now as you can tell from the box, this is a Chromebook. But according to Asus, it's
more than that. According to Asus this is a 'Cloud Gaming Laptop'. And because
Asus went to all the trouble of using the word 'Gaming' several times in the marketing,
I had to pay 700 US Dollars before tax for this Chromebook so that we can see
what kind of gaming experience it really offers whoa that's not a great start is it
after a quick bit of research it turns out Aces isn't the only company doing
this gaming Chromebooks are fairly common and it's pretty difficult for me to talk about the
pricing of these things without getting wildly inappropriate the top of the line
version of this Asus gaming Chromebook normally costs a butthole puckering 1300 Canadian rubles
you can buy one hell of an actual gaming laptop with that yeah I don't know I feel
like buying a fancy Chromebook is like buying a luxury tricycle a tricycle isn't the end goal
it's just a thing toddlers use to get used to the idea of an actual bicycle just buy a real
laptop I don't understand but I'm always open to new things so let's check out this cloud
gaming laptop now in all fairness to Asus for a Chromebook this is reasonably beefy
we don't even have a mediatek cell phone chip in here or emmc storage compared to
a real laptop however it starts to get a lot less impressive but we'll talk about that a bit later
thank you
standard Asus laptop packaging we've got raw cardboard I guess is the pretentious
way of referring to that and in this nice fabric
bag that's protecting the very expensive Chromebook in here yeah it's pretty nice
first off we get these little bookies one of which is a gaming offer I think this laptop
comes with three months of the RTX 3080 tier of GeForce now which is a whole nother thing about
this laptop which we do need to get into a bit later first let's finish unboxing it
and here is one of the advantages of you not owning the hardware that's actually running
the games you get a nice tiny power brick can you get it off with one tug let's see
I guess not it is very Hefty for a Chromebook this is a reasonably well-built Chromebook the top
is metal of some description although the bottom is very plasticky but look at that peeking out
from under that ventilation there's some actual Cooling in here which is rare for a Chromebook but
I guess you know it is gaming back here we have that yoga hinge or whatever it's called so you can
do aerobics with your laptop in terms of IO it's about as limited as you'd expect for a Chromebook
but I think it's a bit stupid that it doesn't have an ethernet port on it because you know cloud
gaming but we'll see if that impacts anything later on when we try game on it now we need to
see if for 700 we get a Chromebook that passes the one hand open test this is very important
oh it doesn't so it's just trash and after having to open the Chromebook using both
my hands like some kind of animal I was real excited by the display oh that looks like a
lovely glossy touchscreen it looks like it'll be a nightmare to use outside though it does
look very glossy now I think this display may be the reason why this thing costs what it does
because it is a 144hz display it may be 1080p I'm not 100 sure that's less awesome though
it's a pretty entry-level laptop keyboard rattly and a bit too squishy but it's serviceable and
for you recreational Excel users we've got a numpad on the side I feel like it's a little
redundant on a Chromebook but it's nice to have I want to turn it on and see what this
display looks like so let's do that now and once I went through the standard slightly too
invasive Chromebook setup process on first impression the display was pretty good but
it may very well have been a bit too glossy for its own good but we'll talk more about that when
we try and game on it first let's open this Chromebook and have a closer look at its guts
the only place you can kind of stick anything in is this
loop around the front of the laptop this kind of thing just makes damage
almost unavoidable but eventually with enough struggle and plastic crack sounds I got the
bottom off there we go oh but don't forget the aces special a hidden little ribbon cable for you
to accidentally destroy when taking the bottom off so that rear is about 78 more annoying to get off
than it possibly has the right to be it's actually made by foxconnor oh okay so this is basically a
Macbook that's pretty cool which I guess explains the solder down 8 gigs of RAM always nice to see
but we actually have an upgradable SSD in here let's have a look there it is all 128 gigs of
it which we can easily access just by destroying the laptop cooling wise this looks pretty good for
a Chromebook we've got a thick heat pipe with a fan and a little bit of heatsink which should be
enough for the I3 but I guess we'll find that out soon enough so yeah let's close it up and try and
do some gaming on it well not on it but gaming using it is like a conduit for gaming foreign
I started off by trying a game that I could run physically on the Chromebook considering that it
uses Chrome OS something like asphalt 17 losers is pretty representative of the kind of games you
can play physically on it I'm assuming this is gonna run very well because it is a phone game
and we have actual laptop Hardware in here but it really didn't how is it so stuttery what in
the world I don't think I mined this game running badly it's just it's really stupid it feels like
watching a cinematic that every now and then prompts you to press a button so you feel like
you're contributing at this point I'm sure a bunch of you are thinking but all of it this
thing would likely be great for emulating old games yeah but you know what else is great for
emulating old games a real laptop besides these days the hardware that powers my catheter tube
