- This might look like a knockoff Alienware.
Well, because it is,
but according to the specs on the box,
like AMD processor,
this might just be able to beat them at their own game.
But will it?
I honestly don't know,
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(bright electronic music)
What we have here today
is the Eluktronics Prometheus XVI,
and it's a very powerful little laptop.
Eight-core AMD processor, RTX 3080, the 16-gig version.
It's quite a beast, and it's $1,300 less
than this Alienware right here.
Now judging by the box,
I actually thought it was more of a striking comparison
to the Alienware.
In person, it's more gray than white,
like I thought it was here.
Let's just open it up here.
So in here we have some dbrand skins.
Now, Eluktronics says that this is so that you can choose
if you want to have just the complete stealth look,
or if you want to have their logo on the back.
Well, I think it's almost smarter than that.
It's the kind of thing where,
when you're asking for someone to build you a laptop,
like your Eluktronics, or even Dell or Lenovo,
you aren't building that laptop yourself.
You're going to a bunch of suppliers and being, like,
in the case of this one,
let's say Cherry is making the keyboard
and someone else, like maybe PixArt
is making this trackpad,
and so on and so forth.
But it's really smart to just call up dbrand
so that they can put your logo on something like this.
This costs, what, like 20 bucks,
instead of having to order, like,
I don't know, 500, a hundred thousand laptops,
just so you can have your logo on here.
That's one of the things that was funny.
I was talking to the CEO and he said
he really likes this laptop.
The insides are based off of, I believe it's an HP.
And then the factory reskins it.
And it came out kind of looking like an Alienware.
Eluktronics actually aren't super stoked about that.
They want it to be more individual to them,
but you need to just make so many laptops
for it to be your own.
So instead they just have exclusive rights to this chassis
in the US.
In person, it does look less like the Alienware
than I was expecting though.
It's kind of like the Legion and the Alienware
just kind of like,
got it on.
And this is what popped out.
Me and Brandon together
think we got it started in the right spot.
We're gonna find out here.
Dbrand skinning laptops is just so smart.
It's such an easy way to make it look cool.
Which one did you take, Brandon?
Little black with the logo,
or RGB?
- [Brandon] Gimme RGB all day.
RGB all day? Hell yeah.
Now when you get this laptop,
the first thing you want to do, of course,
like install your drivers,
but then you want to install the Ryzen Controller software.
It's kind of janky.
Like, look at the splash screen, Brandon.
Beautiful.
(chuckles)
And the whole program's kind of janky.
This is not a first-party program,
but at the same time,
everything that you need to play around with your computer
is right here.
So like, CPU temperature limit, boom.
Now it's 85 degrees.
Turn that off?
Want to change the TDP?
It's right there.
All of the stuff that you would really want to do
is just available for you.
Now, it may not look the best.
Like, this is a very simple little program,
but compared to Alienware's Command Center,
which, like, it's fancy, it looks really good,
but it doesn't work the best.
All right, enough screwing around, though.
Got the Dad Hat, lttstore.com,
and we are ready to do some testing.
Cinebench, let's just go straight for it.
Now, if I'm honest,
I don't think that this is as well cooled
as the Alienware or the Lenovo,
but it does have an AMD processor,
which means that there is a good chance
that it's going to win this.
Huh.
Well, this isn't good.
This Lenovo got a 5362,
Alienware got 5394.
That's within margin of error.
Makes sense, they have the exact same CPU.
But the Eluktronics has 4906.
That's not ideal.
I actually thought it would win right now.
But let's see if we can make it win.
One second.
Okay, so with a score of 5394 to beat,
we're hopping into the Ryzen Controller
and
we're just going to do it the dirty way at first,
just every... Oh.
You can set the temperature limit to 105 degrees.
I don't know about that.
Let's go for 99.
(chuckles)
But besides that one,
we're just going to take all the sliders
all the way to the right,
and just see what happens.
With our super-easy overclock, we got 5132,
which is a decent improvement,
200 points,
but we still need another 200 in order to beat this guy.
And I don't know if we're going to get it.
Yeah, we ran it again
with those additional sliders all the way over to the right.
And the score is about the same: 5100.
So we're not able to beat either of these guys.
Now, we did do a bit more research while it was running,
and it looks like this is about as fast as the 5900HX gets.
