Ryzen Gaming Laptops go BEAST MODE! - Related to itx, s1, go, mode!, a

A PORTABLE ITX Surprise!

Today we have a really cool opportunity to check out an upcoming ITX enclosure from iBUYPOWER, who as you know make high-end systems for gaming and. Production work. Now they are getting into making cases, and this is where the Revolt 3 comes in. They showcased this case at CES, and then it was called the Revolt 3 MK3, but they have dropped the MK3 part. iBUYPOWER will be selling the case as a standalone product under a different sub-brand, but. Also be including the Revolt 3 in their own full-on systems too. The expected release date is around July 2021, hopefully.

This next part is really key and pretty major for iBUYPOWER and that us where you all come in. Let us know in the comments whether or not you would like to see the case with an included power supply for around $200 USD. That would be a 80Plus Gold SFX-L unit with 700W or would you prefer just the case for around $90. Both of those have their advantages, like pre-routed cables already out of the box and you are ready to build if the power supplies included, or use an existing power supply that you already have on hand SFX or SFX-L.

And the second point of feedback from you all would be the colour mesh at the front, whether you would like it black. Silver, white-ish looking, or gold. I’m leaning towards either the black or the silver, because the silver does match other elements around the enclosure, but the gold feels cozy and. Quite a unique, but it doesn’t really match the rest of the enclosure. Let us know which one looks best to you in the comments.

Let’s begin with the size. When it comes to a towering ITX form factors the size is quite crucial. It is so it’s slightly bigger than the NZXT H1, bigger than the SSUPD Meshlicious, and bigger than my Corsair ONE. And actually approaches the size of the Sugo SG14/15 from SilverStone. It’s really that narrow form factor that kind of slims down case visually.

In terms of design. We have this vertical tower with some resemblance to the now recalled NZXT H1. Ventilation is all around with no glass option available, so kind of following the Meshlicious steps with this square ventilation on all panels, with larger cutouts on the GPU side. Which is your front side. That is also the side where the coloured mesh would be placed. It is metal, it is quite coarse, so not exactly like a dust filter, and it is a bit of an airflow barrier too. As you will see later. As for all other sides, they are dustproof with these coarse magnetic filters that slide into each panel and all panels are tool-less and removable with ease.

The only branding element is at the front with the iBUYPOWER text and. On these convenient retractable headphone holders, which are available both sides. They are low profile, offer good functionality, but a bit scratchy when you pull them out. But this is still is a prototype so hopefully that will be fixed in the mass production. The next element I appreciate is the handle, which is on this push to release mechanism, and. It can hold the weight of the entire system no problem. It would be nice to have the actually weight capacity somewhere underneath the handle to give you a bit more confidence about how much it can carry.

I love the inclusion of a power switch at the back, we don’t normally see this with power extensions. But it’s nice to not need to switch the PSU on/off on the actual power supply inside. The front I/O is adequate with dual USB ports, a 4-pole headset jack, and. This USB-C Gen2 port which turns out to be an extension that you must plug into your motherboard I/O instead of the internal USB-C. However, we were also informed by iBUYPOWER that they are thinking about including a separate Type-C for the internal connection, and that swap will require only two screws. Which is kind of cool because now what you can either plug it into the motherboard I/O or into the internal USB port, which is something smart. I haven’t seen any other firm do that. We saw the RAW S1 include the USB-C extension into the motherboard, but I like this dual approach.

Let’s move inside, and. I find this to be a really user-friendly design that smartly utilizes room for the largest components. The included power supply is up top with pre-routed cables, support for SFX or SFX-L. The ITX motherboard is going to be underneath with I/O facing down, and. The triple-slot GPU is on the side without the need for riser cable. And that’s a big plus for new ITX cases to avoid costs and also compatibility issues. As you know PCIe Gen4 riser cables might introduce some black screens and you have to pop things out to fix that. And I appreciate that there is nothing like that here. We have good radiator support as well for the CPU, with a swivel radiator bracket that supports 240mm and 280mm radiators with a total about 58mm of clearance available for radiator and. Fan thickness. You can also install a CPU tower heatsink up to 140mm in height.