can emulate the crap out of old games you don't need to spend 700 on a Chromebook for that uh but
but anyway let's try and use it for its intended use case cloud gaming as I mentioned before the
little Chromebook comes with three months of the RTX 3080 tier of the cloud gaming service GeForce
now which is nice but once those three months are up you have to spend 20 dollars a month
to maintain that tier of cloud gaming so if you want to spend two years for example gaming at the
GeForce now tier they bait you in with that's 480 US Dollars which doesn't even include the
cost of the games these laptops like the cloud gaming service equivalent of a heroin dealer at
least there is a free tier if you're okay with one hour gaming sessions and worse performance
but on the note of performance let's see how this runs cloud gaming oh that is not a very good start
something's just adjusted and now it's running better but no it isn't it's still shockingly
bad as far as I understand I'm in a prime GeForce Now location and my internet handles it well I've
used it before not with this kind of performance so I'm not sure what's happening now it could be
a network issue but that's the problem with this kind of thing if the Network's in a bit of a mood
this happens and I'm gonna try wired internet uh we don't have an ethernet port but I have an
adapter we can use via USBC let's plug it in and see if that helps a few moments later oh
wow that is so much better it still looks a bit compression artifacty but it feels infinitely
better it's not stuttering and this reasonable input lag so with that let's try another game
now fortnite is running pretty well you can see in the very tiny letters up there that we are
getting well over 120 frames per second and this is with 1080p competitive settings now one of the
reasons I always use fortnite is because it's the game I found that runs the best on GeForce
now the input latency and stuff is very low it just feels good and it's always impressive
how well this runs on cloud gaming but you know what also runs it well an actual gaming laptop
wow cyberpunk feels pretty sticky it looks pretty good and I think the frame rate's
reasonable but you can clearly feel the input lag here and that's one of the problems with
GeForce now not only does it not have a particularly big library of games but
there's a big variation in how the games that it does support runs for every Fortnight level
experience there's a game that runs like this now considering that this Chromebook has Intel
Hardware on it I think it should be pretty easy to install Windows on it to see how it
runs games by its own self but before we do that let's quickly compare this cloud
gaming experience to the gaming experience of a real gaming laptop at roughly the same price
the real boy gaming laptop was from a recent video and it's also by Aces as you can see by the specs
it is a reasonable bit beefier than the Chromebook and I only paid the equivalent of about 500 US
dollars for it it was on sale but it is quite a bit cheaper than the Chromebook and has an actual
graphics card in it so let's see how the gaming experience Compares now with fortnite running at
the same settings we are not getting as high a frame rate but it actually feels better because
the system is running it here so there isn't that input latency feel of cloud gaming fortnite may
work well with GeForce now but even with this kind of laptop you can still feel the difference and
the thing is this is with the laptop running in a single Channel Ram configuration which really
kicks its performance in the balls if you upgrade the RAM to a proper configuration it makes a huge
difference check out the dedicated video on this laptop for more information now I will
say that the Chromebook was much quieter while gaming because you know it doesn't have Hardware
running the game in it and the display isn't quite as nice although it's a decent display
it's still 144 Hertz and it is an IPS panel so it's not as good but it's still a pretty good
display so if anything I would say that this is running the game better than the Chromebook was
just because of that lack of latency now when it comes to cyberpunk at 1080p low settings it's a
bit of a mixed bag in terms of visuals it doesn't look as good as the cloud gaming experience and
the frame rate is lower but it doesn't have that input lag so I don't really know who to give it
to here the laptop may not have the input latency but its visuals and frame rate is much worse but
at least you don't have to pay twenty dollars a month for it to run like this anyway with
that pretty unscientific comparison out the way the last thing I want to do is install
Windows on the little Chromebook so it can run games with its own steam horsepower power
oh okay oh the ribbon cable
foreign
so after quite a lot of struggle we're finally at the point where we've got windows installed
on here and we can run some games physically on this very expensive Chromebook now I did
run into a couple of problems the first one is that the only i o on the laptop that works is
the one square USB port so back here it's a bit of a dongle nightmare the trackpad also doesn't
work and the audio doesn't work none of the Jacks nor does the speakers so at this point
it's like a third of a laptop but at least we can see how it runs games right sure it's gonna
be very impressive so at the end of the day all I had to do to run some Steam games natively on
the device was physically break it and then spend two hours hacking Windows onto it just
to have half of the laptop not working anymore and all that for 40 frames per second at normal
settings up a hill yeah I don't know I guess it's convinced me I don't think it's stupid anymore
thank you
foreign