Xiaomi Gaming Laptop - Worth the Risk

Hey, how's it going? Dave 2D here. So Xiaomi recently announced their Mi gaming laptop and it's a product I think a lot of people would be interested in because Xiaomi makes some really good stuff for a pretty good price. This is their Mi Notebook Pro. I've done a review of it.

Really heavy hitter for it's price point We've seen the Mi Notebook Air also a really good product for the price point. So on paper it would seem like the Mi Gaming Laptop would be like hey, you know, that sounds pretty cool. So looking at the paper specs and the photos from the press release, they're pretty impressive. One of the things they do really well is build quality.

I think that's like probably their biggest strength when it comes to what you'd expect at that price. Like, very few laptops at that price point are gonna look like this. This is one of the best built gaming laptops you're gonna see at that price point. And looking at the Mi Notebook  Pro, it's just a really well machined laptop.

Really clean edges. The occasional sharp edge here and there, like on the bottom they didn't do the best job with the machining but it's a really well built laptop. So I expect the Mi Gaming Laptop to be similar. Their design is quite unique.

The hinge looks a lot like that piston hinge we've seen on the HP Spectre and I used to have concerns about that hinge design but it's actually really good. The design of this whole Mi Gaming Laptop looks quite simple. It's this muted look. Grey slab.

No red accents. No logos. The only Xiaomi branding is at the bottom of the screen. Kinda like the Notebook Pro.

And it's a good look. It's actually one of the least gamer-looking laptops I've seen, which I like. The bottom of that laptop seems to have some kind of RGB lighting for some underglow but aside from that it's nothing crazy on the exterior. The screen on the Mi Gaming Laptop is supposed to have a 72% NTSC rating, which is actually the exact same rating as the one on the Mi Notebook Pro and it might be the same screen, it might not I kinda hope it isn't because this screen wasn't -- I mean it's not terrible but it's not [a] great gaming laptop screen so hopefully they changed it up a little bit but the Mi Gaming Laptop was supposed to take a lot of build and design cues from the Mi Notebook Pro which is actually a good thing, this thing had great Dolby Atmos speakers and I think the gaming laptop will as well.

It's gonna have that good keyboard layout, but this time with RGB and macro keys, and it's going to be running a Windows Precision trackpad, which is always good to see on any kind of laptop. The ports look pretty good. Xiaomi does ports well - they kinda stick a whole bunch of ports into most of their laptops and for the most part, people are happy, they don't care too much about the whole minimalism and stuff like that. Performance - they're running an i5 that's comboed with a GTX 1050 Ti Or the i7 with the GTX 1060.

Now that's obviously going to affect the price, but the thing that's kind of extra cool is the cooling. So, Xiaomi's saying it's going to be the coolest, high-performance laptop on the market. And honestly, I believe them because look at this thing, this was the Notebook Pro and Despite this thing only having an MX150, they've designed it well so you can crank the voltage up really easily. Now, that thermal performance comes at a cost, and that is weight.

So if you look at the paper specs and you kinda don't look at the height, it's actually heavier than I thought it would be and I think a lot of that weight comes from that thermal solution because they're running five heatpipes and those things are not light. Ok, the last thing I want to talk about is pricing. And this is kind of the most important part of this video. Xiaomi products tend to kind of capture the interest of people in North America and Europe because they tend to be cheaper than their counterparts and I was surprised at how expensive the Mi Gaming Laptop is, if you look at the pricing of - I guess similarly designed products, so relatively thinner and lighter gaming laptops that are well built.

The Xiaomi Mi Gaming Laptop doesn't stick out as being an amazing value because the gaming laptop market, especially in that GTX 1050 Ti or GTX 1060 segment. That's a very, very competitive segment. Like you're seeing like twenty, thirty laptops in that kind of - performance range so pricing ranging from $800 to I don't know, $2000 at the top end, so this Xiaomi product it's not super cheap - it's not that it's like expensive or anything, but you always take a risk when you're buying a product like this - at least right now - the brand isn't represented well in North America or Europe, you kind of have to be in Asia to obtain this thing, so there's a bit of a risk when it comes to buying something like this. And it's just that I don't feel like for most people that live outside of the Asian market - I don't think it's worth it to really purchase this, this Xiaomi Gaming Laptop.

It kind of took me for a surprise. I expect it to be cheaper. I'm sure it's a great product, and you're getting really, really good build quality with cool underglow and some really great thermal performance, but when you kind of look at the grand picture, and you see the other options that are available, it's not that it's a bad product, it's just not nearly as compelling of a purchase as other Xiaomi products have been where the price is just like, "Wow! That's so much cheaper!" This gaming laptop from Xiaomi, I'm lukewarm about it, so I'll probably do a review when that thing comes in, but - I don't think anyone should be preordering that thing and be like, "Oh this is like the best value," because quite frankly, I don't think it is. Ok, hopefully you guys enjoyed this video, thumbs if you liked it, subs if you loved it.

See you guys next time!.

What can you do with a $20 laptop

This is a $20 laptop. It was a thrift store find, and I got a little
bit lucky in finding not just an IBM ThinkPad, which are bulletproof machines, but even the
same model that I briefly owned back in the late 90s  a 600X. I jumped on it, despite initially having no
idea what I could realistically use it for. Join me as I find out whether 20-year-old
hardware can still serve a purpose today.

It turned out to be a little worse for wear
than I initially thought. But I knew I wanted to nurse it back to health,
because giving old machines of all kinds a new lease on life is just something that gives
me satisfaction. Id find a use for it later. Back in 1998 computers were running,
well, Windows 98.

And this computer rocks a Pentium III 450
with a fully upgraded 576MB of RAM, so Im not even going to be upgrading to XP. At least Windows 98 runs surprisingly smoothly
in fact, it feels about as snappy as a modern PC running Windows 10. There were a couple of things I knew I had
to do before I could dive in and try to figure out a new purpose for this thing. The absolute first thing was to make a drive
image using Macrium Reflect.

Im sure there are other good drive cloners
out there, but they all seem tailored to a slightly different purpose, and Reflect works
really well for just quickly backing up and restoring entire drives, and keeping multiple
images handy. This is a free download and its a really
useful utility  with a 4GB drive like the one this laptop came with, its easy to
store a bunch of images on your main computer as you do other maintenance, just in case
you mess something up and need to restore one. The second mandatory task was a virus and
malware scan, and I discovered that this laptop had an even bigger infestation of unwanted
pests than my first Manhattan apartment. I have no idea what the previous owner had
been doing on this computer, but he had clearly just abandoned it along with all the software
and files he had on it because the viral infection had gotten so bad that it was affecting functionality.

Even right-clicking no longer worked, and
trying to do things like defragging crashed the computer. I did the virus scan while the drive was still
hooked up to my modern computer for backup  much easier that way  and I did the
image first just in case my virus scanner nuked any system files while cleaning. I did have to try a few different scanners
before I found one that could cure my particular viruses without killing the patient. I didnt get a disc copy of Windows along
with the computer, so I had to keep the one I already had on the hard drive.

And I wanted to keep all the ThinkPad tools
that it came installed with too. The laptop also needed a few hardware fixes. The battery it came with was completely dead
and this can be difficult depending on the model, but I managed to find a reconditioned
one for $15. As far as I can tell, it works just as well
as a new one.

And I ended up spending 8 bucks on Ebay buying
a used 40GB hard drive to replace the one that came with the laptop, mostly because
the noise old IBM Travelstar drives make sounds like somebody spinning a bunch of roulette
marbles around the inside of a teacup. It doesnt install confidence in the drive,
and its also just incredibly annoying. So all told, I really spent about $43 to get
the hardware fully restored, and upgraded. I finally fired it up and...

I was back into the computing delights that
only Windows 98 can provide. Several defrag runs and some Windows patch
installations later and I had a lean, mean and clean machine that was ready for anything
I wanted to throw at it. The question was, now what? It was both enjoyable and satisfying just
getting this ThinkPad back in working order, but I wanted to really do something with it. I found several sites that list various tasks
you can use older laptops for, but most of them are either best suited for systems that
arent quite this vintage and can at least run a modern version of Windows, or theyre
just not things Id ever use a computer for to begin with.

Stuff like acting as a wifi repeater  I
mean, Id rather buy a cheap router for that than leave a computer dedicated to it
24/7. It dawned on me that I have literally several
binders full of old CD games, and as luck would have it, my 600X, despite its age, has
a DVD drive. These computers came with their own version
of IBMs Ultrabay, meaning they could be configured with different drives and end-users
could even swap them out. Most of these shipped with floppy drives,
but mine has a DVD drive and its probably one of the first laptops of any kind that
did.

Now, an important digression here. The PC and Windows standards are known for
backward compatibility, but this isnt totally reliable in fact theres one huge caveat. Back when Microsoft introduced Windows 7 64
bit, they completely broke compatibility with 16 bit applications  they just intentionally
stripped that subsystem from Windows. Nowadays most people are running 64 bit Windows
of some kind, leaving no real path for 16 bit applications or games.