As for storage, we have two SSDs behind the GPU, with this large cutout in the middle for your SATA cables. And a mechanical drive slot beside the power supply. This space is actually really useful for storing your cables instead of the hard drive, but the option is there if you need it. And here is the full spec rundown, it’s a quite impressive for a case under 20L, but also nothing out of the ordinary. This is the type of a compatibility we have come to expect from cases this size, and. It’s just a matter of how is the user experience? And what’s the cooling like? That is what really separates one case from another.

As for the assembly. Can I just say how nice it is to have all your ITX linked cables already pre-installed. I guess that is one of the major advantages of having a power supply already included in the enclosure. Some SFX power supplies still have those massive long cables, while here everything is that ITX length. There is no extra length you have to slide somewhere and find room for, everything is precut to your ITX system. But I really do not like working with this style of cable, which are that low-profile really stiff cables that are really difficult to come compress and. Like stash away in places because of that already dense cable. Beside that the only other hurdle was the pump installation, because you need to rotate the pump to twirl the tubes so they don’t hit the fans.

Also, there is no way to actually lock the radiator bracket in the open position. So I would actually recommend you install the pump and the rotate the radiator. The radiator bracket is removable, so you could go that route, but still it would be nice to have the radiator bracket kind of lock in the open position so it’s not constantly falling down.

The GPU space is large and roomy and open from all sides with accessible screw points, the PCIe power cables exits from 3 different locations near the power supply. And the cable cover at the very top to compress your PCIe cables to make sure that the PCIe cables don’t bulge out and prevent that side panel from closing. It’s a smart design, I appreciate those small touches.

Cable management is mostly fine, but. I don’t like how the front I/O cables cannot pass underneath the motherboard since there’s no cutout, instead they must cross the motherboard. Cables exiting the power supply also have very little room until that cable cover in front of it. The PSU guard bulges with all the cables that prevents it from locking into that lower position, and. This pushes into the GPU space a little bit. This is one of those things that is kind of expected on a prototype, but 100% needs to be refined on a mass produced sample, and based on our conversations with iBUYPOWER they will be reinforcing that whole power supply shroud so that it will not bulge.

One more thing is that you can remove the top panel where you can reveal these dual fan slots. Which can handle 80mm fans on the left or the right side to help with GPU cooling. This bracket will be removable if you are not using that space for fans ad it will give you a little bit extra clearance for the GPU.

Thankfully temperatures overall are under control, but. I would love to see improved dust filters included all around to improve performance. These coarse filters are quite cheap and they block a lot of air. I would love to see high performance fine mesh, like we see on the Corsair 4000 and 5000 series, to be included here instead. When we look at the performance versus my entire ITX stack, in this prototype stage it’s a little bit underwhelming for the CPU while the GPU is perfectly fine and. Under control. When you have no other means of exhausting the air but the radiator, it does mix in with a heat output from the GPU, which explains the hotter temperature versus the Razer Tomahawk ITX where I use the same cooler, but there was an additional 120mm exhaust fan.

Also with the Revolt 3 the top radiator fan is mainly blocked by the hard drive cage, and. I would love to see a slight redesign of the bracket to slide down that 240mm radiator to give us a little bit of extra clearance on the interior.

Before I conclude remember that I would love to hear your feedback on whether you would prefer the case for $90 USD versus case plus power supply for around $200 USD. Plus your thoughts would be appreciated for the colour options for the front mesh on the GPU side.

Now overall my experience has been quite positive with this prototype. It checks off many boxes for like a fresh 2021 ITX release in terms triple-slot graphics cards, up to a 280mm radiator on the inside, overall good cooling, I love the handle, I love the addition of headphone holders on either side. And the overall accessibility and user-friendly design is all there. It definitely needs refinement, this is something we have communicated to iBUYPOWER already, but for a standalone $90 ITX vertical enclosure I think it’s pretty competitive.

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Louqe RAW S1 Review – A Raw Deal

I am so excited to finally experience a Louqe enclosure, they are the guys responsible for the Ghost S1, which is super popular and I would say successful in the ITX space due its modularity. Its flexibility, and its compatibility with really good high-quality enthusiast components. This new enclosure the RAW S1 tries to follow in those footsteps of still offering raw power density but in a 12 liter enclosure.

