in something other than a video card is Thunderbolt 3 a significant bottleneck does it perform better on an external display will it work with non Razer notebooks can it be run in a daisy chain configuration can it handle the biggest hottest graphics cards on the market what about CPU bottlenecks so after three full days of testing I'm back welcome to the Razer core deep dive cooller masters master case maker five features they're freeform modular system allowing you to customize adjust and upgrade make it yours at the link in the video description first order of business acoustics i mentioned in my review that the core should have a power switch to reduce fan noise at idle but I didn't quantify why and this is why I plan to replace the fans in my core and why I think that it's a must-have feature on a Gen 2 product Gaming noise levels are vastly improved but I don't want to hear 5 fans spin up every single time I want to use the USB 3 hub or the Ethernet port the good news is that no matter what I threw at it thermal performance is pretty much on par with an open-air test bench it handled the GTX 480 one of the hottest most power-hungry cards ever made especially when over vaulted without even breaking a sweat and if the drivers had managed to install I'm sure the Radeon 6990 wouldn't have been an issue either given that that monster was able to physically fit inside which leads really nicely then into my next question what about non graphics cards razer has nothing about this on their product page and even when asked directly said we'll get back to you then as of filming this promptly never did so I dug into it myself my 10 gigabit network card worked perfectly after I hot plugged it in installed drivers and rebooted a Blackmagic intensity Pro and a vago raid card were both similar stories and my Asus USB 3.1 card and a fork a capture device on the other end of it a USB one even hot plugged without rebooting finally I chatted with red tech support who confirmed that their CEO has already experimented with the red rocket X accelerator card so while Razer hasn't done any firmware tuning or proper validation of these and my simple plug it in and see if it works for five minutes is by no means a substitute it actually wouldn't surprise me if compatibility was pretty strong another thing that I'm annoyed that Razer wouldn't talk to me about is compatibility with other devices yes Razer I know the official statement is that it is officially compatible with the blade stealth and the new blade at launch but what I want to know is does it work with other computers so after much digging the answer is yes and no if you picked up a machine six months ago and you're expecting to just plug and play into your Thunderbolt 3 port you will be disappointed but there's also good news after fighting with needlessly complicated bios and thunderbolt firmware updates this is how to do a BIOS update by the way I got the core working mostly as intended on a Sager NP 98 70 and msi gt72 s and Asus x99 deluxe ii and i've heard reports of it working just fine on the intel skull canyon nook and dell XPS 15 2016 so everything I've tried it on however while the Sager machine and x99 deluxe 2 both worked perfectly after some initial forced driver installation nonsense my MSI gt70 2's put up a solid fire strikes core then got crushed in real world performance without msi being able to offer me any advice yes msi i tried asking razer well hold on a second deadline is why does this matter vana sai laptop and for that matter the desktop motherboard already has desktop grade graphics it's because I wanted to know how the funderbolt interface is affecting performance which can only be achieved through an apples-to-apples test by isolating all the other variables and since there is no way to physically install a 970m in the core to run against the one in the blade 14 I needed a machine with a graphics card that I could so then the strange unrealistic synthetic scores continue but in real games we're looking at about a 25% performance with a gtx 980 and significantly more than that with a higher performance graphics card overclocking by the way is not limited by razer in any way but on the 1080 other bottlenecks seem to make it a moot point so Nvidia suggestion was that the PCI Express gen3 x4 interface could be holding us back but I didn't really buy that and a quick round of benchmarks with one of my motherboard slots forced to 4x speed settled this for me while it does seem to play a role it is not the whole story also of note here by the way is the fact that the 6700 HQ holds its own head-to-head with the last generation 8 core Extreme Edition except in extremely CPU bound titles like cities skylines pretty darn well as for the dual core 8 gig Ram equipped stealth I would expect that to lag behind a lot faster and I probably wouldn't recommend pairing it with a top-tier GPU in the core anyway it appears that the performance hit more likely comes from the overhead associated with converting from PCI Express to Thunderbolt 3 and or making PCI Express a hot pluggable interface something that on windows anyway it is definitely not designed for the next question I wanted to answer especially as someone who wouldn't necessarily care about using the core with an external display is house performance in loopback mode using the external GPU to power the laptops own display actually not bad you'll take a 15% ish hit less if all you want to do is run 3d mark all day which is what I showed back in my first video some other general questions now then some GPU features like g-sync freesync and so etc are supported on desktop GPUs and even notebooks that contain desktop GPUs like the GT 72 s but not on notebook GPUs so how does that work with the core where you can potentially have both if you're using an external display you should be able to use the feature set of the GPU loaded in the core but that won't necessarily be the case if you're using loopback mode next question can you run SLI no not in any of the traditional ways though that doesn't mean that a system with both a D GPU and an external GPU couldn't enable both of them for certain workloads okay what about daisy chaining Linus great question the core has only one Thunderbolt port and this is by design it does not officially support daisy chaining even though that's part of the funderbolt standard but when I asked razor we'll hold on a second could it just sit at the end of a chain with other devices that do Razer completely unhelpful II stayed tight-lipped thankfully though a kitty Oh helped a brother out here and hooked me up with their Thunder 3 duo Pro which is a tooless dual SSD or hard drive enclosure that worked flawlessly both on its own allowing me to fully utilize the speed of the SSDs I installed and in between the core and the system though I should emphasize here that this is an unsupported configuration and I cannot promise that drive access wouldn't affect gaming performance if you were doing both of them at the same time leading us to the last and possibly most important question for me to answer does any of this even matter ignoring me $100 rebate with qualifying system this is a $500 doodad we're talking about here one that I'm not recommending due to CPU bottlenecks pairing with a top-tier graphics card on the machine that is arguably more purpose-built for it the razor blade stealth given that it can charge off the core which is pretty cool a machine though that only costs twice as much as the empty core box in the first place I mean who has money for a core but not a badass desktop to go alongside their portable machine I mean hell you can even build a badass portable desktop in the Danny 4 sfx case that's the same size as the core but with the entire computer in it and this is all valid but my fascination with the core come not from thinking that everyone should buy one but from my excitement about what this technology means costs will come down and having portability while I'm on the go and power at home with the ability to actually upgrade a laptop is very appealing and on top of that remember project Christine I and a lot of other people dismissed it as a pipe dream but core is a huge step towards no compromises high speed hot swappable pc component modules a pretty cool future speaking of no compromises have you ever thought to yourself gee this vinyl wrap that I have on my device just kind of sucks it doesn't fit well it peels off well there's no need for that because debrand has no compromises vinyl wraps they are precision cut and available in pretty much any authentic 3m vinyl finish that you could want and the best part about D brand skins aside from the fact that they're available for laptops phones tablets game consoles controllers and more is their configurator it is fricking awesome you can see your device in a real-time preview from every angle you can adjust and customize using different colors and different finishes and then BOOM you confirm the order they're robots pack it up ship it anywhere in the world and if anything does happen to go wrong they have separate customer service robots that will absolutely get you taken care of so check it out over at the D brand link in the video description please note D brand does not require to use a bright pink freakin carbon fire wrap like Linus does you can pick your own so thanks for watching guys if this video sucked you know what to do but it was awesome get subscribed hit that like button or check out the link to where to buy the stuff we featured at Amazon in the video description also linked in the description is our merch store which has cool shirts like this one and our community forum which you should totally join now that you're done doing all that stuff you're probably wondering what to watch next so click that little button in the top right to check out our latest video over on channels for fun