This can be a kick to the gut the first time
youre feeling nostalgic for a game of SimTower or Close Combat and get absolutely shut down
by Windows. There are ways around this, most of which
involve running either a virtual machine and an entirely separate 32 bit copy of Windows,
or DOSBox. I dont begrudge anyone that wants to do
this  its kind of a pain in the butt, but it does mean you can just use a single
modern PC for everything. I ran a virtual machine back when I was testing
Windows 8 on my Windows 7 computer, and Ive tried out DOSbox for some of my older DOS
games.

But virtual machines require a lot of system
resources and can be difficult to set up, plus you need another copy of Windows. DOSbox is an emulator, and like all emulators
it has its problems. Not all games may run faithfully, or at all,
or they may run with technical issues. Also, as its name implies DOSbox is a DOS
emulator; if you want to run Windows games, you again need to run Windows on top of it,
and install all the drivers manually.

Im not slagging off DOSbox here, but its
just always better to run games on real metal if you can. So if you haven't guessed yet, thats one new purpose for this laptop: old games. Its the right CPU speed and its got
the right operating system. An older computer can be as good as any vintage
game console for playing games  there are actually a lot more older games for PC than
any game system, and many of them will really only work on older hardware.

That said, setting this up has reminded me
of how painful the transition from DOS to Windows was back in the 90s. Laptops especially often use non-standard
or at least uncommon hardware, and by the Windows 98 days, they often only shipped with
Windows drivers  perfect for those 16 bit Windows games, but to run DOS games youre
going to need to find and install DOS drivers specific to your hardware, and then manually
edit your autoexec.Bat and config.Sys files (remember those?) Ive been having a lot of trouble with my
sound card drivers, which dont seem to exist for DOS, although oddly I can get MIDI
music to play but not sound effects. If anyone knows where I can get some DOS drivers
for a Crystal Soundfusion PCI card, let me know. But, you might be thinking is there anything
just a little more current that you can do on an old machine than run 20 year old games? Well, yes, to a point  you can install
desktop Linux on it.

Now, most Linux distributions have advanced
to the point that theyre not going to run any better on old hardware than Windows 10
would, but a few are geared towards low-spec hardware. I had to try a few different ones before settling
on Point Linux, which runs pretty well out of the box on this machine and maybe ironically
for me, at least, actually has better driver support than Windows 98. I guess it shouldnt be too surprising now,
but the last time I installed desktop Linux I could not get half of my hardware working
at all  this time I even got wifi straight away, which has been a hellish and so far
unsuccessful experience in Windows 98 because of a lack of WPA support. But old hardware is still old hardware  dont
expect to even be browsing a lot of modern web sites once you get Linux installed.

Heres YouTube running on a 20 year old
laptop  amazing that it even works at all, but its not really what Id call useable. A lot of modern Linux apps also just wont
work at all  for example, the Steam Linux client requires a 1ghz CPU and from what I
gather some sort of 3D graphics card with Linux drivers installed. But even the Opera and Chromium browsers both
require the SSE2 instruction set, which the Pentium III lacks. You could go just a little bit later than
this laptop and opt for a Pentium 4, though youll definitely pay more than $20 in that
case.

Still, with wifi working on Linux, Im able
to download any game patches I may need through regular old Firefox  which thankfully does
work - and then install them on Windows. Its a little bit annoying switching back
and forth between operating systems, but I. Dont do it that often. Of course with Linux you can teach yourself
programming, you can run a home media or file server, you can teach yourself Linux, or all sorts of other things.

Its a modern OS but one with its roots
in Unix, so you can both learn a lot of things by using it and do a lot of fun things with
it. Youre still going to be pretty limited
by the lack of horsepower in an old machine, and even just navigating around the operating
system involves an annoying delay every single time I click on something, but unlike modern
versions of Windows, you can scale back Linux as far as you want to get it to run decently
on any hardware. So you might end up finding yourself wanting
to install it on a different machine too, but its still helpful to have it on an
old laptop since it acts as a bridge between older, DOS-based flavors of Windows, and the
present day. Now, lets say you want go to out and buy
your own old laptop to try some of this stuff out on  there are a few things Id look
for.

First, seriously, buy a ThinkPad if you can
theyre user-serviceable, theyre extremely durable, and theyre everywhere
meaning parts are everywhere too. Theyre also really cheap, obviously, so
a great value. If you cant buy a ThinkPad, try to stick
with one of the big-name, popular brands  just to make it easier to get parts. Second, it is very handy to have at *least*
a CD drive, if not a DVD drive.

A DVD drive is recommended because its
just easier to install Linux  very difficult to find CD-based install images these days. Failing that, a laptop with a bootable USB
port can substitute, although that would have been hard to find in the late 90s. Even my forward-looking 600X cant boot
from its USB port, though you can always look for something made slightly later. That said, an optical drive is still a must
for 16 bit Windows games; by then the gaming world had mostly moved on from floppies, although
having a system with both drives, or at least the ability to swap them out like many ThinkPads
can, would be ideal.

Third, if you want to run any sort of modern
applications, look for a Pentium 4. Youll pay a bit more, though. Finally, most of this applies to old desktops
as well, so if you swing that way, youll find things similar but a bit easier. Ive actually got an old desktop from this
same era that I might do a separate video on as an addendum to this, but the basic gist
of things is that its easier to find old desktops with standardized hardware and great
driver support, or build one yourself.

Now before you rush out to buy your own individual
components, just know that the costs of building your own old PC dont scale well  youre going to spend a lot
more than $20, though you can probably still keep it under
$100. But it might make more financial sense to
just buy something pre-built and customize it. I personally love old laptops like this, though,
specifically because theyre locked in time. Theres always temptation with a desktop
to upgrade it, expand it, and modernize it just to get that one more game running or
get a few more frames per second  and before you know it, youve just got a modern PC.

Laptops are more like game consoles  they
are what they are, and seeing what they can and cant do is part of the fun of owning
an older one. So thats it, I hope youve enjoyed this
look at my ThinkPad 600X, and maybe itll inspire you to try to do something with some
old hardware youve got lying around as well. If youve got any good ideas for repurposing
an old laptop, leave a comment below, and dont forget to hit that subscribe button
if you havent already. See you next time..

Top 3 Cheap Laptops for Students!

Hey, how's it going Dave 2d here, and this is a video on some inexpensive laptops for students And I know you can get some very cheap laptops out there for like 200 bucks that have Windows 10 on them but those laptops I feel like they wouldn't last for regular use for what a student does day in day out putting it out of your bag Using it everyday. Those are not good laptops I feel for students so what I have in front of me are three very well-built Well priced laptops that all do different things these aren't competitors. There's not going to be a comparison of them It's just three individual laptops and depending on what you do as a student or what you want to do with your laptop You might be interested in one of these and I also have a couple other side picks as well But the three main ones are: the asus ux305 The acer aspire 5 And the lenovo 320s. So let's start off with the Acer first I've done a full review of this thing before this is a great device for students who want to get a laptop for school But also want to do some light gaming basically It's an inexpensive regular looking 15-inch laptop that can handle current gaming titles Reasonably well because of the video card.

It has an MX 150 from Nvidia Which is kind of like the GT 1030 and most current titles are very playable on this machine. If you want a more detailed review I'll link my video below. The configuration with the MX 150 cost $600 and it's a great laptop for the money. Now there were two things like might be an issue for students First is the battery life I'm only getting around five hours of battery life for this so if you want to bring it to school and you have a full Day of class you're gonna have to bring your charger with you.

The second thing is that it's not super thin or light It's not like a really thick gaming laptop, but it has some size to it. Now if you are looking for something That's a little thinner and lighter that is still a good price point It's this thing Lenovo 320 s so this thing starts at I think $550 for the base model, it's a full aluminum build but the chassis has some flex to it the bottom panel is easy to open up for upgrading the RAM and storage the Screen is a little dim and the base model isn't a 1080p screen It's not bad though videos and pictures still look really sharp at normal viewing distances the keyboard is comfortable to use but The keystrokes are little softer than I'd like and there's no backlighting. The trackpad uses Windows precision drivers Which are really and the battery life is surprisingly good as well , I'm getting around seven hours But this thing comes in couple configurations starts at around $500 - $550 depending on sales, but great device for students Okay, next up we have the Asus UX330 Which is the successor to the UX306 which I've reviewed in the past and this thing is a surprisingly good laptop for the money. Now, it's not super cheap It's 700 bucks.

This thing has great build quality and a pretty simple design It has two regular USB ports, a USB C and a micro HDMI. It has a good screen 1080p matte finish And it gets pretty bright. Also has a nice backlit keyboard and windows precision trackpad. Tracking is really good on the surface It's just a nice texture, but the button clicks are a little shallow.

They don't feel bad though, Just really short travel. The speakers on this thing are really good. They're located on the bottom, and I mean for this price It's kind of crazy How good these speakers sound. They have Harman Kardon branding, but usually having branding like this for a laptop speaker doesn't mean anything They usually sound very average, but these actually sound good It still doesn't have strong bass, but it's a very clean, audio, and you'll be happy with these speakers It is a 13 inch screen.