I have to be honest my expectations for the RAW S1 are super high just because of everything the enterprise has done with the Ghost series, but I will say that the RAW series, the S1 in particular, I don’t think is as flexible in terms of adding components and. Adding water cooling as the Ghost series because with their little top hat you can install a 240mm radiator there, which you can’t with the S1 Nevertheless, come along and experience my journey working with my very first Louqe case.

First of all, I love the towering ITX form factor for 2 reasons. Number 1 it minimizes footprint on your desk because the cases vertical, not horizontal, and Number 2 that vertical space allows for massive GPU support. So you don’t have to expand the case in any other direction but in height. Here it looks very similar to my Corsair ONE in terms of size and actual dimensions too. It is also very similar in size to the SSUPD Meshlicious as well and slightly smaller than the now recalled NZXT H1.

In terms of materials it is thick aluminium, so one solid shell on the exterior with those beautiful ventilation patterns that look kind of random. But also fit exactly where ventilation needs to happen. There are some plastic pieces, both on the top and the bottom of the frame. Which kind of eliminates that premium feeling of an otherwise really solid enclosure. And once you remove the shell you can see there is a bit of flexing going on in that middle spine where your hardware sits and the base floor. Which actually is plastic like the surrounding bits. I think it would have been very difficult to mold that part to the shape of the shell.

Overall though the case feels very solid, especially because we have a handle at the bottom and. That’s kind of cool because it brings portability to the next level. My only complaint with the design – and that is totally subjective – is the exterior rhodium grey colour of the aluminum. It has greenish and warmish tones instead of the neutral dark grey tones that like we find with Apple products and other dark grey aluminum.

As for the case I/O we have a power button at the front and. The USB-C extension that can be installed on either corner at the rear. This is an extension so you have to plug this directly into your motherboard backside instead of the internal USB-C connector, so keep that in mind otherwise you won’t have USB on the case whatsoever unless you go directly into the motherboard.

Now to get inside that is a straightforward process, but. A little bit more complicated than like removing a simple side panel. Louqe does include a Torx key with which you have to remove 4 screws, then you have to pop out the USB-C connection and. The power button, both of which are easily done. Only then do you have access to remove that interior from the exterior shell. You can see it’s basically a rail system for the interior frame and the exterior shell. My sample here was extremely tight and that is something that I was not expecting for such a premium niche product. I was hoping for the build quality of those rails to be slightly superior.

With the interior shell open we can see that this case can hold. The specs say CPU towers up to 75mm in height are supported, triple slot GPU’s up to 320mm in length. SFX or SFX-L power supplies are supported with an optional 120mm fan in front of the power supply set to exhaust. Unlike the Ghost S1, which had that radiator expansion for the top hat. I don’t see how that is possible with the RAW S1 because that exterior shell is one solid piece. I don’t see how they could mount something on top of it to expand its cooling potential. You can see the interior is red, which I found to be odd since it might peek out through the ventilation and reveal itself. But the case is really dark inside when you close the shell so it really is not a concern. Plus I kind of like the look of it.

The PCIe Gen4 riser cable is really crucial and I’m happy that Louqe did it right. If you haven’t seen our article on the issues you might experience with riser cables check it out right here. In this case you can plug in a Gen4 GPU with a Gen4 compatible motherboard and everything should work just fine. The riser cable is blue, but it is wonderfully flexible allowing you to pass it underneath the motherboard and. Plug it into the PCIe slot on the motherboard without any issues whatsoever. This might be my favorite riser cable experience as of yet.

Not for the main assembly. I was kind of dreading the part where I have to do cable management because I absolutely hate cable management in tiny ITX cases. However, in this case, because the shell is out everything is exposed so you have full access to 360 degrees around the enclosure. Which lets you route the cables in a completely zero stress manner. Because the motherboard and the GPU are separated in those two chambers the cables don’t really mix, so you can do a really clean job on the main chamber and. Only then route the cables behind the motherboard for the graphics cards. I am very proud of how everything turned out in terms of cable management, even though I am using the shorter ITX cables for my SFX power supply.

The only downside in the entire user assembly and. The user guide is the optional 120mm fan out in front of the power supply. Based on the user manual you mount that last, but there is no way to access the screws in front of the power supply because there is no clearance for your screwdriver because the power supply is right there. You can either use rubber screws like I did here or mount the fan first and only then mount the power supply. But then also you have to deal with that really tiny amount of space in front of the power supply and. The fan for all your cables. Luckily they were able to jam in there just fine, but it did require some force to mount that bracket back in. The good thing is that we have lots of room between the power supply and that middle spine to stash all the excess cables in there. And also route the PCIe cables through it into the back chamber. You really have to make sure all your cables are collected and as tight as possible, especially because you will be populating that interior back into a really confined shell.

