- The AMD Ryzen 9 3950x blew us away
with its 16 CPU cores and 4.7 GHz boost Clock,
humiliating Intel's fastest offerings.
So what would happen if someone put it in a laptop?
("Justice")
We get the apex 15,
the newly crowned fastest laptop ever.
At this point,
it's not a question of whether it will wreck
the competition, but rather by how much
it'll wreck the competition.
Let's get into it.
Today's video is brought to you by GlassWire.
Keep track of the weird stuff that's connecting to your PC
even when you aren't using it.
You can see if strange devices join your Wi-Fi
and block them instantly.
Get 25% off at the link below.
(energetic music)
The original plan was to compare the Apex 15
to other laptops from the blue team,
but given that Intel's best was just eviscerated
by the thin and light Zephyrus G14 here.
We figured we needed to up the ante,
so on every single one of our performance charts
you're going to find the desktop core i9-9900K
to show you just how overpowered this thing is.
At the time of writing, the core i9-9900K
is Intel's fastest consumer desktop CPU.
And unsurprisingly,
it's 8 cores were no match for the 16 cores in the Apex 15.
If you were looking for pure CPU power on the go,
there is absolutely nothing like this.
You're not reading that wrong,
unless you think the blender classroom render
didn't finish five minutes earlier than the 9900K.
Maybe the biggest surprise though is not only
that the Apex 15 beat the core i9-9900K,
but that in some tests even the Zephyrus G14
beat big blue,
reinforcing how much of a beast it is.
As for single threaded performance,
well, the 9900K is still the king of the hill,
but not by the margin that I was expecting in Cinebench,
just 5%.
Moving on to gaming test though,
Intel does manage to hold on to the top two positions
on our chart,
although, I would most certainly hope so
given that one of those chips is a desktop one
and that the other one
is equipped with the new super variant
of the mobile RTX 2070.
The 3950x then is without a doubt,
the fastest mobile gaming CPU that we've ever tested
and the Apex 15's cooling system,
which you probably just heard spin up right there,
performed admirably,
keeping our GPU at around 1700 MHz
and our CPU above 4 GHz.
That's dang impressive,
so surely there must be some compromise then, right?
How does the Apex 15 fair against a desktop R9 3950x?
Well, unsurprisingly there's just not enough power
or cooling for the Apex 15 to keep up with a true desktop
or with my underwear photo shoot,
lttstore.com
So the R9 3950x is running in Eco Mode
knocking the TDP down from 105 watts to just 65 watts.
Now originally there was actually a suite
of overclocking tools in this laptop's bios
until der8auer took things a little bit too far
and Clevo locked the BIOS down to prevent,
overzealous tuning.
Anywho, hopefully soon
there will be an expert BIOS mode down the road
that puts the options back in with some warnings
that it could void your warranty, ET cetera, ET cetera.
The Apex 15 is also slowed down by the 16 gigs
of 2666 memory that we unfortunately had to use.
The original plan was to use 32 gigs at 3200 MHz.
But Ryzen 3rd Gen desktop chips and sodimm memory,
sort of uncharted territory.
So over the next few months we're hoping,
a bios update should add support for loads more ram
with an accompanying performance boost.
Back to the thermals though,
the CPU does get up to about 90 degrees Celsius,
when it's under heavy load,
at which point the clock speed does drop to 3 GHz
and that might sound kind of slow.
But guys remember,
there are 16 cores and 32 threads in this laptop.
I mean, we will regularly see 6 or 8 core laptops
that have to drop to the mid 2 GHz range
when they're under heavy loads,
So this is still very impressive.
Sort of.
'Cause something's gotta give, right?
So what has XMG?
I mean really Clevo,
the original designer, done to keep the thermals
of this beast in check?
In short, the Apex 15 moves a shocking amount of air
for a laptop
and it creates quite a bit of noise while doing it.
Surprisingly, I didn't find the noise too annoying.
There's no high pitched whine
and glass half full
since the fans are going full tilt pretty much all the time,
the laptop is kind of easy to tune out.
To really figure out how they kept the Apex 15 cool though,
we'll need to take a little trip inside.
First, you're going to want to take out the battery
by removing these two screws and pulling up.
We were only be able to get about an hour of time away
from the wall by the way,
with this 62 watt hour battery,
but putting a larger one in would have been more expensive,
made the laptop bigger and heavier,
and let's face it guys,
it's not like 1.5 hours of battery life
is suddenly going to make the Apex 15
viable for use anywhere
that you don't have easy access to an outlet.