So
I think that really speaks more so
to how well Alienware and Lenovo
and their vapor chamber coolers
have cooled these i7 chips,
as opposed to this thing being slow.
I'm kind of surprised though.
I was not expecting for Intel's 10 nm
to be able to beat AMD.
So
although it wasn't quite
the Cinebench result I was hoping for,
it is still impressive because we didn't hit 90 degrees.
And that's very promising for the cooling system and games.
What I am impressed with, though,
is just the overall build quality of this thing.
So the chassis is stamped aluminum,
and it just feels really good.
I have to say, it's not the same as
the magnesium chassis of the Alienware.
This thing is insanely well-built,
but it's very much in a similar league as the Lenovo,
Now, as for the keyboard,
(typing sounds)
I am personally a fan.
So I feel like that it has a tiny bit more travel
than the Legion has.
This is in many ways a good keyboard,
but I find it's not...
Like, the key stability just isn't quite perfect.
And there isn't enough travel.
And this one right here is pretty good.
This one's maybe like an A-minus,
we can call this one A.
The Alienware has the Cherry switches
that are just the best,
but that's kind of in its own league.
One thing I was planning on complaining about
is the trackpad.
You can look at it, the size is fine.
It's basically the same as the Legion and the Alienware,
or actually, a tiny bit bigger than the Alienware.
And I just don't really have any complaints about it.
It's the kind of trackpad that you can just use every day
and be generally happy about it.
But enough fooling around.
It's a well-built machine,
but no one cares if it doesn't game well.
It's a gaming laptop, so let's do some games.
Before we get into the hard gaming benchmarking,
I want to just find out the subjective.
How does it feel to game on this laptop?
We're here in Valheim.
And first thing, this screen is so good.
I've said it before,
but Quad HD on laptops is just, it's the sweet spot,
especially 16x10.
It's kind of weird in games.
In games, I feel like a lot of them
are made for a much wider screen, as opposed to taller.
But you get used to it pretty fast
and it is quite nice,
extremely responsive,
no problems at all.
We're now in Forza Horizon 4,
and this is probably
our best display benchmark that we have.
It's also a pretty good benchmark benchmark.
We're getting, like, what, 120 FPS.
You're not going to be complaining about that in this game.
Now, this really shows you
how much just color and brightness you have.
Like, you don't really get to see it
cause you're watching on whatever monitor you have.
But to my eyeballs,
I would quite enjoy just not doing work
for the rest of the day
and playing Forza on this thing.
Now we can get into the actual hardcore game testing.
This guy right here.
So we're connecting to an external display for two reasons.
First of all,
all of the testing for the Alienware x17 was done at 4K.
And this is not a 4K panel.
Also, inside of this, there is a MUX switch,
which can give you something like
a five to 10% performance uplift.
But unfortunately it isn't yet enabled
in the BIOS of this thing.
So, you know, connected to an external display,
you get that performance uplift,
and it's more representative of what you can expect
when you actually have hands on with this thing,
and it's been updated.
Based off of my numbers,
I don't think this is going to be as fast
as the Alienware or the Lenovo.
Hot damn.
So I was expecting this to be something like 90 FPS,
but we ended up getting 103.
So that's two more than the Lenovo Legion.
And I honestly don't know how it did it.
I'm very impressed, you little guy.
Okay, yeah, we ran it again and it did drop a bit.
So we now have 96 FPS,
and the reason is just simply that
our CPU,
it's overheating.
Now we do still have it
in everything-to-the-right go-insane mode.
So I don't really blame it,
but I do think that this is
a much more reasonable kind of
mid-nineties, maybe 90 FPS,
is what you're actually going to be getting.
Wonder if having this thing,
not on a desk pad will help improve performance.
It does seem like we have intakes on the bottom
that might be slightly choked by something like this.
Now we're testing in Rise of the Tomb Raider.
Anything above about 45 is a win.
That's what the m17 did.
Anything above 66, which is what the x17 did,
is an ultra win.
I'm guessing we'll be somewhere in the middle there.
Damn, again I'm quite impressed.
So 57 FPS, that's one less than the Lenovo Legion,
which is well within our margin of error of these tests.
Final benchmark is Dirt.
We're looking for 100 FPS.
We're currently getting 90, so not a bad start.
Now, the fans, they're a bit loud in this thing.
If I'm honest, they're not super annoying.