I would recommend turning on the system before placing the shell back on, and just as with the beginning that whole process of reinserting the shell into the frame was extremely tight to the point where I felt nervous about having my fingers around the frame because what if on one section goes in smoothly/quickly and. I hurt a finger, that is not something you want to experience on such a enthusiast high-level niche expensive enclosure.

Let’s talk about the price shall we? This thing is going to launch at €299 or $329 USD, which is a LOT. It is designed in Sweden and also made in Sweden, so that will cause part of the price premium, but. I was expecting to have a slightly advanced experience overall. Not just because of the rail system but because of some imperfections on the aluminium edges, especially around the handle that were quite sharp and. Not as refined as they should be. I also don’t really like some of the plastic pieces, but I understand why they are there because molding that shape in the aluminum would have been even more expensive.

The GPU mount here is completely tool-less. It just requires you to screw back that big thumbscrew at the bottom that holds the GPU in place. Really the only limiting factor with components and compatibility would be the CPU cooler. Because the best one right now under 75mm would be the Noctua LH-12S which I installed. It does perform very well in a default non-overclocked scenario, but I am using the same configuration as I test with all my ITX systems that means with the CPU overclocked to 5Ghz, which is extremely out of bounds for what this tiny cooler can handle.

I tested temperatures for both the CPU and the GPU with the shell and. Without the shell, and overall cooling was actually quite decent. The CPU wasn’t throttling, which I found to be very impressive, but the GPU temperatures are really impressive. Overall, there is plenty of room between a dual-slot GPU and the shell to not create turbulence for airflow, but as soon as you go into like cards then that fan will be right against the shell and that might create turbulence and additional noise as a result.

As for noise at full power, it’s going to be loud. But with some tweaking of the fan curves, especially for the CPU tower and that optional 120mm fan – which is actually louder than my CPU cooler fan – it’s totally manageable. By the way, there are no dust filters anywhere on the case, because that would worsen your cooling potential as it would be another barrier for airflow.

Since the motherboard is facing down all your I/O will have to be routed from there, and. I don’t like that especially with the really massive DisplayPort cables that don’t flex very well. This layout does give you the cleanest cable exit from the bottom of the case near the surface and. Not like cable sticking out from somewhere in the middle.

My first experience with the Louqe enclosure is kind of mixed. I was expecting to have a bit more finesse and refinement like what I’ve seen with the Ghost series. I hoped that this would carry over into the RAW S1 series because it’s priced just as high. However, some of the edges of the aluminum are not refined, especially on the rail system, at least with my sample.

To explain the price a little bit more. The riser cable alone costs $100, which is 1/3 the price for the RAW S1. Let that sink in for a little bit. But this case is targeted towards that really enthusiast niche market, so $300 for people who want to build in this vertical tower. Probably won’t be such a deal breaker. Especially when you have to consider the limitations with cooling, both for the GPU and. CPU versus something slightly bigger that can accommodate a 240mm radiator. The Ghost S1 already does that, so I get that they want to do something different with the RAW S1. At the end of the day, I feel like they have checked off the mark about massive GPU support. Cable management was surprisingly simple despite having such compact dense package. It also has a built-in handle that is actually built into that spine so it won’t go anywhere and it gives me confidence of carrying the system around without any issues.

On the other hand, it does lock you in a certain path for your CPU and. Your CPU tower heatsink choice, because of that small 75mm tower clearance. But it’s something that many Louqe customers have already accepted and I feel like they are just continuing with that trend. And that’s it, I hope you enjoyed this review. Let me know what you think of the Louqe RAW S1, is it a worth follow up to the Ghost S1?.

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Ryzen Gaming Laptops go BEAST MODE!

