 Now my mama told me a lot of things growing up. She said, stand up straight. If you have nothing nice to say, don't say nothing at all and never kick them while they're down. But I don't see my mama, do you? And that is why today's video is going to be about Walmart's overpowered 15.6 inch gaming laptop. Could it possibly be as bad as their desktop? Well, there's only one way to find out, isn't there? And this video is sponsored by Elgato. The Stream Deck Mini has six fully customizable LCD buttons with easy to use programming software. Check it out at Amazon or Newegg at the link below. All right, so my idea is we crack the box open, see if it comes with anything epic. Overpowered, maybe? Can we do this pose? Let's do this, like this. Okay, hold on. Hold on, I gotta get serious. No smiling, no smiling. Okay, hold on. Sorry. What? I can't do it. So spec wise, we're looking at a Core i7-8750H has a six core processor, GTX 1060, six gigs, 16 gigs of RAM, 256 gig SSD, one terabyte hard drive, 144 Hertz, 1080p display, RGB backlit mechanical keyboard, and Windows 10. I mean, on paper, like specifically this paper right here, this ticks pretty much all the boxes, with the only issue being the price. So we ordered this actually at around the same time that we ordered our desktop, but it didn't arrive until quite recently because they screwed up our order. And when we went to pick it up, the laptop just wasn't there with our order. And it was only because we checked before we left the store, we did in-store pickup, that we were able to point out that, hey, the $1,400 laptop we ordered, ain't here, dog. So it comes with an external power brick that's kind of big, but also not too thick. So I guess that's nice. A quick start guide. A, connect AC adapters jack into other more different jack. B, the display panel can be opened to a wide range of angles for optimal viewing. C, press the power button. All right. So this laptop actually arrived in C-Sprep mode, and there was no bloatware installed whatsoever, same as with the EDITATIUM desktop. Really? So they've got their control center, but- That's it. That is the most hilarious animation. Look at it. But game. What the hell? Who thinks that's a good idea? I mean, it's the same kind of thing you'd have with a normal program. They just, it doesn't have like an acceleration curve. It's just like, do, do. For those who don't know, it's called disruptive innovation. Okay. So you just got disrupted. So in the OPE control center, you can turn on and off your LED light bar, which is right here. It's RGB. You can turn on and off your keyboard backlight. You can, ooh, ooh. You can turn off the internal display. Oh crap. Now what? You can do a bunch of different keyboard effects. You can alter your fan settings. So office mode or gaming mode, it was in gaming mode by default. There's also a turbo mode. Whoa! You know, as far as system bloat goes, this is really not bad. However, as not bad as it might be, this is just a skin. What is this? What are they doing? There's no way that that is not programmed in. So what was, what was the intent here? Disruptive innovation, I told you. Ooh. Oh, oh, peeljected. One can say that your peel was not too appealing. One can, but one shouldn't. Okay. What does this mean? Tap, tap twice. Hey, there's a little light in the touch pad. So when you tap this corner twice, it enables or disables the touch pad. So to Walmart's credit here, there actually are a fair number of features, you know, whether you buy into the RGB hype or not, that are specifically tailored to gamers. As for the overall sort of build quality of the machine, I would describe it just from sort of a fit and finish standpoint here as average at best, but certainly not the worst thing I've ever seen. And spec wise, the 144 Hertz display is not immediately disappointing to me. Not super bright or anything, but it's not super dim either. Like, no, okay, stop that. Hey, stop that. So moving stuff around quickly on screen, there's pretty good clarity even during fast movements. So yeah, it's not a CRT or anything, but for an IPS panel, that's not bad. What do you think of the mechanical keyboard? Oh, it has a mechanical keyboard. According to the specs. Oh, oh, oh. Oh, that's stupid. So the OP control center is not tied into the keyboard brightness adjustment over here. So if you turn it off, that is so cringe. To see if it's actually mechanical, we actually pried one of the key caps off here. And yeah, it does appear to be. So we've got our metal contact piece here that seems to be what makes the key itself actuate. So it actually does actuate before it bottoms out. But the issue is