Gadgetory

venom is back last time around with the black book 15 I told them I loved the performance and loved the aluminum chassis but I felt like the price was pretty expensive I also confessed that 13 to 14 inches is my ideal size and that no 15 inch really had a fair shot at stealing my heart so now they've come back swinging with the black book 13 zero which targets a more aggressive price point and looks at least on the surface like an absolute stunner let's see how it fares cooller masters new master keys Pro L and Pro s keyboards provide sixteen point seven million color RGB backlighting genuine Cherry MX switches and an industry-leading ARM Cortex processor learn more the link in the video description now I could say that zero means something like zero compromises are so thin in lines to feel like you're carrying nothing but based on that I know that the venom guys are a bunch of gamers with a focus on selling gaming laptops I suspect it means zero dedicated graphics card so the zero whether it carries Intel's Ultrabook certification sticker or not is pretty much an ultrabook sorry gamers with that said it's clearly a better-than-average ultrabook from the outset it's available in a variety of configurations all the way down to a very attractive $9.99 US dollar model with the core i5 and a 120 gig SSD OS drive with a 500 gig hard drive all the way up to the top of the line $2,500 midnight edition with a core i7 6500 you ain't gigs of ram a top-of-the-line 512 gig samsung 950 pro m2 PCI Express based SSD and a 2 terabyte Samsung 850 Evo SATA SSD for storage it's got an Intel 82-62 by 2 a/c wireless card that managed over 20 megabytes per second sustained transfers in my tests it's called Windows 10 Pro and a healthy 45 watt hour lithium-ion battery it features an all aluminum chassis designed with perhaps a greater propensity for picking up greasy fingerprints and a little bit more flex than I'd like not to mention that the hinge isn't the premium one finger style but it makes up for at least some of all that by being crazy light right around 1.4 kilos or 3 pounds overall I'd say the device feels pretty darn good io is a pretty good mix with a single type C port and a headphone jack and nothing else it sorry I was thinking of the MacBook that's right No it's got power in a USB 2.0 port and a headphone microphone combo jack on the left with a USB 3.0 port an HDMI port a Type C five gigabit USB 3.0 port not Thunderbolt unfortunately and an SD card reader on the right I love the SD card reader I mean the number of times I have needed one of those in the field let me tell ya not good flipping this puppy open reveals something that may feel like a compromise to some but that I don't actually mind I actually ordered my custom-built XPS 15 with a 1080p display because I don't feel like at this size the higher dpi makes enough of a difference to justify the battery life that I'm giving up and apparently Venom agrees because every model of blackbook 13-0 is equipped with a 1080p IPS display but while the resolution spec of this panel is not that impressive in other ways it's among the best that I've seen the blacks are midnight black and there is astonishment a quite bleed even though venom has the guts to ship it with a black desktop background as a communications device the 13 0 is a bit of a mixed bag on the one hand the microphone actually sounds pretty good but on the other the 1 megapixel camera doesn't perform particularly well in either backlit or even front lit scenarios with the subject ending up quite washed out and pale-looking so while the speakers are ok about all you'd expect for a notebook this size making it fine as a casual movie-watching device on the couch it is not ideal for regular video conferencing the keyboard is what I would characterize as pretty good the keycaps wobble more than I'd like on a truly premium device and the stroke action is a little bit mushy but for me there are really more important things on a thin and light the adjustable backlight is great and the 13-0 delivered on typing speed and accuracy as well as the overall layout the arrow keys have that annoying up-down combo close together thing but I think Apple started but it's otherwise bog-standard with function modifiers available for pretty much anything that I would need to do including one to disable the touchpad which leads us to that I guess the touchpad has some high points and also some low points from the things that I like perspective it's got the full range of gesture controls which can be set up within the Elan tech control panel it's got a satisfying pad click with no discrete buttons and it does a pretty darn good job of rejecting both palms and my click finger when I'm operating it two-handed but it comes with what is for me a bit of an annoying flaw hopefully one that can be addressed with a driver tweak kerb something along those lines there's a for me perceptible leg between moving my finger across the trackpad and seeing my actions on the screen this is true with the notebook plugged in or running off battery and I even went as far as to reinstall windows using the included 16 gig USB Drive which is nice to have by the way I prefer that to a recovery partition as an enthusiast which resolved this issue when I encountered it on the blade 14 2015 moving on though there is more good stuff the bundled software package is very Spartan basically some alternate browsers and not much else Norton is on there but it's a full year subscription rather than a 30-day subsidized trial so I'll give that a neutral rating leaving really only a few things to talk about in the part of this video where I would normally talk about gaming performance haha acoustics are better than I expected with the 13-0 managing to run fanless quite frequently even with the i7 installed so you'll do better with an i5 skew and while the battery takes over four hours to charge which is agonizing when you're waiting around for it to run a battery life benchmark the good news is that in PC markets productivity suite it managed to run for well over three hours continuously which is a pretty darn solid score leading us finally to the conclusion in a market that did not contain the razor blade stealth the black book zero would be a savior to folks who wanted a great ultra book experience without dealing with the hassle of running Windows on a MacBook Air there are some minor quirks in the real world it's a less obvious choice but not an entirely invalid one while the blade stealth features an undeniably stronger thinner industrial design Thunderbolt and RGB backlit keyboard and a higher resolution display across all SKUs it's thinner fans will work harder to control CPU thermals and it's much less configurable spec wise with a maximum of eight gigs of ram soldered to the mainboard and only the n dot to drive being upgradable the black book 13 0 by contrast and this one hits pretty hard for a heavy Google Chrome tab users like myself manages to cram the same capacity battery a two and a half inch drive Bay which is pretty nice if your ultrabook is your primary machine as it is for so many people these days and a sodium memory socket into it's only marginally thicker shell and while venom doesn't advertise the capability of the 1302 run a single 16 gig ddr3l sodium I tried it with a 1333 megahertz intelligent memory branded stick that I had lying around and it worked perfectly that right there is a huge win from my perspective on what is already a very compelling little product provided that they can quickly sort out the touchpad leg so thanks for watching guys if this video sucked you know what to do but if it was awesome get subscribed hit that like button or even consider supporting us directly by using our affiliate code to shop at Amazon instructions up there by buying a cool t-shirt it's not a t-shirt ok that's technically also not a t-shirt that's also a long-sleeve sure whatever 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