Remember Eluktronics – no not electronics, Eluktronics – one of the small companies that are trying to bridge the gap between high-end boutique laptop manufacturers and the bigger guys like Dell, HP. ASUS, and MSI. In fact, if you remember, I checked out their RP-15 about 6 months ago, and. It was one of the fastest Ryzen laptops we have ever tested. Was it perfect? No, not really, I mean there were some concerns about the chassis and some other things. And if you want to check out my thoughts on that laptop you can read the review right here. But anyways, today we are here with an other laptop from Eluktronics and it’s called the Prometheus XVII Ultra. Now that name is an interesting fusion of Greek mythology, where Prometheus means God of Fire and a modern marketing term like Ultra, where you’re getting the best of the best.

In a way that’s true because you are getting a Ryzen 5000H series CPU and an RTX 3080 that can be pushed to a higher wattage in Beast Mode. Which results in amazing gaming performance. The cooling solution on this laptop is pretty robust to keep up with that. But that doesn’t convey the whole picture, you see there’s a whole lot more when it comes to evaluating a laptop, especially when it has the term Ultra attached to it.

All right, before I get into the specs of this laptop. I do want to talk about availability because with the current state of the market finding components – let alone Ryzen-based laptops with higher-end GPU’s – can be a bit challenging. Now Eluktronics is fulfilling back orders to the best of their abilities and due to popular demand expect some production delays. With that out of the way, let’s start off with the price. It starts at $1700 USD, and for that you get a Ryzen 7 4800H CPU with 16GB of RAM, 512GB NVMe SSD. And an RTX 3060. The next tier is $400 more, and interestingly, that gets you an Intel 10th Gen Core i7-10875H CPU with an RTX 3070.

Add an extra $500 and. You get AMD’s latest Ryzen 7 5800H CPU with an RTX 3080 featuring 16GB of VRAM. Our sample comes with a few upgrades like twice the memory and storage, which brings the total to about $2,800 USD. That is a very expensive investment, but at the same time when you look at the competing models that offer high wattage RTX 3080 GPUs I would say that this is a bargain, but hold onto your wallet because I will circle back to that value aspect at the end of the review.

I should also mention that if you spend $2,500 or more at Eluktronics you instantly qualify for a gaming bundle that includes a thick gaming mouse pad, a lightweight gaming mouse, and a gaming headset along with a 10 foot HDMI cable, which is a nice touch.

Now from the outside there is nothing really interesting going on with the Prometheus. The chassis is pretty clean and minimal and it’s made of a mix of plastic and aluminium components. If you’re interested in giving it a unique look you can opt for this black matrix skin from dbrand. It’s an extra $10 and I think it looks pretty cool. Now right around the edges you will find these subtle RGB light bars, and you can customize the colours through the included software. Keep in mind that this is a 17-inch laptop, which means portability ultimately depends on how big your backpack is. Given that it’s just under 1-inch thick, you should be okay lugging this thing around, but you also have to keep in that this things weighs around 6lbs so it is a big boy.

The hinge is not the strongest given that it’s placed at the center, you will experience a bit of flexing when you open the laptop with one hand. Especially from the corners. I noticed some wobbling when using this thing on my lap. Keep in mind that this is a generic chassis that is being used by other manufacturers, so there’s nothing really unique from the Eluktronics with the design on the Prometheus.

Moving on to the interior space, and once again you are greeted with a clean keyboard layout and. A gigantic trackpad, which I will get too shortly. They did manage to fit a numpad, but that shouldn’t be surprising considering the 17-inch form factor. The arrow keys are positioned awkwardly, they are the same size as the rest of the keys, and. I find myself accidentally hitting the 1 key instead of Up and then 0 instead of Right. I should also mention that the secondary enter key is missing with the numpad, so that might be an issue for people who log a lot of data in programs like Excel or some other applications.

On the other hand, the keys are excellent. There is very little wobble so you end up with a rigid surface and the travel distance is perfect for a laptop keyboard. You get a very satisfying feel you bottom out. I would say this lines up right along with the Zephyrus G15 Uh, so if you’re a hardcore typist or gamer this won’t disappoint you. The keys are also LED backlit and they feature RGB lighting. It is a single zone setup and there is very little customization when it comes to lighting effects. The brightness levels are pretty good, it will get the job done for your night gaming sessions.