It's a little bit smaller than the other two laptops I've mentioned so far So depending what you do or what you want to do with your laptop this might be too small But if you're looking for a 13 inch device you're on the money The one thing I don't like about this device is actually the fan noise It comes on way more often than you'd like it to and when it does It's pretty loud and actually comes on when you're doing very un-intensive stuff like watching a YouTube video or browsing the web It's kind of weird because this is something that software should be able to fix But it's been out for several months and there hasn't been a change, so we'll see. Now for the price for $700 It's not something that is for someone looking for the cheapest laptop right, there are going to be cheaper laptops on this But if you're in the market for some of that's kind of higher-end like an XPS 13 or an HP Envy Those are like 900 bucks or more. This thing is a lot less But still a really good laptop, now the other thing I want to mention This is not part of the three that I was originally going to talk about is kind of like an off pick so this is the Dell Inspiron 13 7000 now this is a two in one device. I'm not a big fan of two in one devices.

I find that they're a little bit kind of cumbersome for everyday use as a student But I know that a lot of my audience are crazy about two in one devices just because they're so versatile this one's $650 and I think it's the best foldable two in one device at this price point now There's a lot of inexpensive two in one devices and a lot of them suck. Just they're not good as laptops They're even worse as tablets But this one is very usable in both forms the keyboard in particular is surprisingly good for the price It feels like honestly it feels like they're XPS keyboard. It's really good trackpad is good It's a Windows precision driver the whole thing has excellent build quality lots of metal, impressive speakers for the price It's a great two and one the two things that I don't love about it Though are the screen and the battery life The screen feels a little dim and I really wish it was brighter because this is such a good device for media consumption But because of the dimmer screen you can't use it outdoors readily, and the battery life could be better I'm only getting about five hours of life on this thing, but for a cheap But well built two and one, this is my top pick so the last thing I want to talk about are some devices that are well. They're not really on the table here It's kind of like a theoretical device so right now the eighth generation CPUs from Intel have been launched Intel's coffee Lake and those 8th gen CPUs are kind of trickling down into all these devices and everything Is getting refreshed so the seventh generation KB Lake CPUs those prices are coming down a little bit? But there are some sixth generation skylake CPU laptops that are significantly cheaper and they're still available on Amazon and some of those devices are barely a year old so they're actually quite new still it's just a Matter of perception of whether or not you want the brand-new one that's coming out or one That's a year and a few months old ok I'll link all this stuff below And I'll link some Sixth generation skylake CPU laptops down below as well as some of those have amazing pricing like this 510 s that I have over here But yeah, hope you guys enjoyed this video thumbs.

If you liked it subs if you loved it. See you guys next time.

The FASTEST Laptop Weve Ever SEEN

I can see the product development meeting now No one's buying AMD laptops because they're slow... But everyone likes AMD Ryzen desktops with lots of processing cores... Today's video is brought to you by Corsair Their Void Pro gaming headsets feature microfiber mesh fabric And memory foam ear cups As well as custom tuned 50 millimeter neodymium drivers Check them out through the links below [Intro] With its black back panel and red accent lighting, the Asus GL702ZC looks mean But not in an, over-the-top gamer-ey way And opening it up, immediately reveals the stars of the show A Ryzen 7 CPU and Radeon Graphics processor that make this, the first all AMD gaming notebook that we've seen in... Many years, or...

Now that I think of it, ever? And it's no slouch! The Ryzen 7 1700 8-core 16 thread processor boosts up to 3.7Ghz, The RX 580 is a very competent GPU for 1080p gaming, The 16 gigs of RAM out of the box, And, the ample I/O that comes with the territory of a large and in charge 17-inch machine like this one, make the GL702ZC, on paper, One of the most compelling, gaming/workstation PC's that we've ever seen But I'm sure what everyone is wondering right now, is... Can they keep all of that cool? And the answer is... Hell yeah! For a while.. At 3.2Ghz under synthetic load The temps, well...

*BAD PUN ALERT* They just kept on Ryzen At 5 minutes, we hit 80 degrees Celsius After 10 we were above 90C, and then after 20 minutes, it seemed to leveled off But at 95 degrees And, while still remaining super quiet for some reason maybe ASUS needs to do some fan curve tuning here Once my CPU is over 90 degrees, I don't care if it sounds like a typhoon, It needs some TLC. Tender Loving Cooling And remember our testing was done in a climate-controlled room All of that being said, we were impressed to see any laptop maintain 3.2Ghz on eight cores So, to find out how this kind of grunt compares to a more traditional Intel 4 core laptop We put it up against the ASUS G503VM. A similarly priced 15-incher, That packs an Intel Core i7-7700HQ, and an Nvidia GTX 1060 Firing up Cinebench we... Wow.

Oh wow Wow! Oh wow, just... Wow, that's some savage destruction of... I mean, not just our comparison laptop... All laptops! By a lot! Even beasts like ASUS $6,000 water-cooled GX800, And the Acer Predator 21X are no match! For the multi-threaded prowess of the GL702ZC.

And the theme continues in other CPU focused tests like 7-Zip and Blender It's not all amazing though In rendering tasks that can take advantage of the GPU. The gap narrows somewhat with the GL702ZC still taking a convincing lead though And then, when we move from compute, to graphics The RX 580 just can't quite keep up with the GTX 1060 No matter how hard it tries *loud fan noise* Which, judging by the sound of the fans while gaming... Was pretty hard In 3D Mark it loses out by a bit to the 1060, And then in actual games the GL702ZC consistently loses, although not by much To it's smaller, Green and Blue brother Not that those couple of frames will probably be noticeable in actual gameplay But there's more to life than FPS anyway. If you run out and buy a GL702ZC today That's our AMD version here, It's both heavier and thicker than the Intel Nvidia version And honestly, the 702 didn't light any exciting fires for us at this price in general The keyboard is not amazing, it does have a numpad if you're into that and after typing for a bit Getting up to speed accurately won't be a big challenge, but it's a bit mushy feeling And pretty much the same can be said for the trackpad It's serviceable, but un-interesting And the same goes for the screen.

It is IPS, so viewing angles, brightness, and colors were all suitably adequate And FreeSync is a boon for improved gaming smoothness at low frame rates But 60Hz screens are better suited for laptops that don't have to go up against 120Hz models, at a similar price In eSports titles, this amounts to a big difference in the gaming experience Moving on to the webcam. It's not bad by laptop standards, but it's.. Unexceptional. Especially in low light And, you might want the light low since you'll be doing everything you can, to conserve the battery Like...

There's bad, and then there's... One hour and 22 minutes until all the electrons have escaped... Bad To be clear, the performance while it's doing it is good But this still puts the 702ZC on the, worst battery life We've ever seen in PC Mark's test podium Okay, so that last bit was a bit of a downer There's more good stuff though, Opening up the GL702ZC you are greeted with surprising upgradability There's an empty RAM slot, Non soldered solid state storage, and a 2.5 Inch bay And, AND! A mother-freaking full sized, desktop AM4 socket! Now, we can't guarantee that ASUS will provide BIOS updates, but AMD has confirmed AM4 support Until 2020! So it's possible Pretty unlikely, but possible That you could have top-tier AMD CPU performance for years to come with all that being said We're not that into buying this thing as a gaming laptop. It's competent at gaming But if that's what you plan on doing, there are better options right now With that said, we see the GL702ZC with its unprecedented multi-threaded performance as more of a, Powerhouse on a budget mobile workstation That can also game on the side.

And in time, we're really excited to see what other Ryzen 7 designs, make their way to the market. I mean, maybe with a more powerful NVIDIA GPU, or mobile Vega.. Next note, AMD. We could see the ultimate streaming laptop Only time will tell Speaking of time, if you find yourself running your small business or your freelance operation and just not having enough of it Freshbooks can be the solution you're looking for.

It's a cloud-based accounting software that allows you to be more productive, More organized, and to get paid faster. You can create and send Professional-looking invoices in less than 30 seconds, you can set up online Payments with just a couple of clicks and get paid up to four days faster You can see when your client has seen your invoice to put an end to the guessing games And you can take great features, like their hours tracking and expense tracking with you on the go with their Android and iOS apps. So for an unrestricted 30-day free trial go to [freshbooks.Com/techtips], we're gonna have that linked below, and enter Linus Tech Tips in the how did you hear about us section So thanks for watching guys! If you dislike this video you can hit that button But if you liked it hit like get subscribe Maybe consider checking out where to buy the stuff we featured at the link in the video description And while you're down there you can check out our merch store, which has cool shirts like this one as well as our community forum.

The Core i9 Laptops Have Arrived

- Hey guys, this is Austin. If you love laptops, I have
some good news for you. Intel recently invited me out to their event in San Francisco where they showed off a
wide range of new chips, including not only Intel processors that have built-in AMD dedicated graphics, but we're also going to be
getting new laptop chips across the board, including a brand new six-core
Core i9 option for laptops. So, let's start with the
very first Intel processor that has dedicated AMD graphics that are actually built inside the chip or by its short name of the 8th Generation
Intel Core Processors with Radeon RX Vega Graphics, because, you know, that
rolls off the tongue.

