 On the surface, the Razer Core, and in fact any other Thunderbolt external video card enclosure like the Asus XG2, is pretty simple. I've got a general review that does a good job of tackling the basics here, but here's that in a nutshell. Your laptop is small and portable, but could use more graphics horsepower for a better gaming experience. So it's a powered box that uses a desktop video card to boost your frames per second. See? Simple. The problem is that while I was making my simple review of the Core, I ended up with far more questions than answers. Can you put in something other than a video card? Is Thunderbolt 3 a significant bottleneck? Does it perform better on an external display? Will it work with non-razor notebooks? Can it be run in a daisy chain configuration? Can it handle the biggest, hottest graphics cards on the market? What about CPU bottlenecks? So after three full days of testing, I'm back. Welcome to the Razer Core Deep Dive. Cooler Master's MasterCase Maker 5 features their freeform modular system, allowing you to customize, adjust, and upgrade. Make it yours at the link in the video description. First order of business, acoustics. I mentioned in my review that the Core should have a power switch to reduce fan noise at idle, but I didn't quantify why. And this is why I plan to replace the fans in my Core, and why I think that it's a must-have feature on a Gen 2 product. Gaming noise levels are vastly improved, but I don't want to hear five fans spin up every single time I want to use the USB 3 hub or the ethernet port. The good news is that no matter what I threw at it, thermal performance is pretty much on par with an open-air test bench. It handled the GTX 480, one of the hottest, most power-hungry cards ever made, especially when overvolted, without even breaking a sweat. And if the drivers had managed to install, I'm sure the Radeon 6990 wouldn't have been an issue either, given that that monster was able to physically fit inside. Which leads really nicely then into my next question. What about non-graphics cards? Razer has nothing about this on their product page, and even when asked directly said, we'll get back to you. Then as of filming this, promptly never did. So I dug into it myself. My 10 gigabit network card worked perfectly after I hot plugged it in, installed drivers, and rebooted. A Blackmagic Intensity Pro and a Vago RAID card were both similar stories, and my ASUS USB 3.1 card and a 4K capture device on the other end of it, a USB one, even hot plugged without rebooting. Finally, I chatted with Red Tech Support, who confirmed that their CEO has already experimented with the Red Rocket X Accelerator card. So while Razer hasn't done any firmware tuning or proper validation of these, and my simple plug it in and see if it works for five minutes is by no means a substitute, it actually wouldn't surprise me if compatibility was pretty strong. Another thing that I'm annoyed that Razer wouldn't talk to me about is compatibility with other devices. Yes, Razer, I know the official statement is that it is officially compatible with the Blade Stealth and the new Blade at launch. But what I want to know is, does it work with other computers? So after much digging, the answer is yes and no. If you picked up a machine six months ago and you're expecting to just plug and play into your Thunderbolt 3 port, you will be disappointed. But there's also good news. After fighting with needlessly complicated BIOS and Thunderbolt firmware updates, this is how to do a BIOS update, by the way, I got the core working mostly as intended on a Sega NP9870, an MSI GT72S, an ASUS X99 Deluxe II, and I've heard reports of it working just fine on the Intel Skull Canyon Nook and Dell XPS 15 2016. So everything I've tried it on. However, while the Sega machine and X99 Deluxe II both worked perfectly after some initial forced driver installation nonsense, my MSI GT72S put up a solid Fire Strike score, then got crushed in real world performance without MSI being able to offer me any advice. Yes, MSI, I tried asking Razer. Well, hold on a second then, Linus. Why does this matter? That MSI laptop, and for that matter, the desktop motherboard, already has desktop grade graphics. It's because I wanted to know how the Thunderbolt interface is affecting performance, which can only be achieved through an apples to apples test by isolating all the other variables. And since there is no way to physically install a 970M in the core to run against the one in the Blade 14, I needed a machine with a graphics card that I could. So then, the strange unrealistic synthetic scores continue, but in real games, we're looking at about a 25% performance hit with a GTX 980, and significantly more than that with a higher performance graphics card. Overclocking, by the way, is not limited by Razer in any way, but on the 1080, other bottlenecks seem to make it a moot point. So Nvidia's suggestion was that the PCI Express Gen 3 X4 interface could be holding us back, but I didn't really buy that, and a quick round of benchmarks with one of my motherboard slots forced to 4x speed settled this for me. While it does seem to play a role, it is not the whole story. Also of note here, by the way, is the fact that the 6700HQ holds its own head-to-head with the last generation 8-core Extreme Edition, except in extremely