Okay, now let’s address the trackpad. It’s really massive, it’s actually bigger than my XPS 17, which I already thought was really big. It’s made out of glass surface, which means the surface is really smooth for navigating Windows. But my main concern is with palm rejection because if I place my right hand over the primary left and right buttons, and. If I try to move a Window, it just wouldn’t work. Now there is an option to disable the right zone of the trackpad, which basically cuts the usability in half. But honestly that just makes things even worse. I was really uncomfortable using that setting and I feel like there is a lot more fine tuning that still needs to be done to this trackpad because it’s just not perfect. Especially when compared to something like the Blade 15 or even the XPS 17 series. Another thing I want to mention is the palm rest area, because if you have small hands you might experience some level of discomfort trying to reach out for the keys because they are placed a little bit far from the edges. So that’s something to keep note of. Now I have began, so I didn’t have any issues and. I was pretty comfortable typing.

This is the webcam test on the Prometheus XVII Ultra. Now the quality is not the greatest in my opinion, but I will say the audio sounds pretty good, especially compared to the Razer Blade 15 Advanced model. So that’s a good thing. I will say that because of how weak this hinge is when you’re typing or just doing other stuff it might just start to wobbble as you are talking to somebody in a video call. The speakers are located at the bottom, so honestly don’t expect too much because there was very little bass response and. The treble sound too harsh. In fact, it’s just not a pleasing experience when you are listening to music or just watching YouTube videos, I would highly recommend a pair of headphones to get that job done.

I like the port setup on this laptop, it’s spread across the left, right, and. Back edges, and it has everything you need. Starting at the left, you get a USB Gen2 Type-A port and separate audio jacks. Switching over to the right there are two more USB Type-A ports, but do note that their Gen1 instead of Gen2. Next to that is a full-size UHS-I SD card reader, it’s not the fastest out there, but I appreciate this inclusion. At the back there is power-in, gigabit ethernet, HDMI , and a USB Type-C port with DisplayPort passthrough. I really like the layout of the back because it just makes cable management a lot easier, especially if you want to connect an external display or you just don’t have plugs around your mouse hand.

Moving on to the display, the Prometheus comes in just one option a matte finish IPS-type panel with Quad HD resolution and. Running at 165Hz. I had no issue scaling this thing to 100% to take advantage of the extra screen real estate, and. Personally I think Quad HD is an awesome option for a 17-inch laptop. It looks really sharp and the colours are pretty nice. As you can see from my display analysis test it covers 99% sRGB, 76% Adobe RGB, and 79% DCI-P3, so it will get the job done for photo and. Video editing, gaming, and all the other things that you would do on a laptop. But honestly, if I were to compare this to the competition within the same price range, I would have expected a superior quality display. Specifically something that covers a superior colour gamut. Also the screen doesn’t get that bright, it’s pretty dim, I think the peak levels are around 350 nits so outdoor visibility is going to be a bit challenging.

There is also a MUX switch integrated into the Prometheus, so that allows the user to switch between Optimus or just run off the discrete GPU full time. Which I think is a nice inclusion. In terms of upgradability, you have instant access to two RAM slots, which are already occupied. The primary NVMe SSD has drive speeds that are good, but. Not the fastest compared to the competition, especially when you look at the write performance. There is also an extra slot for storage expansion.

Now let’s jump into battery your life, and since this is a 17-inch laptop with a powerful CPU and GPU and. A pretty small 62Wh battery that means some of the worst battery life that I have ever seen, even when you set this thing to Balanced Mode. Meanwhile, Beast Mode doesn’t change all that much at light loads since both are operating at the lowest possible frequency while loading webpages. And if you are wondering no Office Mode doesn’t make a difference here either. But then again, you can’t forget that this really isn’t meant to be a portable device. It’s meant to be more of a desktop replacement than anything else. Of course, things get worse when laptops operating at a higher load level, but I have got to say it isn’t as bad as I thought when compared to some of the other laptops.

So while the power modes don’t make that much of a difference when it comes to battery life, they do play a huge part in terms of performance. Especially in the Beast Mode with maxed settings where things get really insane. To show that I will be marking the charts where you can read Beast Mode Maxed so just keep track of that. First up Office Mode, which converts the Prometheus into a power sipping laptop, but that also means a lot of performance sacrifices. Meanwhile, Balanced Mode and standard Beast Mode are pretty close to one another with just 10W separating them. The maxed out Beast Mode really turns everything to a whole new level. There is something else to mention here as well, while the power sliders were pegged at 80W it seems like that burst of power only came at the start with the laptop eventually settling down to a constant 73W.