that it's almost like they implemented this feature without a clear understanding of why or what it is about mechanical keyboards that makes them good for gaming. Because they've got kind of a very heavy feel towards the top of the key press, and then they're quite mushy after that. So there's no real clear advantage over just a short travel scissor switch, for example. How do you feel about the numpad? It gets a little too cramped. So I like that they're using all the space that they have here for keyboard. Like they're going almost edge to edge keyboard, which is nice. Like the keys are quite big, but I kind of question the wisdom, actually not just of this one, but of our other contestants as well of including a numpad on a gaming laptop. Like what do you plan? Like a counting simulator? Like- Even line. Okay, that's what I said. Hey, hey. So for IO, we've got USB 2, ethernet, audio, dedicated microphone jack. That's kind of nice to see. Over here, we've got two USB 3s, an SD card reader. And then, oh wow, that's not bad. A USB type C, which is over with our display outputs, HDMI and then two mini display ports that I guess is because they figure people will use it as a display out more than as just a USB port. That's sort of an interesting thought. And actually a lot of ventilation. Heat sinks here, here, here and here. And then basically just wide open mesh across the bottom, but it still actually has a reasonable amount of structural rigidity down here. It's not bad. Should we crack it open? Well, assuming we can put the thing back together. This should be fine. Do we have a parts tray or anything that we can kind of use as a proxy? We have a shot. So I thought we were ready to go, but they've got a warranty void if removed sticker. Oh, what shall we do now? Oh no, however will we address that? So it uses a similar approach to the LG Gram. Now with LG, they were saving weight by using a main board and then daughter boards with these ribbon cables connecting them. But whether it was a cost or weight savings, they've ended up with a really interesting internal layout. So without increasing the thickness of the device, it makes extra room for higher profile, like thicker cooling fans and heat sinks and stuff like that because they're not fighting with the PCB for space. And then we get a similar effect over here for M.2 drive. Now it should be noted that this is not an NVMe SSD. So this is just a regular SATA SSD, just in an M.2 form factor. You can see though, if you wanted, you could put a PCIe one here or you could put a second PCIe one here, but not another SATA M.2. That's why you got to watch out for this compatibility. They could have just expanded the battery capacity because this is pretty chintzy, you know? And that is actually a perfect segue into how exactly it is that Walmart, best known for good prices on, you know, bathroom paper, got into the laptop manufacturing business. I thought, and I would have put money on it, that what they had done was rebranded a laptop unit from the company Clevo, who is well known for supplying other brands with their manufactured laptops, but I was wrong. So to whom do we owe the pleasure of inspecting this laptop while I'm putting it back together here? This is the ODM known as Tongfang. Tongfang, I've never even heard of them. Neither have I up until, what, two days ago. And apparently Turkish reseller Monster sells laptops based on this exact barebone, which is known as GammaKilla5 Charlie Noob 6 Xavier. Am I supposed to have heard of that? Like, is that supposed to add credibility or Monster? Does the fact that Origin PC use the same? See, I had thought that Origin just used Clevo. Like, I thought everyone just used Clevo. To be perfectly honest, I wasn't aware of these guys at all, like Sega, Eurocom, Origin. I thought it was just all Clevo rebrands, but then there's this, sorry, what are they called again? Tongfang. Tongfang, company that I've hardly ever heard of. I say hardly because I have technically heard of them in the last three minutes here. So here's the thing, this approach of basically rebranding what someone else has already built has advantages, like allowing a company like Walmart, who has no experience whatsoever designing computers to just jump right into the market with a product that might have some flaws, like this keyboard is very imperfect, but is otherwise balance-ly specced and very functional. The disadvantage is that it's hard to differentiate yourself. So Ivan mentioned that Origin PC also sells this model. Can you spec out an identical config to this on Origin? And how much does that cost us? Bear in mind, we paid $1,400 US for