 This is for Otamus and- Hello? We received your suggestions and worked them into our new products. Really? Wow, that's so cool. Yes, and it turns out that- Wait, what? Only joking. We sent you one. We think you'll really like it. And if you don't, you can go f*** yourself. Who is this? Dbrand? Dbrand, are you the sponsor for this video? With GlassWire, you can instantly see your current and past network activity, detect malware, and block badly behaving apps on your PC or Android device. Use offer code LINUS to get 25% off GlassWire at the link down below. 🎵 Disclosure, I'm invested in a framework who makes laptops. The idea I pitched to Asus and that came alive inside this box is actually a pretty cool one. Because here's the situation. Almost every powerful laptop on the market today is either for gamers or for content creators, because heaven forbid that any one person want to do both of those things. So you end up having to choose. Do you want a 60Hz 4K panel to cover with all the little sliders, dials, and switches that you need for video or photo editing? Or do you want to sacrifice resolution for a high refresh rate panel so you can land those sick 360-nose scope headshots? My idea then was to have something that can do both. Or, well, really it wasn't my idea. TVs that can run at 4K60 or 1080p 120Hz have existed for a long time. And it's been kind of baffling to me that nobody has adopted this approach in the PC space until now. I love when things say internal demo only and I get to play with it. I get some makeshift bezel. Don't peel it. Am I gonna get in trouble if I peel it? They said not to peel it? Why not? Jeez. Hello? We're setting up a device. USB receiver. Oh, is my battery dead? Oh, balls. Do you want me to go get a wired mouse? No! Using a wireless mouse with a wire. Imagine being such a big loser. Boy, that is a lot of pixels. This thing at 100% scaling is freaking ridiculous in terms of real estate. And at 4K 120Hz, this is already pretty smooth. But it could be smoother. It's 3840 by 2400. That is awesome. Like all these creator monitors that are 4K but 3840 by 2160. So you don't even have that additional vertical space for all your tracks or whatever else. That's stupid. This is cool. After rebooting, the display will be set to full HD at up to 240Hz. Oh, okay. That was it. So we're at 1920 by 1200 now. And that is very 240Hz. That is super smooth. Urk, urk, urk. Oh, it's pretty bad. It's chugging. It's chugging. Whoa, there we go. What the heck? I swear it's running faster now or something. Like ever so slightly. There's only one of the- you're only supposed to fight one spider thing in this zone. It's hilarious. Not gonna lie. I really like this thing so far. And this feels smoother than the FPS it's reporting. It's just super responsive. That's the thing a lot of people don't realize about high refresh rate panels is it's not just about how many FPS your game is running at. It's about how frequently you are getting an update. How much latency there is. This is crazy low latency. Super responsive. And in terms of resolution, from my point of view at this size, 1080p is lots. If you're talking 24 or 27 inch monitors, yeah, you're gonna want 1440p. But I would rather have the additional frame rate at this size personally. Oh, I fell down an elevator shaft. Cool. There are definitely some oddities. In 4K 120Hz mode, they rate it for 100% coverage of the DCI-P3 color space and 500 nits peak brightness. But this is weird. At 1080p 240Hz, it's got 100% coverage of sRGB and can reach only 400 nits. Now, that's not to say that it's a bad panel. We got an average delta E of just 2.27 in SDR in 4K mode. And with firmware updates, I mean, who knows where it's gonna be once it's finished. One other oddity, it's got a crack in it. Asus wanted to clarify that not all of them are gonna ship with a crack in it. I mean, personally, I don't think it's a big deal. I've got a crack in me and I don't think anyone ever told me I was defective. Haha, get it? Because everyone's got it. Anyway, I don't know. Maybe the engineer dropped it or something. Now, the quote from Asus is, you can game at 240Hz and can work on content creation at 4K while still getting a nice smooth 120Hz. And that really is a great idea that I can't take credit for. The big question for me then is, why haven't we been able to do this forever? CRTs actually did have a similar functionality because the main limitation was how fast the electron gun could scan back and forth. So they often had multiple rated resolutions, each with their own optimal refresh rate. But the thing is, LCDs have their own limiting factors and a big one is pixel response time. Now, manufacturers tune their panels in order to achieve as little smearing as possible, which usually involves some degree of overdrive. That is, for each individual pixel, essentially applying a voltage that is great enough to get past the desired state, but then backing off of it at the last possible moment so that it lands in the right spot. So fine-tuning that sort of thing is a royal pain in the butt. And fine-tuning it for multiple refresh rates is even more work. So what I suspect is that no one wanted to bother. But that's changed in recent years with the introduction of variable refresh rate displays with G-Sync or FreeSync. Those need to perform perfectly at many different refresh rates on the fly. So again, what I suspect is that a lot of that R&D is making its way into products like this that are gonna have multiple native refresh rates. There are likely other factors. Integer scaling, that is allowing a two-by-two quad of pixels to be driven as a single unit, only recently gained driver support from major graphics manufacturers. And