Five more screws which are different lengths by the way,
so be careful when you're reassembling
and we can slide the bottom cover off,
revealing.
Look at that copper
and the heat pipes.
Those are some of the largest heat pipes
that I have ever seen at 11 mm wide,
which I guess means it makes a bit more sense
how the processor didn't have a complete meltdown.
Underneath the heat pipes
and a generous dollop of Thermal Grizzly Kryonaut
is the motherboard.
And this is cool.
Almost everything in here can be upgraded.
There are two M.2 slots,
a 2.5 inch hard drive bay
and easily accessed ram.
Even the CPU uses a standard desktop AM4 socket,
so, adding another level of craziness here,
it could actually be possible to upgrade
to future processors,
assuming that a bios update were provided.
That means the graphics card,
that's an RTX 2070,
is pretty much the only bit
that can't be swapped out in the future.
It's kind of like the anti Mac book.
Back to the exterior though,
the Apex 15 is built like a brick,
a 5.69 pound brick to be exact,
and although looks chassis construction is plastic,
there's enough copper on the inside
that it gives it a pretty solid feel
with my only complaint being
that the keyboard,
the like wrist rest itself and the keys themselves,
are a little bit squishy.
Now, it didn't stop me from liking
the keyboard reasonably well.
It's not top tier,
but the key switches never actively annoyed me,
so I'll give it a solid B.
The bad news is that the track pad did actively annoying me.
Overall, the tracking and click feel is mediocre,
but it's the poor palm rejection
that really made me want to outright disable it
and just use a mouse.
With that said,
on a different laptop,
that would be a straight up deal breaker,
do not buy,
but with this,
I suspect that most of the time
where you can plunk down this thing and your power brick,
you can also plunk down a mouse,
I mean the thing is less of a laptop
and more of a desktop that can be moved around easily.
I mean even the IO is desktop like,
you have 3 display outputs on the back,
I mean you don't do that if you intend for this thing
to be used on the go.
But, all of that positive stuff aside,
assuming you're after something like this,
should you spend your money on it?
Does come with some compromises.
Remember that you're only getting 65 watts of CPU power.
You're getting a lot more noise than a desktop,
and if you're willing to give up some CPU performance,
basically any other laptop out there is going to beat this.
For portability and battery life,
however, if you're after a high performance rig,
the value of this machine
is something that I don't know if I've ever seen before.
Our config right here,
will run you about $2500,
which is a lot of money,
but consider this,
an equivalent desktop is going to run you close to 2 grand.
And unlike the Apex 15,
that desktop doesn't come with a 144HZ IPS gaming display,
or with the keyboard.
Also, the performance per dollar of this machine
can be improved by settling for 12 cores instead of 16.
The R9 3900x variant drops the price to around 2 grand,
which is only about $200 more,
than an equivalent desktop.
That is pretty compelling.
I'm used to seeing big price premiums
on these weird low volume high performance skews,
but it's not really here this time.
So if PCI express expansion cards,
aren't really your thing,
this is a heck of a lot of performance in a,
well, relatively portable container, isn't it?
So if got to crush big calculations
or renders on the go,
this is it guys.
Nothing is going to get it done faster.
Just like nothing can get a Segway out there
faster than this guy,
anytime we buy anything online,
we give access to our personal information
to merchants and their data partners,
and this happens without our clear consent.
So it's important that your online presence
is kept safe and secure,
and with privacy.com you can do that.
It's a free tool that makes it easy
to manage your financial life online
by keeping your most important information
out of the hands of people
who might have it stolen from them.
By generating virtual numbers,
Privacy masks your real bank information
so you never have to worry about giving it out
to people you don't know online,
you can create up to 12 cards a month
on their free personal plan
and pro is $10 a month,
which gives you access to everything in the free plan
plus 1% cashback on all purchases,
up to 36 cards a month
and more security and privacy features.
Privacy.com is PCI-DSS compliant
and since they make merely for merchants,
there's no cost to you,
so sign up today and you'll get 5 bucks.
It's privacy.com/linus,
that's privacy.com/linus.
I have that link below.
If you guys are looking for something else to watch
maybe checkout our review of Zephyrus G14,
a laptop that has no asterisks,
on its recommendation,
this thing is unreal.
So this is cool,
but this is like,
more well-rounded.