this. Now, based on our previous experience, by dealing with the Origin PC, the $1,500 gaming system that they sent us, not, guess how much this config would cost? Origin PC specced out to be pretty much same as this minus one terabyte hard drive. Okay, how much? $1,400, so identical to what Walmart was charging, except that with Origin, you get to have Origin's customer service, which in Secret Shopper, we have established, it was at least sample size of two, I guess, but was excellent. And you'll have the confidence that down the line, if you need help with your system, Origin PC will probably still be in the PC business, whereas with Walmart, I'm not sure if that's so clear. Either way, Origin did not score well in value, which leads us to the question, is Origin going aggressive on their laptop pricing, or is Walmart enjoying Origin-like markups? Yes. Well, yeah, it has to be one of them. Duh. You've probably been asking yourself, why do you have these other laptops on the table? You'd be asking yourself a good question. So when we bought it, this was $1,400, but in the time that it's been sitting on our shelf, Walmart implemented a rollback to only $800 US for this thing. So over here, we've got an $800 Nitro 5 from Acer, rocking a Core i5 8th Gen and a GTX 1050 Ti. And then over here, representing the $1,400 price point, we've got an Asus ROG, I think this is a Scar or something. It's a last gen processor, but in terms of gaming performance, it should be quite similar, and the GPU is a GTX 1060. So in Cinebench or whatever, it won't perform as well as the current gen version of this, but in games, it should be basically identical. So let's go ahead and fire up our stress test here and make sure that there's not any egregious thermal throttling issues or anything like that. Were you expecting this to be clocked like 300, 400 megahertz lower than the Asus model? According to what I researched prior, this laptop does have thermal throttling issues, runs hard, but we cannot hear it at all. Perhaps it's because you set it into like desktop mode in the penis center. Oh, I was on battery. Well, wait, so that means then anyway, that Asus' on battery performance profile is much more aggressive. I'm still on battery. Yeah, let's take a look how much better is left because they were on it for the same time. An hour and 14 minutes, 60% remaining. 38% remaining. So they're both terrible. Oh, there we go. 150, 165 FPS. So they've been running long enough to reach equilibrium. Now bottom line is this guy clocks in anywhere from 80 to 100 megahertz slower than this one. And the performance cap reason given by GPU-Z is power for both of them, but our overpowered laptop hits this cap more frequently. They're both around the same temperature with this one coming in at around 71 degrees. We had to stop it for a second here because I had a microphone issue. Don't worry about it anyway, 71 degrees. And this one at 74, with the overpowered being about as loud, maybe a touch louder. Let's see how it goes in actual games though. So performance-wise, it is already falling behind the ASUS machine, but by like two to four FPS here and there. And it is way ahead, not just in terms of FPS, but also just in terms of playability. Like with how dark this display is, it's really hard to make out details in the shadows. And there goes the power outage that we were sure was probably coming at some point today. Oh boy. Winds peaking at a hundred kilometers an hour, blasting trees and knocking down power lines. A houseboat adrift after being torn from its moorings. BC Hydro warning that some homes and businesses may not get their power back for days. So I'm gonna make my best attempt at an Ivan joke. So you might say that the laptop was so OP that the power went out. No, I would usually cue into like, this laptop is so full of op-iness. So we had to throw out the results we were getting last time because they all switched to battery power in the middle of the run. We'll be back with you in a moment here. So this is interesting. Our similarly priced Nitro 5 comes in at just two thirds the average frame rate of our overpowered machine and with other significant, well, disadvantages as well, including a weaker CPU as well as a worse screen. But then moving up into the original pricing of our overpowered, well, it wasn't really that competitive because due to the faster clock speed of our GPU over here, we still ended up with higher frame rates, even though this one has an inferior CPU. So this one is, I think the official MSRP is actually 1600, but you can find it for about 1400 on Amazon. Just to validate what I was saying before, we popped