Gadgetory

so I am on my fourth international trip in the last like three and a half weeks I've been all over the place New York two or three times LA and now finally I am in beautiful Paris so it's night time I was thinking to myself I could go out and I could see the sights enjoy the nightlife or I could show you guys something that I whipped up that I call the ultimate travel gaming setup okay so I know what you guys are thinking that's just a razor blade stealth with a mousepad a mouse and international adapter and power brick there's nothing ultimate gaming and there's nothing special about it but I do have a piece that is special and this was actually kind of inspired by my upcoming review of the razor blade stealth because as you guys probably know if you've seen any coverage of a previous played stealth one of the big selling points for razor for this device is its compatibility with their razor core external graphics card enclosure but I don't think most people are gonna buy that kind of thing so I wanted to review the device stand alone but that doesn't mean that I wanted to ignore the capabilities however as you guys have probably noticed this is not a razor blade core this is the secret sauce that actually makes this travel gaming setup more possible because the core or core v2 now I guess is really designed to be left at home so you take your notebook around with you you get home you plug in your Thunderbolt cable and boom you've got a full desktop grade graphics experience this guy this is the a horas GT X 1080 gaming box and it's actually available with a variety of different GPUs pre-installed in it so small and compact that you could be reasonably expected to travel around with it so it enables a completely different use case than the razor core which is actually pretty bulky not to mention it does not come with a handy-dandy little travel case so razor doesn't really advertise this but their blade stealth and actually their blade for that matter I've tested them with a variety of different external thunderbolt and external GPU enclosures and I've actually found that while they don't guarantee interoperability between their notebooks and their GPU enclosures and third-party accessories it's actually been pretty good so your mileage may vary in terms of which external box you use but I wouldn't necessarily feel like you have to buy the razor one and that's a good thing because razor I mean I love you guys and all that but you guys charge a freaking lot for your external GPU box but pricing on this one puts it closer to if you account for that it comes with a gtx 1080 inside and that those obviously have a cost this guy comes to about two hundred dollars only compared to the razor core v2 at about five hundred dollars so it doesn't come with this fancy orange cable mod cable that was that was actually something that i added so on the one side you've got a really large fan that is completely dedicated like all the way from here to here to here to here to this mini gt x 1080 graphics card on the front you've just got a ARS logo on this side you've got a built-in power supply a couple of cooling fans that are bringing fresh air in over here and then around back you find the business end so there's a standard PCIe 16x graphics card so feasibly you could actually swap this out in the future if you could find something that would fit then you've got some included i/o so you've got a fast charging USB three three more USB 3s and then the Thunderbolt that you need in order to power the GPU so it doesn't have the same IO as the core and honest I'll tell you guys it's been a little bit more finicky at this stage been the razor core has requiring a reboot sometimes in order to be detected but overall the experience has been pretty decent so we just take our Thunderbolt 3 cable plug that bad boy in and what's cool about this is that we actually don't even need the blade stealth included power adapter anymore so this takes the place of your laptop power adapter ok so let's fire it up the gaming box actually turns on automatically once you plug in Thunderbolt and power up your machine I just need to give my setup a second to detect my mouse and all that good stuff getting a couple issues with USB connectivity this is something that I've seen with this particular box before it doesn't affect my use case right now but it is something to maybe keep an eye out for before you go ahead and jump on this exact setup but but overall this is about the direction we're heading in terms of mobile gaming like look how compact and easy to travel with this whole setup is ok now before I fire up the game there's one quick thing I want to check just I want to make sure that this hand shook properly so yes GT X 1080 shows up here and the Nvidia control panel shows up so we should be good to go now I just want to configure my options here now normally playing on a laptop even a gaming laptop you'd be setting up like bitch tier options but not today we're gonna crank it to 3200 by 1800 FXAA and we're turning the graphics to very high with motion blur off now to be clear the best gaming experience on these external boxes is had with an external monitor because there's only so much bandwidth in this Thunderbolt connection there's a PCIe 4x connection and then some protocol overhead so when you have to communicate from the system to the graphics card in order to actually render the game then that's a lot of bandwidth and then when you have to send the graphics cards display output data in of actually hooking up an HDMI or DisplayPort connection here when you have to send it and I think it's called loopback mode back to the laptops display then you end up hurting yourself because you're using some of your bandwidth up for that so you can expect to take anywhere from a 10 to a 20 percent performance hit is this not incredible like yeah we're only running it 38 to 42 fps so it's not the smoothest gaming experience of all time but like I'm being pretty unfair to it like we're running at 3800 by 1600 I don't have to do that on a 13.3 inch display so let's say we drop it to 1920 by 1080 let's have a look at what performance looks like there there it is my friends ultra details 65 to 70 FPS gaming in a reasonably demanding game on a laptop okay so I know that external GPU boxes aren't new and the razor blade stealth isn't particularly new obviously carrying a mouse around with you when you travel isn't new but the reason that I'm bringing this up now as opposed to before is just because a few things have all come together and made this sort of this what's been a pipe dream of mine for the future start to look like it's a lot closer maybe even a reality today so number one is that these external GPU boxes are getting both smaller and cheaper that's awesome number two is that notebooks these actually legitimately thin and light notebooks with great battery life I use this on a plane for over six hours with a couple of battery tweaks on my way here finally have quad-core processors because that was the issue a lot of modern games are finally getting to the point where they can actually use more than just a couple of CPU cores so even though razors been talking about this use case for well since the blade stealth launched it never made any sense to me before but check this out so you can see here the CPU is turbo hang up as high as like three points gigahertz and change to keep the CPU from being a bottleneck and this is pretty cool here back up a little bit I'm gonna lean in with my microphone which I'm wearing this whole setup is quiet so in some ways this is actually better for my purposes than a gaming laptop with everything integrated because now I can upgrade my super portable notebook or my GPU separately as my needs change and the pricing is not that far off especially when you consider that like this graphics card is non-proprietary so it could just be moved to like a friend's desktop or resold when you need a new GPU like ah this is totally game-changing so thanks guys for checking out my video on the ultimate travel gaming setup if you dislike that you can hit that button if you liked it hit like if you want to get subscribe do that if you want to check out where to buy the stuff we featured I'll try and throw links in the video description for that this is actually available with a number of different GPUs I'm not sure if I mentioned that before also down there's our merch store and our community forums so you should totally join that