So the CPU side of things
isn't all that exciting. You're getting a quad-core
Kaby Lake base CPU. That lives on the Core i7,
can boost up to 4.2 Gigahertz. What really makes this special is the idea that you're getting a pretty much dedicated
Radeon graphics card that's actually going to be
paired inside that same chip, so this is going to be a
custom Vega implementation with between 20 or 24 CUs depending on if you go
with Core i5 or Core i7.

They had a couple laptops
available to demo. The HP Spectre x360,
which looks very similar to the ENVY x360 we
recently took a look at running Ryzen Mobile, as well
as the Dell XPS 15 2-in-1. Now, these are fairly
thin and light laptops. Now, they do have 15-inch displays.

When you consider that they have the CPU. And the GPU all inside a 65-watt TDP, they don't have to be all that thick and they don't need to have
any kind of crazy cooling. It's all going to be on one chip, which means that for
a lot of these things, they can actually be
pretty close to Ultrabooks. Of course, being much, much powerful.

Now, we'll have to wait
until I actually get one of these laptops and to test, but if you do want a sneak
peek at the performance, I recently did do a video on
the new Hades Canyon Intel NUC, which was going to be a
little bit more powerful, does have that same chip inside. There were ton of other
processors announced as well. So, on the mainstream side, the U-Series processors that
go in a ton of Ultrabooks are going to be getting
Iris Plus Graphics. So, while these are going to
be almost definitely found in things like the
next-generation 13-inch MacBook, it's going to be really
nice to be able to have a fairly thin and small laptop that can have, not only
quad-core processors, but also pretty decent
integrated graphics.

Nothing crazy, certainly not going to
touch the Radeon stuff, but it should be a nice step forward. What's really exciting though are the brand new gaming laptops chips. So, these are the H-Series processors and at 45 watts, it's what you find in pretty much any gaming laptop, as well as some workstations. So, there's a big change across the board.

First of all, the Core i5's
are basically being bumped up to what you used to be
able to get as a Core i7. So they're still going to be quad-core but they now have hyperthreading. So, if you have a older
generation Core i7, the low-ends now is going
to be roughly equivalent. The real sweet spot though are going to be the brand
new 8th Generation Core i7's, which just like the desktop, are moving from four cores to six cores.

And yes, having six
cores in a gaming laptop is going to be awesome,
especially concerning that they keep that same 45-watt TDP. It's literally just more free performance. The only little place you lost
out here is with clock speed. So with the base Core i7-8750H, when you're completely maxing
it out with all six cores, the base clock is only
going to be 2.2 Gigahertz.

However, it can't boost all
the way up to 4.2 Gigahertz, so that will be a lot closer
to that for the most part. If you step up to the
higher end Core i7-8850H, these numbers are a lot, that guy's going to be able
to run at 2.6 Gigahertz base or 4.3 Gigahertz boost. On top of that, that 8850H. Does have some slight
overclocking capabilities, so depending on whether the laptop OEM.

Will actually allow you to do it or not, it can, in theory, be boosted
by another 400 megahertz. What I'm really excited
to get my hands on though is that brand new Intel
Core i9 laptop chip. So this essentially builds
on what you're getting on the Core i7 with the six-core design, but cranks up everything to 11. The i9-8950HK has that same six-core hyperthreading design as the i7.

However, it bumps up the clock
speeds to 2.9 Gigahertz base and especially with
their new velocity boost, which will allow an
even higher turbo clock, assuming that you're going to be fairly cool on the processor, you can get up to 4.8
Gigahertz out of the Core i9. Even better is that's
going to be overclockable. So, I feel like it's going
to be only a matter of time before we start seeing laptops with a six-core
five-gigahertz-plus processor. Intel had a few of these
Core i9 systems set up and to be fair, they're
all very, very thick.

A lot of that is because they
all had a GTX 1080 inside, which as you will probably know is not exactly going to be
the easiest thing to cool. However, you don't actually
need dual power supplies for the Core i9 as it is still
going to be a 45-watt chip, at least until you start overclocking. All these processors should be
going on sale pretty shortly but I've got to say, I am really excited for
the new i7's and i9's. Having six-cores in a laptop is going to be a legit game changer.

But I'm curious, which of these processors do you think will make
it into your next laptop? Let me know in the comments below and I will catch you in the next one..

The Best Laptop to Buy Instead of the New MacBook Pro

Hey how's it going guys, this is Dave 2D, And this is a video on the best alternatives to the 2016 15-inch MacBook Pro Now it's hard to find a truly comparable device to that 15-inch MacBook Pro Because it's got some pretty unique features, like the Touch Bar and macOS. But if you're comfortable using macOS or Windows And you're just looking for a premium laptop that has good build quality, has good performance, with a quad-core CPU and has good portability -- this video's for you. Now this is not an exhaustive list, but these are ones that I personally really like These are all quad-core laptops, so no Surface products Or Ultrabooks because those are all two-core CPUs Ok, first up we have the 2016 15" MacBook Pro itself.
Super thin, pretty powerful but very expensive. And it's only equipped with Thunderbolt 3 ports.

Next up we have last year's 15-inch MacBook Pro It's bigger, but it's still a very capable machine.
It has more ports, and it's at a cheaper price point right now. We have the ASUS UX501.
This is the most premium laptop that ASUS makes, outside of their gaming lineup.
Not the thinnest laptop but it has a really big battery The MSI GS63 is one of the most powerful laptops in here since it has a GTX 1060.

It's a gaming laptop, but because it's pretty thin and light, it makes the cut. Next up, we have the Dell XPS 15
It's still one of the best laptops ever from Dell The carbon-fiber finish and the Infinity Display really makes this a strong contender here. We also have the Aero 14 from Gigabyte. Comes in black, green and orange.

And it's also equipped with a GTX 1060, but this is a smaller 14-inch screen. Lastly we have the 2016 Razer Blade. Also with the GTX 1060 One of the thinnest laptops with this powerful graphics chip. It also has a 14 inch screen and it has Chroma lighting So like I've done in other videos like this, I'm going to go through some categories, and then tell you my top picks for each particular category.

In terms of build quality, the MacBooks are the kings here. They're really well-built The Razer Blade and the XPS 15, I would say, are tied for second place The XPS 15, I feel a little more durable, the Razer Blade looks cleaner to me. You can actually get skins for all three of these laptops, from dbrand. They can look awesome.

I'll link them below. The 4K display on the XPS 15 is really nice. It's not the brightest of the group, but it's still plenty bright. It's the most color accurate, and it has super thin bezels.

The 2016 MacBook Pro has lower resolution, but it's very bright, which is great if you use your laptop outdoors alot It has a very wide color gamut but it isn't as color accurate. The UX501 also has a great 4K display. None of them have bad screens though, it's just a matter of preference for resolution and screen size. MacBooks tend to have terrible user-upgradability In fact, the 2016 15-inch MacBook Pro can't be upgraded at all.

The RAM and the SSD are both on-board. Now all of the Windows laptops have upgradeable RAM and storage, except for the Razer Blade. You can only upgrade the storage for the Razer Blade. The most upgradeable is the MSI GS63.

It has two RAM slots and two drive bays. The XPS 15 can also do this, but it's a little bit more complex. Gotta order some parts in, to do that. These all have good keyboards.

None of them are bad. Personally, I like the keyboard on the 2016 15-inch MacBook Pro, the most. I know a lot of people would disagree, but I personally can type the fastest and most accurately with it. No joke.

The GS63, the XPS 15 and the Razer Blade with Chroma Lighting are also good. But you know what? You can't go wrong with any of these keyboards. They're all enjoyable to use. The MacBooks are still the trackpad leaders.

The Taptic Engine, the surface texture, the precision. They're still the best It's kinda sad. We're rolling into 2017 here, and Windows laptops still haven't perfected the trackpad. But of this bunch, the one that I like the most, is the XPS 15.

Now any of them that can use native Windows Precision drivers are going to be better, But the MacBook trackpads are still the best. The laptop with the best selection of ports is definitely the MacBook -- No, I'm kidding. I'd say the winner is the MSI GS63 It has a ton of ports but the SD reader is slower. I think it's USB 2.0 But basically all the Windows laptops tend to have a pretty good selection of ports.

The Razer Blade is missing an SD reader. The Aero 14 doesn't have Thunderbolt 3 support But aside from that, they're all well-equipped with ports. The only one here with rock-solid external GPU support is the Razer Blade. So if you connect that to the Razer Core, it works perfectly.

The XPS 15 isn't bad either but the rest of them are still kinda flaky right now with external GPUs. Aside from MacBooks, they're all rocking the Skylake, 6700HQ processor. Very similar CPU performance across the board. The laptops with the GTX 1060s are the best performers.

Between them, they're too close to really say which one is the winner, maybe the GS63. But they're all really powerful. Now thermally, the laptops with the weaker cards are going to produce less heat and have quieter fans. The MacBook and the XPS 15 are the most quiet when they're under load.

The Razer Blade and the Aero 14 are the loudest, when they're gaming. The 2016 MacBook's speakers can't be beat.
No one is making better speakers right now. And to be honest, all the Windows laptops speakers sound similar in overall quality.

I mean they sound different from each other, but it's hard to really label a winner. So if the 2016 MacBook has first place,
the 2015 MacBook has second place. And maybe the Razer Blade for third place? None of them are bad though. In general, battery life isn't going to be amazing on laptops like these.