out of the game and had a look at what core clocks we were running at during the benchmark. And yes, in fact, the overpowered machine is running at anywhere from 50 to about 80 megahertz slower on the GPU in actual games. Last result just came in for Deus Ex Mankind Divided, and this is interesting. So average frame rates, again, our $800 machine, like true $800 machine is way slower than our rolled back $800 machine. And that one falls a little bit behind ASUS's, particularly in the minimum frame rates. Interesting. Let's do one more game. So I'm sitting in the 130, 140 FPS range. What are you sitting at right now? 160ish, 150, 160. So when we're running into a CPU bottleneck, we can see here that our core i5 8th gen is actually not that far behind. So we're running at 1080p and all high with 16X anisotropic filtering. So, okay. So only about 20 FPS difference. Now let's take our two $1,400 gaming laptops. Man, that high refresh rate display makes a big difference, eh? Holy crap. So not only am I lower than last time, but the ASUS machine is absolutely crushing it. It's well over 200 frames per second. 240. Let's hear, let me stand the same spot. It's like 80 FPS higher. Did you know this was gonna happen? Nope. So there's clearly some power management or some kind of profile issue going on here. So here, I'm not gonna have a task manager running in the background. Let's make sure that you don't have extra background crap running. How will we analyze? Isn't it kind of like a- Well, I just wanna know what the frame rate is. Cause honestly- Task manager, you think affects things? Not much, but it's a little bit. I think it can use a couple percent. Yeah, but not to the tune where this is like 60% lower. Okay, tell you what, then let's both have it open. Fine. What's sucking up all my memory? CSGO is using 1.3 only. That doesn't even make any sense. I know what it is. No, it's not. What the? Okay, well- Single channel, you thought, right? Yeah, but they're both single channel. And this one's running faster. That's only 2400 megahertz. What is going on here? Okay, let's just go ahead and launch the game. So let's make sure we're running the same settings though. Okay, it's all the same. So let's go back. Let's try again. Ooh, snowballs. So I'm back up to like 160, like we had on our first run. I just, I mean, I also wanna just kind of feel the experience because to be clear, even if it runs at a lower frame rate than that one, it's only got a 144 Hertz display. Like it's, so I'm still at 130, 140, 150-ish FPS. 190, 180. Damn it, I'm getting shot. And you're at, really? Okay, so why don't we stand here and smoke this doorway. So I'm at 140 and you're at 170. Honestly, I think we're ready to draw the conclusion at this point. Compared to another $1400 laptop with some of the weirdness that we've encountered, I wouldn't take the overpowered. With the keyboard being honestly the biggest issue for me personally, because I do do a lot of typing. With that said, compared to an $800 laptop, this is crazy because I am about to recommend a Walmart OP gaming device. Because compared to what you get for 800 bucks, this absolutely mops the floor with it, both in terms of the features, like the 144 Hertz display, and in terms of the performance at anywhere from nearly double to about 50% better. So that just happened. That just happened right now. But only because they rolled back the pricing. So you heard it here first, folks. Get them while they're hot. And then otherwise don't get them. Don't get them when they're not hot and on sale. Speaking of hot, this video is brought to you by our hot sponsor. Your favorite e-tailer. Oh yeah, Memory Express. Whether you're a gamer, business owner, or anyone else who just like needs electronic stuff from time to time, Memex is the place to go in Canada. If it runs on electricity, there is a great chance that they've got it in store. And with their Uber price beat guarantee, they'll beat the price of any authorized Canadian retailer by 10% of the difference, both in store and online. So go check them out at the link in the video description. So thanks for watching, guys. If you disliked this video, you can hit that button. But if you liked it, hit like, get subscribed, or maybe consider checking out where to buy the stuff we featured at the link in the video description. Also down there is our merch store. Merch store! Whoa, oh yeah, I know you guys usually just like kind of gloss over during this part. But these circuit board shirts that I've been wearing for the last like three months, you can finally get them. Merch store, what, no? Oh, no, not that one. Where'd that even come from?