CPU-bound titles like Cities Skylines pretty darn well. As for the dual-core 8GB RAM equipped Stealth, I would expect that to lag behind a lot faster, and I probably wouldn't recommend pairing it with a top-tier GPU in the core. Anyway, it appears that the performance hit more likely comes from the overhead associated with converting from PCI Express to Thunderbolt 3, and or making PCI Express a hot, pluggable interface, something that, on Windows anyway, it is definitely not designed for. The next question I wanted to answer, especially as someone who wouldn't necessarily care about using the core with an external display, is how's performance in loopback mode, using the external GPU to power the laptop's own display? Actually, not bad. You'll take a 15%-ish hit, less if all you want to do is run 3DMark all day, which is what I showed back in my first video. Some other general questions now then. Some GPU features like G-Sync, FreeSync, Ansel, etc. are supported on desktop GPUs, and even notebooks that contain desktop GPUs, like the GT72S, but not on notebook GPUs. So how does that work with the core, where you can potentially have both? If you're using an external display, you should be able to use the feature set of the GPU loaded in the core, but that won't necessarily be the case if you're using loopback mode. Next question, can you run SLI? No, not in any of the traditional ways, although that doesn't mean that a system with both a DGPU and an external GPU couldn't enable both of them for certain workloads. Okay, what about daisy chaining, Linus? Great question. The core has only one Thunderbolt port, and this is by design. It does not officially support daisy chaining, even though that's part of the Thunderbolt standard. But when I asked Razer, well hold on a second, could it just sit at the end of a chain with other devices that do? Razer completely unhelpfully stayed tight lipped. Thankfully though, Akideo helped a brother out here and hooked me up with their Thunder 3 Duo Pro, which is a tool-less dual SSD or hard drive enclosure that worked flawlessly both on its own, allowing me to fully utilize the speed of the SSDs I installed, and in between the core and the system. Though I should emphasize here that this is an unsupported configuration, and I cannot promise that drive access wouldn't affect gaming performance if you were doing both of them at the same time. Leading us to the last and possibly most important question for me to answer. Does any of this even matter? Ignoring the $100 rebate with qualifying system, this is a $500 doodad we're talking about here. One that I'm not recommending due to CPU bottlenecks pairing with a top-tier graphics card on the machine that is arguably more purpose-built for it, the Razer Blade Stealth, given that it can charge off the core, which is pretty cool. A machine though that only costs twice as much as the empty core box in the first place. I mean, who has money for a core, but not a badass desktop to go alongside their portable machine? I mean, hell, you can even build a badass portable desktop in the Dan A4 SFX case that's the same size as the core, but with the entire computer in it. And this is all valid, but my fascination with the core comes not from thinking that everyone should buy one, but from my excitement about what this technology means. Costs will come down, and having portability while I'm on the go and power at home with the ability to actually upgrade a laptop is very appealing. And on top of that, remember Project Christine. I and a lot of other people dismissed it as a pipe dream, but core is a huge step towards no compromises, high speed, hot-swappable PC component modules. A pretty cool future. Speaking of no compromises, have you ever thought to yourself, gee, this vinyl wrap that I have on my device just kind of sucks. It doesn't fit well, it peels off. Well, there's no need for that, because dbrand has no compromises vinyl wraps. They are precision cut and available in pretty much any authentic 3M vinyl finish that you could want. And the best part about dbrand skins, aside from the fact that they're available for laptops, phones, tablets, game consoles, controllers, and more, is their configurator. It is fricking awesome. You can see your device in a real-time preview from every angle, you can adjust and customize using different colors and different finishes, and then boom, you confirm the order, their robots pack it up, ship it anywhere in the world, and if anything does happen to go wrong, they have separate customer service robots that will absolutely get you taken care of. So check it out over at the dbrand link in the video description. Please note, dbrand does not require to use a bright pink fricking carbon fire wrap like Linus does. You can pick your own. So thanks for watching, guys. If this video sucked, you know what to do, but if it was awesome, get subscribed, hit that like button, or check out the link to where to buy the stuff we featured at Amazon in the video description. Also linked in the description is our merch store, which has cool shirts like this one, and our community forum, which you should totally join. Now that you're done doing all that stuff, you're probably wondering what to watch next, so click that little button in the top right to check out our latest video over on channel Superfun.