Skylake processors are reasonably energy efficient, but when you take a quad-core CPU, And you put it into into a thin and light chassis, you can only expect so much. The 2015 15-inch MacBook Pro has the best battery life. It's an older processor but it has a big battery, and macOS is pretty energy-efficient. Of the Windows laptops, the UX501 is the longest lasting here.

The XPS 15, when it's configured with the big battery, is also pretty good. Ok, in terms of value none of these laptops are going to be particularly cheap. They're all premium in some way or another. I think the best value overall would be the MSI GS63.

You're getting really good performance for the price Now, whether or not you need or even want that kind of performance, is something else. But it delivers really good bang-for-the-buck. The UX501 is also pretty well-priced, with its 4K screen. And a used, or refurbished 2015 MacBook Pro, can also be a pretty good value.

Now, you can't go wrong choosing any of these laptops, and there's other really good options out there That aren't in this video. Something like the Alienware 13. It's a little bit thicker and heavier than the rest of them here. It is a great quad-core laptop In terms of like the best overall one, it really depends on what you're doing.

As a video editor, my personal top pick is the XPS 15, mostly because of the screen. I really like the color accuracy and I really like the fact that it has really thin bezels. That just seals it for me. If you need more information about any of these laptops, they're gonna be down below Individual reviews, as well as some benchmarks for some of the video cards Actually one of the video cards -- The GTX 1060 But yeah, hope you guys enjoyed this video.
Thumbs, if you liked it.

Subs, if you loved it. It's been nice.
I'll see you guys next time..

The Best Business Laptop

What'sup guys Matthew Moniz here and welcome
to my review of the Lenovo X1 Carbon. This is the 2018 model and in terms of design
nothing has really changed from last year. But the internals have been updated and a
few other things have been improved to make this business laptop even better. The best thing about Lenovo X1 thinkpads that
they're made of carbon magnesium so making this product extremely light and also very
great to touch.

The material doesn't feel like metal it actually
feels more like rubber. But it is very comfortable to use especially
when you have your wrists on the deck. This also goes through a bunch of tests the
MIL-STD-810G test. This is a military test that the US uses to
test things like shock, absorption, drop tests, altitude a bunch of stuff, so in terms of
day-to-day use this thing is going to take a lot more of a beating than a regular consumer
business laptop like the Dell XPS 13.

In fact, it's actually even lighter than the
Dell XPS 13 at 2.5 Lbs. It's a little bit thicker! But it's definitely lighter. When it comes to ports Lenovo did a fantastic
job of including all the ports you need in a business environment. You got 2 USB type-c thunderbolt 3 ports with
4 PCIe lanes, so you can hook up an external GPU, you can hook up a 4k monitor and you
can also power the laptop.

You also have proprietary port for an RJ45
cable. So if you want to wire it to the network you
have that option as well. There's a USB 3.0 Port, a full size HDMI port
and on the right side you have another USB. 3.0 Port, a kensington lock and an audio jack.

Plus, if you need extra storage, you have
a microsd card slot that also combos with a sim slot. So you can pop in your sim card in here and
use data while you're on the go without having to connect to WIFI. Getting inside is super easy, 5 screws and
you're in. Everything inside of here is not upgradeable
or replaceable except for the NVME SSD.

The one in here is 256 GB and is super fast
and does a good job with read and write speeds. There's a big battery but I don't like the
fact that there's only one fan. On the i7 model, I think you need two still
and especially with a thunderbolt 3 port and you're game on it or lets say you're going
to run intensive applications for a very long time. I'll talk to you guys about heat management
later on in the video.

The display is one area that Lenovo has improved
a lot. I didn't review the 2017 model but I did review
the 2016 version back then my biggest complaint was the screen didn't get bright enough. This year that's all been solved it gets really
bright 302 nits of brightness so it's good. Colours are very vibrant, they're punchy and
the screen is very colour accurate.

Getting over 100% SRGB and 78% ARGB. If you don't want a Full HD model. The 1920 x 1080 version that I have here. They do have a QHD version and also a QHD
version with HDR.

I haven't seen it myself but I've heard it
looks fantastic. Another cool thing is that this display rotates
180 degrees, which is a lot more than most traditional clamshell laptops. Lenovo has also including a thing call the
ThinkShutter, which is kind of clever! Insteasd of putting a piece of tape over your
webcam to protect yourself from potential intrusions. This just has a little shutter that goes back
and forth to keep the webcam closed so you don't have to worry about your privacy.

Speaking of webcams, this one is HD like the
majority of Ultrabooks on the market. It also looks pretty similar to other webcams
on most Ultrabooks. In fact, if you want the best web cam you're
going to have to look at the Surface Book 2. That one does a really good job.

But this is fine for streaming, the microphone
sounds like this and if you're a business person you'll be more than happy for your
conference calls. Sound is definitely one of the weaker points
of this laptop. There's two speakers on the bottom they get
pretty loud but they sound distorted at max volume and they sound tinny overall. You're definitely going to want to carry a
pair of headphones with you.

But inside is a bunch of far-field microphones,
so you can yell to it across the room, use Cortana and the laptop is going to answer
you. Also, very very soon Lenovo is going to push
out an update enabling Alexa on this. So if you like Amazon and you like Alexa this
thing is going to be able to do it. Now when it comes to keyboard the Lenovo X1
has one of my favourite keyboards on an Ultrabook.

I take this keyboard over the majority of
Ultrabook keyboards any day of the week. 1.8 Mm of travel distance over 2mm of actuation
force. Hands down one of best and most comfortable
typing experience you can get on an Ultrabook. I also like the trackpad.

It's very accurate this year. My only complaints about it is the size because
there is a trackpoint ball with buttons on top of the trackpad some of that real estate
is lost. Now for those of you out there that use the
trackpoint. I know how important it is.

I used to use the trackpoint all the time. You can be so much more precise with it than
you can with the actual trackpad. So I'm glad Lenovo is keeping those on their
keyboards. There's also 3 levels of back lighting, the
arrow keys are a good size and overall the typing experience is amazing.

The review unit that I have here is using
the i7-8550U processor. So that's the 8th gen Intel Kaby Lake-R refresh. You get two more cores and a lower TDP compared
to last years model. So basically in day-to-day stuff like browsing
the web, using productivity applications like Microsoft and Google Docs.

You're not going to notice that much of a
speed difference. It's not until you start doing more demanding
things that can utilize those 4-cores like editing in photoshop, edit 4K video if you
have an external GPU connected. That's when you'll see those 4-cores come
into play and offer about 40-50 percent speed increase. You can also game on this thing at very very
low settings.

So you can play Overwatch on it, Fortnite,
CSGO, you just got to drop settings very low. In terms of heat, this laptop did not do well. I was getting surface temperatures of 50 degrees
celsius comparable ultrabooks using the exact same CPU would only get up to about 40-43
degrees celsius. Also, during my stress test after about 20-25
minutes the laptop would thermal throttle and completely shutdown.

CPU temps would hit about 80 degrees celsius
which is also about 15 degrees more than other comparable ultrabooks. Noise is really good I'm getting about 33
decibels when it's idle and about 35-38 decibels when it's under full load. So here's my closing thoughts. The 2018 Lenovo X1 Carbon is still a great
business ultrabook.

It has a beautiful screen. It has all the ports you need for a business
environment. One of the best keyboards you can get on an
ultrabook, a good touchpad, it has great security features and of course microsd and sim slot
if you need to be on the road and have some extra storage space. The only thing I don't like about it is the
sound quality, so you're going to want to carry some headphones and the overheating.

Now the overheating is not a big deal for
most people. People who use this laptop just to browse
the net, stay connected, do presentations. I wouldn't worry about it. It's just for the few out there who hook up
an external GPU, maybe want to edit video on this or game for a long period of time.

Than I would be a little bit worried. So that pretty much wraps up my review of
the X1 Carbon 2018. Let me know your thoughts in the comments
below. If you have enjoyed this video feel free to
hit the like button, if you're new to the channel subscribe and I'll talk to you in
the next video!.

The Best Budget Gaming Laptop PERIOD

- This video is sponsored by Squarespace, whether you need a domain,
online store, or website, make it with Squarespace. Hey guys, this is Austin. Recently, I did a video on this guy. A six-hundred and fifty
dollar gaming laptop entirely powered by AMD Ryzen.

That got me thinking how would it stack up to
an Intel and Nvidia option. That's where this comes in. This is the Acer Aspire Five. Not only does it have Core i5
processor and MX150 graphics, but impressively, it comes
in with an even cheaper 600 dollar price tag.

On paper this guy looks
very similar to the HP Envy. So we're getting a 15.6 Inch display and it's actually reasonably thin considering it is a gaming laptop. I will say at first
glance, the build quality does not match up to that HP. It's all plastic.

While it doesn't look bad, it sort of lacks that
premium feel of the Envy. However, what it lacks in feel it makes up for in actual functionality. Not only are we getting a
full-sized ethernet jack, but we also get USB-C, HDMI, a USB 3.0 Port, as well
as an SD card reader, and on the other side we're
also getting two more USB ports. You're getting a
full-sized keyboard layout in addition to the number row.