the last thing you'd want is dual native resolutions, but one of them looks like an interpolated mess. But all of this is just speculation. What isn't is that this tech is coming, and I think it's super cool, and it's gonna be even cooler when it's not a big chore that involves rebooting the machine in order to change modes. Though that could also just be due to the early firmware that's running on these machines. I'm actually kind of surprised that this one works as well as it does. Now let's change gears. I love these little engineering sample care packages. This one's really cool. First things first, let's talk about what's different about this machine versus the one I just looked at. It's got an HVA panel. They're rating it at 100,000 to one contrast ratio. We'll see how that works out. Almost 1200 nits peak brightness with 100% coverage of the DCI-P3 color gamut. And this one is apparently Pantone validated. It's compatible with Dolby Vision HDR and uses a quantum dot layer in order to achieve all of this. Now here's what's happening with this machine. It's not going to get any better than this. It's going to be a lot better than this. This is a very, very expensive machine. It's going to be a lot cheaper than the one that I just showed you. You could actually achieve all of this. Now here's what's kind of trippy. The mini LEDs are UV. The quantum dot film turns that into white light. And then you've got just regular LCD sub pixels that gate that white light as R, G or B. So what I imagine is that you're not really going to get extremely bright back lighting on a mobile device. It's 1440p, 165 Hertz. So it's kind of that Goldilocks zone in terms of resolution and refresh rate. And it's got 512 local dimming zones and Lara's dead. Reflections off the water. That looked pretty sick. Definitely Tray's HDR this one, boys. Whoa, man, I don't know how well the camera is going to capture this, but Jeepers. So for comparison, we've got a mini LED iPad Pro here. You definitely lose a little bit of the contrast of the iPad going to a matte display instead of a glossy one. Apple's definitely got darker blacks. Mind you, this is a product that is actually released. So there's that. Asus seem to be pretty concerned that we were going to be hyper critical of their haloing. It is to my eye, not that bad though. Again, this is actual content. If we played, you know, halo testing videos, we would obviously see them where you've just got a white ball bouncing around on a black screen. I guess it was a matter of time once we saw this stuff in the iPad before we see it in mobile computers. Now there are some areas where I've definitely seen notably better performance out of the tablet. Here we go. This sign, this first floor sign here. You can clearly read the sign on the iPad, but it's actually kind of hard to make out this text on the laptop. Overall, very impressive. So there's three different modes that it can run in. Either HDR, which is obviously gonna be using full array local dimming, HDR off, or HDR off with a single zone and then it gets 600 nits sustained brightness. So that's meant for like color accurate work. If you're editing your photos or whatever the case may be. This is super cool. Yeah, you know what else is cool? Ah, the new gamer hoodie on LTT store. And there's even more guys. Okay. Oh my gosh. This is fricking heavy. I thought there's no actual laptop in it. Is it this heavy without even the components in it? What the heck is this? Are you sure this is what ASUS was supposed to send? This is apparently the follow-on from the mothership concept, but in a usable size, it's still pretty big. But if it's anything like the mothership, it's gonna have the performance to back it up. Oh, it's my ticket to ROG flow. Adorable. Thank you, ASUS. All right. This is the, okay, is the NR2201. It's a pretty big laptop. Okay. Is the NR2201 flow surface. So the idea is it's supposed to be kind of like the mothership, which was a laptop that we actually went all the way to Taiwan to see the design facility for. And the basic premise was that instead of putting all the heat generating components in the bottom where they're gonna get suffocated by your beautiful desk pad, lttstore.com, they put all the heat generating components in the top, kind of like a convertible laptop or like a surface. Just like a surface, it's got a detachable keyboard that comes down in front of it like this. And unlike a surface, it's got top tier specs. So I don't think they've confirmed absolutely everything about it, but we're expecting up to wait, a 3050 Ti? Got a little more clarity. We're supposed to be teasing the NR2201 flow surface, which is based on this concept. This is a mechanical sample of the original mothership, but up to 3050 Ti, up to Core i9, up to one terabyte Gen 4 SSD, compatibility with their XG Mobile external GPUs, full HD 120 Hertz or 4K 60 Hertz, and blah, blah, blah, liquid metal, et cetera. But I don't have one to show you, so I can't really comment on how good the detachable keyboard is or the kickstand or anything like that. But I can tell you is that we're gonna have a lot more coverage of things that are getting announced at CES, so make sure you get subscribed so you don't miss them. And I wanna tell you about our sponsor, FreshBooks. FreshBooks is the easy to use accounting software that helps you do your business. You can impress your clients with professional looking invoices that detail the work you've done, use automated payment reminders if your invoices get past due, and easily track your expenses and use their time tracker to log every minute of billable hours so you don't have to think about it later. 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