Now that all leads to the frequencies of the Office/Balanced/Beast/Beast Maxed modes all being within 350MHz of one another. Meanwhile Office Mode just completely cuts speeds off at its knees. So don’t even think about using that when you need to chew through any heavy compute tasks. The amazing thing here is the additional 20W in Beast Mode Maxed out setting leads to a massive increase in temperatures. Now in order to keep things at that level the CPU ends up reducing clock speeds, and. I have to say that’s a bit disappointing for a pretty thick 17-inch laptop. Meanwhile, the other modes are a lot superior behaved.

Now that leads me into real-world performance with the CPU set to 60W and 80W. As we go through these tests, it’s interesting to see where the 5800H in the Prometheus ends up. In most cases, it trades blows with these Zephyrus G15, which is a bit less expensive and. It even manages to lose to the older RP-15 in a few situations. Then again, don’t forget the G15 has a more powerful Ryzen 9 CPU to start off with. Overall though this is one of the fastest laptops I have ever tested, just not as convincingly dominating as you might have thought.

Now if you thought the Beast Mode sliders were interesting for the CPU. The GPU can get an additional boost of 15W bringing it from an already high 135W all the way up to 150W. And let’s see how that affects the power temperatures and frequencies over time. Once again, the GPU doesn’t really hit its power limits in any of the settings, even with all the sliders maxed out, but. In Office Mode it actually behaves more like a slim-and-light laptop while Balanced and standard Beast Mode presets are basically the same thing as they top out around 125W. It’s really odd to see none of the modes hit their wattage targets, especially Beast Mode with Dynamic Boost disabled and the power slider maxed out to 150W.

Normally I would point fingers at temperatures, but. Not one of the settings even came close to the 87°C maximum and all had really well managed heat regulation. That is a good thing, but at the same time it doesn’t really explain the power behavior of the RTX 3080 GPU. There might still be some limits in place that can’t be disabled through the software, but that is just my guess. The one good thing is that pushing the GPU power slider to the max does end up giving you a pretty good boost in frequencies over Balanced Mode and. Regular Beast Mode preset. Office Mode on the other hand well that’s just all over the place.

As for in-game performance, well yeah this thing is an absolute beast. In most tests it’s right up there with the fastest laptops around, but max out those power sliders and. It turns into the Hulk and smashes pretty much everything. But then again, the RTX 3080 is also sucking down a lot more power than any other laptop GPU we have seen so far. At the screen’s native 1440P resolution it remains ahead too, but. You also need to be a little bit impressed with how well the Blade 15 Advanced handles itself. That thing has a much lower wattage GPU, but it manages to hang in there. At the 150W setting the Prometheus powers ahead, but this also goes to highlight how throwing tons of power at a GPU doesn’t give a linear increase in performance. I mean the RTX 3080 here is sucking back about 50% more power than the Blade 15’s RTX 3070, but it only gets about 15% higher frame rates.

As for fan noise. All 3 modes behaved exactly how they should with Office Mode being the quietest all the way to Beast Mode being the loudest. I think our best bet is sticking to Balanced Mode to give you the best acoustic performance. Switching over to surface temperatures, and they are pretty good, but I will say that the sides do get quite warm so that might be an issue if you game a lot with an external mouse.

Overall the Prometheus brings a lot of interesting things to the table. The first thing is it’s amazing performance in both gaming and real-world applications. I love the ability that Eluktronics gives the user to modify the behavior of the CPU and GPU rather than just having a bunch of presets like Battery Saver, Balanced, Performance. Etc that you see with other laptops.

The I/O is pretty loaded and I’m impressed with the layout. The keyboard is great, I love the feedback that provides, except for the awkward arrow key placement. And the display is good, but I expect advanced, especially for this price point. Frankly my main issue with this laptop is the generic design. Of course, I understand that they are using a generic chassis that other manufacturers use, but. That leads to things like a trackpad is just not the most comfortable thing to use and some people might find it too big. The hinge is not necessarily the strongest and the webcam quality is just not that great either. To conclude, if you’re purely looking for raw gaming performance, I would wholeheartedly recommend the Prometheus XVII Ultra, but personally if I were to spend close to $3,000 on a machine I wouldn’t pick this.

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