And even though most of
the laptop is plastic, it does have this metal
shell on the inside which does feel pretty
nice as a palm rest. Inside this guy has
eighth gen Core i5-8250U. So it's going to be one of
the new quad core chips. You're getting those
Nvidia MX150 graphics, 8 gigabytes of dual channel DVR 4, as well as a 256 gygabyte SSD.

However, all it takes is for
you to fire up the Aspire Five before you realize that there
is one major thing missing: a decent looking screen. So on paper, it's not bad. We're getting a 15.6 Inch
panel with a 1080p resolution. The issue is...

It is a very very unimpressive looking TN panel; Color is okay, but the contrast
is straight up terrible. And specially with the viewing angles, the screen just doesn't look that great. I get it. Acer wanted to cut some costs to be able to get this much performance in such a cheap laptop, but the screen is a little
bit tough to deal with.

Thankfully though, it's not all bad. So they keyboard is classic Acer. It's not the most tactile
thing in the world but specially for gaming you're
going to be totally fine. And thankfully this guy also is using a Windows precision touch pad.

I love to see these, as
they are pretty much always not only track more accurately, but specially have those
multi-touch gestures. When you put the Acer
side-by-side with the HP Envy you're going to see that this
guy has a much nicer display. Sure, it might not be quite
as bright as I would like, but compared to the TN panel
over here, it is night and day. Plus, this guy is going
to be a touch screen, it's convertible, and built quality-wise not only is this side going to be thinner but also just feels a lot more premium.

One thing the Acer
definitely has going for it is upgrade-ability. So underneath a couple
of flaps on the bottom you'll see not only do you
have access to your memory if you wanna upgrade that, but over here if you
pop up this little cover you're going to see that we have full two and a half inch drive
bay that's completely empty. So if you want you can upgrade
with a bigger hard drive. We can even throw in a
second SSD in this guy.

When it comes to performance, the Aspire is just in a different league. So sure, the Envy does
have that nicer screen and better build quality, but in return, you're getting not only an
SSD but you're also getting just a potent combination with the Core i5 and dedicated graphics. The i5 8250U delivers good
quad core performance. It's right up there with a lot
of higher end gaming laptops and a fair bit above the
Ryzen inside the Envy.

The graphics is where
things really take off. So with an Nvidia MX150
GPU, while it might not be the most powerful graphics
card in the world, you're getting enough performance to play some pretty decent 1080p games
as you guys will soon see. And when you compare it to
the Ryzen chip inside the HP, the vague graphics are just not
going to be able to compete. However, the real test is, of course, what it's like to play
in real-world games.

First off, we have CS GO. Now as a game that even though it might be a couple years old, it is still incredibly popular this is one of my favorite
ways to test PC's. And here on 1080p settings at high We're getting near 80 to
a 100 frames per second. Super super playable.

(Happy music) What's not playable is
my shotgun right now. Oh, did I get it?! Did I get it?! Ohhh! The game I just got my
goal in is Rocket League. So, just like CS GO, it's not
really difficult thing to run so we're getting between
40 to 50 frames per second on high settings at 1080. And again, this is
another great example...

Well that's not a good idea. Another good example of a
game that is (laughs)... It's kind of perfect
for a 600 dollar laptop. It's nice that we're getting
this kind of performance out of something that is
relatively affordable.

Next up, for something a
little bit newer we have PUBG. Now, obviously we're
just in the opening area but on 1080 low we're getting
like 35 frames per second. Man, this game has come a long
way now that they don't have 300 thousand people spawning in one area. I will say one thing.

Even though the screen isn't
that bad on this laptop just having to angle it down a little bit to get a better camera angle means that it looks a little
bit washed out right now. I really wish that they had spent just a little bit more
money on a nicer paneling. Man, this thing would be perfect. So yeah, 1080p low is
definitely very playable here.

So we are averaging around
30 to 35 frames per second. If you wanted to really
optimize those frames you could probably go down to 720p. But with a game like PUBG. I feel like on a 600 dollar laptop I'm not really complaining
about low settings.

To really put this to the test, we have Middle-earth: Shadow of War. Now this is not only a
much nicer looking game, but also a more technically demanding one. And here at 1080p on low
settings we're getting right around 30 frames per second. So if it's going to be me,
I'm probably going to turn on the dynamic resolution to get that frame rate up just a little bit.

But again, a very playable game. So as you guys can see, the
gaming performance is not bad. Specially given this
600 dollar price point. Something else I like is the standard SSD.

Now sure, it's easy
enough to add another SSD. Or another hard drive if
you want some extra space but having Windows and
everything fully ready on an SSD out of the box is nice. I can't tell you how many
hours of my life I've wasted waiting for slow old laptops with normal hard drives to update. This makes everything so much faster.

The Aspire Five is a seriously
killer little gaming laptop. Now this is very rare for me to say, but I don't really have
a lot to complain about. They made a lot of really smart
decisions on the components. There is a ton of
performance for 600 dollars.

Really, the only thing I can
complain about is the screen. Now, no, it's not a deal breaker, but it would've been nice if they had put just a little bit of a
better display in here. However, besides that,
this is a close to perfect gaming laptop considering the budget. And you know what else is perfect? The wonderful sponsor for
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The Best $200 Laptop

- Hey guys, this is Austin. This the $188 HP Stream. So when I did the video on this recently, I was impressed with just how much laptop you're able to get for that kind of price. However, lots of you guys
commented some other options for around $200 on the laptop side.

One of the main things people suggested was to pick up a Chromebook. And you can see that there's
a lot of appeal here. What you're getting is
a very cheap computer that while it's going to be lightweight, it's only running ChromeOS. That's actually not going
to be a big problem.

However, even more people
suggested to pick up a used laptop so that is where I
found this HP Elitebook. Which, you know, it's
a couple of years old. Still comes in at around $200. Ever since Chromebooks
were first announced, they've actually kind of been
pretty much the same thing.

So what you're getting here
is a very very basic laptop. However, when you're just
needing to run a web browser, that kind of actually works out okay. Especially considering
just how cheap it is and especially how easy it is to set up. Stuff like schools and
different like places that are kind of constantly
going through hardware actually really do get a big advantage out of using a Chromebook.

So this is a fairly small laptop. With an 11.6 Inch display. So I will say it actually does
feel reasonably well built, even though it is all going to be plastic. And if we open it up.

We'll see lots and lots
more plastic inside. The design is about as safe as it gets. So, to be fair, Chromebooks
actually do have a lot of the basics figured out. So the keyboards are
pretty much always fine, the track pads are pretty decent.

The screens are going
to be kind of mediocre. But you're going to be getting decent WiFi as well as just enough ports for, well, whatever you're gonna do on a Chromebook. What you're getting here is a
stripped down operating system that is entirely built around Chrome. Now for a lot of people
you can't do most things inside the browser.

However. There are also some other options that happen to run full Windows. When you get into the
world of used laptops, there are options absolutely everywhere. And they try to keep things
at least somewhat even, I went on Amazon and
tried to find something that was going to be refurbished.

At least you get some kind of warranty and you know it's not going
to be completely beat up or whatever. At least, I hope it won't be super beat up and terrible in the box. Oh, well, okay. That's quite the unboxing experience.

We get the giant old school power cable. There's also a laptop and
this giant cardboard thing. Whoa that's actually really heavy. As you can see, things have definitely
evolved in the last few years.

And you're $200 laptop
is much, much thinner and lighter than it used to be. There are advantages to using
something a little bit older, thought, including a ton of ports. So in addition to a full DVD drive, we also have an SD card reader. A pair of USB 3.0 Ports, we got fire wire.

Around back you're going
to be getting VGA, a modem, Ethernet, and is you flip
it over to the other side, we're getting a full sized display port, another USB port, as well as eSATA, and you're headphone and microphone jacks. So you know, don't complain
about your single port MacBook anymore. This guy for 200 bucks has you covered. You also have the magical
experience of being able to remove your batteries.

When inevitably you're
old laptop has a terrible 35 minute battery life. It's easy to just grab
another one off eBay and throw it in. They're definitely
advantages in going with a little bit of an older design. But what I'm curious about
is one of the trade offs.

Is this really going to be
your best option for $200? When it comes to the Chromebook 3, use it for about 30 seconds
and you will immediately appreciate just how small
and lightweight it is. It's just over a kilogram, or about 2.5 Pounds. It's so lightweight it
kind of feel likes a toy. However, with the exception of the bezzles which are shiny and
look a little bit cheap, it actually is reasonably well built.

Take a look at the screen. And you'll see it's rocking and 11.6 Inch 1266x769 panel. And while it's not incredibly sharp, it's going to be totally
usable for something especially at this price point. I'm kind of impressed with
how bright the screen gets.

A lot of the time when it
comes to a budget laptop, the screens are a little
bit on the dim side. But it's actually pretty impressive here. Although it's not impressive
at a viewing angles, but I mean, for less than 190 bucks, what do you expect? The biggest consideration
when you're picking up a Chromebook though, is whether or not you're
ready for ChromeOS. Now for a lot of people, it's going to be more than enough and completely fine.