Like, it doesn't have a whole lot of high-pitched whine,
but it certainly doesn't compare to this guy.
The x17 is very quiet while gaming,
for a gaming laptop, of course.
But you're not paying Alienware money,
so Dirt was a tiny bit of a disappointment:
92 FPS instead of the 100 I was hoping for.
But at the same time, going into this,
these are the results that I was expecting before
it kind of blew me away with the other ones.
Let's take it apart
and see how they're doing such a good job.
Disassembly, I believe, is pretty easy.
So you've just got a couple of screws.
The ones in the front are shorter than the ones in the back.
If you put a long boy in the front,
you're going to have a real bad time.
But fortunately,
a lot of the problems that you will run into
have already been covered by them.
So they hired Bob Of All Trades
to go and just make disassembly videos.
So, you know, things like these little fan grills
are kind of easy to screw up,
and now I'm going to note what's on the go
and not break them.
Exactly like this,
I'm slightly concerned
I'm going to break a couple of clips.
So I'm going to rewatch that video.
I was afraid that if I just pulled on this,
I was going to break it.
Now I can go in here.
That didn't feel great,
but she's all good.
Awesome.
Thank you, Bob.
That is quite the cooling system.
I do have to say it's clearly well-designed.
So we have one heat pipe that runs under here, sneaky like,
to get your VRMs cooled
on what is presumably the GPU over here.
We have these massive radiators on the back and the sides.
One thing I was a bit curious about
was that a lot of Eluktronics laptops, you know,
they come with liquid metal as an option,
whereas this guy does not.
It turns out there's a good reason.
They tested it, and there weren't massive performance gains
by putting liquid metal on the CPU and GPU.
What they did find though,
is that if you upgrade the thermal pads on the VRM
to K5-PRO paste,
you are able to push them harder
and see a real performance gain.
So they're considering having that as an option,
although liquid metal,
it's nice that they tested it,
and aren't going to just charge you extra
for something that won't have a performance benefit.
As for upgradability, we've got our RAM right here.
Oh yes.
So, this makes so much sense.
The RAM that we have here,
eight gigabytes 1Rx8, this is the faster old RAM.
So, we did a video on this a little while ago,
where new higher-density modules
will give you less performance.
This is almost definitely why I was surprised
at the performance of this laptop,
and why it had the extra, like, 10% performance
that I wasn't expecting it to have.
It's because someone like Eluktronics can go in,
ask for these faster RAM modules,
and they can get them.
Someone like Lenovo or Alienware,
aren't able to do that
because they have to order such large quantities
that they've probably run out of this fast stuff by now.
Yeah, super easy upgradability.
Two SODIMM slots, two SSD slots,
got a Wi-Fi card.
One thing that isn't so incredible is the battery.
So we get 64 watt-hours compared to the Legion's 80.
Now, they do make up for it by having an AMD CPU.
It's just more efficient than the Intel variants.
But if they had the larger battery,
they'd be able to beat instead of just match
the battery life of their competitors.
Well, although at the start of this video,
I thought this was going to be a brutal Alienware knockoff,
it turns out it's much closer to a Legion 7 knockoff,
and quite a good one at that.
Now, if we take a look at the Legion
that comes with the RTX 3080, you're looking at $2,759.
Now this guy right here,
if you get the 16-gigabyte 3080 version,
you're looking at $2,500.
So, do you really want to go for Eluktronics
for $200 less, and a smaller capacity SSD?
I'm not entirely sure.
But what is really compelling
is that there's an 8 GB RTX3080 version
of this guy right here for $2,300.
And I think that makes a lot more sense.
There's no eight-gig version of the 3080 in this guy,
and you probably just don't need 16 GB of VRAM.
You might as well just save yourself the $200,
in which case Eluktronics is quite a compelling little buy.
So yeah, overall, I'm pretty impressed with this guy.
The cooling's good.
The screen is great.
Keyboard's good.
I'm actually kind of surprised about that one.
Only real complaint is that
I wish the battery was a little bit bigger.
Good job guys.
I like it.
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- So thanks for watching, guys.
Let me know what you thought of this video.
It's kind of a different style than we normally do.
More of like experiencing a laptop,
as opposed to reviewing it.
If you're looking for something else,
the Alienware x17 video,
you probably want to go and watch that now.
So, have a good day. Bye.