But for a lot of other people, they're gonna want the flexibility of something like Widows. It really does just depend
on what you're using it for. The basic idea is that ChromeOS. Is a stripped down version of Linux that is focused around the Chrome browser.

Now while that might sound crazy, especially if you live your
life in a lot of web apps such as Google Docs and Office 365. It is usable. Some newer Chromebooks, though, including the Chromebook 3, do support Android apps. And while it's an option, it's not exactly a great
one on this system.

For starters, most apps expect a touch screen. Which is fine when you're
using and Android phone, but not so great when you're
using and 11 inch laptop. So when it comes to actually
clicking to say jump in Super Mario Run, it's not the greatest experience. And on top of that, a lot of other games just
won't run all that well even completely ignoring the controls.

And performance really is
an area where you notice the low price of the Chromebook. It's powered by a Celeron N-3050 processor which is about as low end as it gets in a laptop in 2018. To be fair, for basic web browsing, which is what most people
are going to be doing with the Chromebook
anyway, it's totally fine. Maybe not the fastest thing in the world, however, once you start
loading up a few tabs it does noticeably slow down.

And keep in mind that I'm
using the upgraded model with four gigs of RAM. There is another model of the Chromebook 3 which only has two gigabites of RAM. If you know, you're really all
about that single tab life. As a Chromebook, you don't exactly need a lot of storage.

Which is good, because the Chromebook
three only has 16 gigs of storage on board. Now while that might not be enough to get you a full copy
of Windows 10 on board, it's actually fine for ChromeOS. It gives you about 9 gigs or so free to install other Android apps or whatever kind of stuff
you wanna actually download. One thing that is decent
is the battery life.

So Samsung claims up to
11 hours on a charge. And while that might be
a little bit ambitious, this is a laptop that I would
feel totally comfortable going for a full day
without taking the charger. I know I sound pretty negative,
but don't get me wrong. There is definitely a
market for Chromebooks.

However, if it's my money, I'm gonna spend my $200 elsewhere. Like for example, with this
giant used HP Elitebook. Look, this thing is absolutely enormous. And sure, you're getting
a lot of extra ports and features that you're not
getting on the other laptops, but you're also getting something that weighs over five pounds.

It's like basically
both of those combined. They're also some really weird
quirks with the Elitebook. So beside the webcam, there's a little light button. Press it, and a tiny LED pops out to illuminate the keyboard.

So, you know, if you're
heavily working in the dark or you're need to sign
some incredibly important legal documents on your keyboard, this tiny light has got you covered. A quirk that I'm not as big of a fan off is the track pad. Now sure, you're going to have a left and right click buttons on top and bottom, but even for 2012, this
one's a little bit rough. Now it does support two finger gestures, but my big problem is just the tracking.

Sure, once you crank up the sensitivity, it's not that bad. But especially compared
to even low end stuff like on the stream in the Chromebook, it's just not in the same league. On the plus side though, in the middle of the keyboard, is a little track pad nipple. So, you know, who's ever gonna complain about having an extra
nipple in their life? Performance wise, you're getting a core i5-3360 M.

Now that is a third gen Ivy Bridge part. It is definitely a little
bit on the older side but it actually holds up
surprisingly well today. Run it through Geekbench
and there's no contest. It absolutely destroys both
the Chromebook and the Stream.

It's not just for benchmarks, either. You really do notice the
difference when you use all three of these laptops back to back. The Elitebook just feels much faster. And to be fair, I'm not going to want to
do a lot of gaming on this, for example, but for normal use, it stays very snappy
pretty much throughout.

Which is definitely
not something I can say about the Stream, especially
when it starts doing something like an update in the background and everything grinds to halt. That core i5 is backed up
by eight gigabits of RAM. And a 320 gigabit hard drive. While four gigs of RAM
is fine on the Chromebook and decent on the Stream, it is really nice to
have that extra memory when you load more than just, say, two things up at a time.

And something that I'm
really surprised to say is, the 320 gigabit hard drive
actually isn't terrible. Screen wise, we're
looking at a 14 inch panel with a resolution of 1366x768. And that's actually pretty
mediocre these days, to be totally honest, but when you compare it to
these other two laptops, at the very least you're
getting a nicer looking panel. It's low res, but it's
not gonna, you know, make your eyes bleed or something.

Something else is
slightly behind the times is the 802.11 In WiFi. Now keep in mind this is actually a pretty solid implementation
with 2x2 WiFi antennas and I was actually able to
get around 200 megabites per second on the download. But, it doesn't quite match
up to the latest AC solution. Still though, for under 200
bucks, I'm not complaining.

And speaking of price, this laptop was originally
over $1000 five years ago. Considering that it's now
about 20% of that value, it's actually not too bad, and you do see a lot of the
advantages of having something that was much more expensive
when it first came out. However, everything comes crashing down when it comes to the battery life. So as you would expect from a
five year old business laptop it's not exactly the strong suit.

I'm meaning somewhere
between two to three hours of fairly basic use on this guy. A big part of that is because
it has a pretty small 55 watt hour battery, so even though it is swappable, in theory you could carry a couple around, I feel like, especially when
you put this side by side with the newer laptops like the Chromebook and the Stream, which are getting well over
double the battery life, it really is kind of
hard to justify carrying this huge big of a laptop around. And of course, the other big wild card is the fact that you're
buying a used laptop. So like I said earlier, I picked up a refurbished
model from Amazon which does come with a warranty, and at least someone
in theory went over it to make sure everything works.

And thankfully, I lucked out. Everything actually does
work pretty much flawlessly. Now there are a couple of
very very minor blemishes on the outside of the laptop. But honestly, I'm surprised
with just how clean this thing is.

But of course, your mileage will definitely
vary depending on where you find a laptop, whether it's been refurbished or not, whether someone took care of it or not. For me, it really comes
down to two things. You can either go with the safe option and get a brand new laptop
with good battery life it's gonna be small and portable, which you're going to
be losing performance. Or do you wanna take a
chance on an older laptop that might have a couple of problems, but is going to deliver
a lot more performance and a lot more features.

If it's my money, if you
find the right used laptop, I think it's totally worth considering. Even something that's five years old is still going to be good
enough for 99% of people. And the good thing is, a lot of the upgrades
that you might wanna do, like more memory or an SSD
are fairly cheap these days. But I'm curious.

What do you guys think is the best option for a $200 laptop today? Let me know in the comments below and I will catch you in the next one..

Tablet vs laptop

- You might have seen a recent commercial where a kid is using an iPad and at the end of the ad she
asks, "What's a computer?". - It's sparked a lot of conversation in our corner of the internet. - Because it's a good question. And personally I think some people attach the word computer to certain form factors.

- And I think that if you look
at computers philosophically, there's something that
just lets you do the thing you need to do and that
certain form factors, frankly, are a lot better for that. - Is that fabric on your laptop? This is an iPad Pro. - And this is a Surface Laptop. - You're probably thinking
that this is some type of Apple versus Microsoft
episode of Versus.

Because of these products. But we're not really talking about-- - Arguing over. - We're not really talking
about specific brands. We're talking about the differences between using a tablet versus a laptop.

- Right, a lot of people are probably wondering if they can get away with just using a tablet as their main computer especially if as the chip sets in tablets get to be comparable to
desktop computing power. And my opinion is, likely not. Tablet's not gonna do it. - And my take is that this thing is so easy to use and as you mentioned, so powerful that for a lot of people, all they really need
is a tablet like this.

- You really like Apple stuff, don't you? - One of the reasons I
really like using a tablet as my main computer is just because of how thin and light it is. I mean, I take this with me everywhere. I throw it in my bag. I take it to work.

I take it out to dinner. I take it into bed with me at night. It's not like carrying a clamshell around. - You realize that a 12.9 Inch iPad is still really big, right? - There's a 10 inch one too.

- Oh, okay. One of my favorite parts
of an actual laptop are. (Keys tapping) The tactile keys. In my opinion, the keyboard
is an amazing invention that is not broken and
not in need of fixing.

I know people do it but I
personally don't understand how anyone can do all of their
work or personal documents typing on a touch screen keyboard. - Oh I don't use the touch
screen keyboard all that often. That's why I have this. Which is the smart keyboard.

It magnetically attaches. And it doesn't ever need to be charged. It's pretty great. - And it cost $169.

So add that to the thousand
dollar tablet you got there and you're in premium computer land. - I never said this
wasn't a premium product. I just said I liked the
convenience of a tablet. - Also, how well does that
thing balance on your lap when you're using the smart keyboard.

That's what I thought. With a clamshell like this, it's actually comfortable and
well balanced on your lap. Hence, laptop. - Even though I don't use the touch screen keyboard all that often, I just love having a
touch screen in general.

- This has a touch screen too. - Yeah, but not all laptops do. Like, okay, I'm not
gonna say the brand name because we're not making
this about the brands, but you know-- - Oh, my gosh, were you about to say something critical about-- - Also, this works with a Stylus. Otherwise known as pencil.

- This supports a Stylus pen too. - Again, not all laptops do. In fact, not many work with the Stylus. - Right, but just as your
tablet as evolved to be as powerful as a regular computer, laptops have evolved to
offer the best of all worlds.

If you buy a new or high end Windows PC. Or even a less expensive Chromebook, you're likely to get
things like a touch screen and yet you still have this
nice, familiar form factor. - Also, when I rotate
my tablet or just happen to pick it up the wrong way, the screen rotates with it. - Does your laptop do that? - Why in the world would I
want to rotate my laptop? - And I think a tablet like this gets better battery life than most laptops, generally speaking.

- You might have a point there. But honestly, we've argued
enough about the form factor and hardware differences
between laptops and tablets. What it really comes
down to, in my opinion, is the software. - Yeah.

It does. There's a reason why we don't
get many tech support calls from friends and family being all like, "I don't know how to set up an iPad." Right? And that's why kids are
able to pick up a tablet and immediately get addicted to it. - Uh, is that a good thing? - This is just known for its intuitive UI. And also, it runs on a
mobile operating system.

Which means that a lot
of the apps that you already know from your smart phone, you can run on here too. - So maybe laptops sometimes require a little more tech support. But that's not really what
I'm talking about here. I mean, have you ever tried
writing a 3,000 Word Document on your tablet or working
in an Excel Spreadsheet? Or editing a really serious video project? Or just manipulating folders in Windows? I mean, there's a reason
why people are so attached to their laptops and
that's due in large part to the OS and software.

- I still think mobile software is better. - Why? - Because for a smart
phone first generation, this stuff just makes sense. - We're not talking about
smart phones though. We're talking about tablets and laptops.

- How many times are you gonna
say the word form factors? Form factors, form factors, form factors. - Listen, 17 more times
we're gonna say form factors because we're nerds
and that's how we talk. Form Factors, form factors. - Those two just going at it again.

As if there isn't something in between. - This is an iPad. - [Cameraman] Pro. - Pro.

(Cameraman laughs) (Lauren laughs) I knew that. (Laughing).

MSI GS65 - Their Best Gaming Laptop Yet!

Hey, how's it going? Dave2D here Today, we're looking at the MSI GS65 This is their latest thin and light gaming laptop It's running the new six-core CPU from Intel with the GTX 1070 Max-Q. It's a completely decked out thin and light laptop that just- It's awesome, as you could tell by the title It's been redesigned this year, completely redesigned. The previous generation and the one before that all share the same chassis They just kind of switch the internals Brand new everything this year. The build quality on this new design is good It feels slightly better than the GS63 to me.

It has no red on it at all I think this is the very first gaming laptop from MSI that wasn't black and red It's got this black and gold theme going on Very subtle, it actually looks really good You can bring it to work or a coffee shop, and no one would think anything of it. It's super stealth, it honestly looks like a premium black and gold laptop Now in case you're wondering, the logo up here is completely flush to the surface If you're inclined and wanting to mask this logo out, You could probably get a skin for it, and it'll look even more murdered-out The hinge is on each side, so it doesn't run along the whole length But it actually feels really wellbuilt, and this kind of hinge aesthetic is just not something we've seen from MSI before, I really like it Inside, we have the power button in the middle of the laptop And there was talk about how there's gonna be a fingerprint sensor This engineering sample does not have a functioning one But it might in the future. The build quality of this whole thing is good, very good It's not perfect, like this isn't a unibody build or anything like that It's like, not milled from a single piece of aluminum It's using paneling, but it's pretty good There are some panels with a little bit of flex from the perforations But it is a well built laptop. Okay, before I go any deeper into this video I feel like I should bring something up with you guys.

I really like this device It's a great laptop, and there are some issues with it, but I had to dig pretty deep to find them And I think a lot of you guys might think that I'm just like nitpicking, and I really am I feel like that's what you have to do when it comes to products that are really well built and just good... You just got to dig deeper than normal to find something that you can kind of use as a reason that some people may not like it but... You'll see. Okay, let's go with the keyboard first.

I feel like that's like a good place to start It's pretty much your standard MSI keyboard It's SteelSeries backlit But the keys have this layout that takes a little bit of time to get used to Once you do, you'll be comfortable on it The trackpad is, well technically it's a Windows Precision trackpad It's running Windows Precision touchpad, but it's using Synaptics software underneath It feels good, it's just not perfect. Gestures are on point, but there's something with the tracking that feels off to me. It's like the acceleration It's just a little bit too fast. Um, I can't really describe in words It's just- it doesn't feel like your standard Windows Precision software to me.

It's good Just not perfect. The button mechanism is a little stiff But it's tactile and I like the feel of the trackpad overall One of the first things that I didn't like about this laptop is the accessibility So MSI's thin and light laptops are never really easy to get into Like, I've never had a lot of problems, but there's just not, you know, one screw and remove it It's always a little bit of work. This one is very difficult I'm not saying it's impossible, but I couldn't get in there, and I've opened quite a few laptops See, this isn't even my unit, it's like an engineering sample And I'm already a little bit more aggressive than it would be if I purchased this with my own money but I just can't seem to get in here easily The other thing is that the drive in here is a little bit slow, and it's okay when companies put in slow drives Because like it keeps the cost down and you can upgrade it, but in this case, It's pretty difficult. I'm sure you can get in there, it's just not an easy thing The display is excellent, I really like it It's bright, it's fast.

It's 144 Hertz excellent color gamut. There's nothing I really have to complain about it. The top bezels are thin, the side bezels are really thin There is a bit of a chin But I mean if you're gonna put thick bezel somewhere, the bottom one's probably the best Webcam's up top. Image quality isn't amazing, but at least the angle is good and it's just really nice to see laptop companies put in faster screens because, Last year, we were seeing really high end laptops with something like GTX 1080s in them, but they're capped with 60 Hertz screens which just didn't make sense to me This is the way to do it.

Fast screens with fast processors and fast GPUs. Good stuff all around One thing to note though, this display does not have G-Sync And I think for some people they're just like ''hey dealbreaker, no G-Sync?" But the truth is I actually like that it doesn't have it Here's why. Number one: it keeps the price down. If they had a display that was licensed for G-Sync, this would be like an extra 100 or 200 bucks The other thing is battery life.

By not having G-Sync, you get to use Nvidia Optimus So you can use the onboard graphics to keep your battery consumption down when you're just not playing games and stuff But the main reason for me is that G sync is only really useful at like 60 frames per second or slower the moment you bust like six seventy eighty frames per second it just doesn't it's not as useful I'm not saying it's not useful It's just not as useful as it would be when you're at lower frame rates at 144 Hertz this thing can shoot way beyond the frame rates Where g-sync is clutch in terms of connectivity the port selection is quite good There's nothing I feel like this thing's missing it even has an Ethernet port if there's one thing I would add it would be like an extra Thunderbolt three USB-C port, but that's basically it now I don't love that the location of the AC adapter Hole is just kind of in the middle of the side here, and I think some people won't care but it just doesn't look as clean to me when it comes out the middle and the cable can kind of cover the exhaust in Some circumstances, it's a minor issue, but I thought I'd put it out there the speakers are located on the bottom And I wish they weren't located on the bottom because they actually sound okay They get really loud just the location is really poor when you have these things playing in a normal position the audio gets really flattened out by the table or the desk or whatever you have your laptop sitting on it just Loses so much clarity because of its position that I just wish it was positioned elsewhere the battery inside here has been Significantly upgraded from the previous generation it's now 82 watt hours It's a six hour battery for regular use with the screen at 150 nits. The AC adapter is 180 watts Nothing special kind of like your standard MSI adapter the performance on this laptop is straight-up excellent It's the six core i7 8750H. And you're gonna see great performance numbers if you want more details on this particular CPU you can check out the video that I'll link Below, but for multi core applications, it's a big step up from last gen the GPU is awesome 1070 Max-q really good performance for basically any kind of game at 1080p and you'll be able to take advantage of that 144 Hertz screen It's a really good combination The fans can be controlled in Dragon Center like you can crank up the fans if you're doing with a 3d render Or if you want like the best gaming performance possible you can crank it up It'll be loud, but you'll get great performance or you just leave it on auto and just let it do its thing on idle its silent and On load, it gets a little bit louder, but you get great performance You can slow down manually if you want But on a thin and light laptop like this with a six core processor and a 1070 max-q you kind of wanna let the fans do its thing and I think they do a really good job with the thermals the Exterior temperature is also pretty good on the top surface. It gets a little warm on the bottom, though I'd play games on a table or a desk and not so much on your lap so overall I feel like MSI did a really Good job on this device There's some one about this thing that I feel like people would appreciate there's so much they did right about this thing um The only real complaint to have about it is seriously the accessibility.

That's something I really wish they just I don't know why they made it so difficult to get in there But it is the pricing at eighteen hundred dollars in the base model is Fair it's not great. This is never gonna be cheap a six core desktop replacement. It's never gonna be cheap right now, but It's reasonably priced I feel like there's gonna be way more expensive models that do something similar to this As for whether you should upgrade if you're running a 7700 HQ and all you do is play games and probably not But if you do anything that can take advantage of the multi-core stuff like the six core CPU. This is a good one Okay, hope you guys enjoyed this video! Thumbs if you liked it, subs if you loved it! See you guys next time!.