 Da da da da da! Okay, do I have better weapons? Like, oh my God, look at all this. These are, they're homing, they're homing. You have to shoot them down. You know, when you're gaming at, you know, 4K resolution, it's easy to forget that under the hood of Microsoft's most powerful Xbox One is little more than a low power AMD Jaguar processor and an aging Polaris-based integrated graphics card. Oh, and did I mention the mechanical hard drive? See, the truth is, if the Xbox One X ran standard Windows with standard Windows games, it would be dog slow. But the other thing that's easy to forget is that all of those parts in it are fundamentally standard PC components. So what would prevent someone from building a faster game console? Oh, apparently nothing. This is the Subor Z+, a game console from China that we got our hands on. Let's take this baby for a spin, shall we? Right after I tell you guys about GlassWire. GlassWire allows you to instantly see your current and past network activity, detect malware, and block badly behaving apps on your PC or Android device. Use software code Linus and get 25% off GlassWire at the link below. The Z+, game console was built by the Shanghai branch of a little company called Zongshan Subor Advanced Technology. I'm sure I butchered that, so I'll be referring to them as Subor from here on out. And the packaging is relatively unassuming. In fact, you might be forgiven for thinking that it's for like a laptop rather than for a game console, which might actually be a hint at what's to come. Then on the inside, we've got the console itself, a manual that is entirely in Chinese, which makes sense. This is intended for the Chinese market. And a little box off to the side here that contains a stand and HDMI cable, and then a standard C13 PC power cord. Let's go ahead and get the gaming machine out. This is what you guys paid good money to see. So it's got a very console like appearance as you'd probably expect with this kind of weird angular cutout that might go great with your media console, but didn't go particularly well with mine. Ignoring that then, we've got two USB 2.0 type A ports on the front, and then four USB 3.0 ports around the back, along with ethernet, twin HDMI ports, though both of these are outputs. So there's no fancy cable box pass through or anything like that. And three and a half millimeter jacks with audio along with a SPDIF connector. On the bottom, there's this little latch right here, and this is cool. It reveals two two and a half inch drive bays. So they're secured by standard Phillips screws, which is nice, and occupied by default by a one terabyte Toshiba hard drive, which means that this thing is mostly looking pretty good for storage expansion. Should we fire it up and see what it looks like in action? So this is a pretty bog standard Windows install. The only thing that really stands out about it out of the box is that everything that you see in the installed programs is stuff that we put on it. It's extremely clean. The only pre-installed application is this, what's this thing called again? Here we go, Ruyi Assist, which tells you your CPU temps down there. We're at 50 degrees. It's not amazing for idle. And then you can switch to low power mode, and then there's a grayed out switch to console mode. More on that later. So this is interesting. Eight gigs of SGRAM. So this is actually graphics memory. Slots used eight out of eight, so I guess this is eight chips, and then they've got two gigs of it that is hardware reserved presumably for graphics. And then our CPU. Oh wow, Windows doesn't know what the crap that is. 2.99 gigahertz, four cores, eight threads. So this is Ryzen based, but that part number is basically indecipherable. Fascinating. Maybe we can get some more hints out of CPU-Z and or Ida64 here. So yeah, there confirmation. This is Ryzen with SMT and then graphics. Oh, so we've got Vega based graphics, but basically no actual specs for it here. So a quick Google search for the part number 15FF that we found in CPU-Z shows us that it might be a 28CU APU. So that would put it at about two thirds of the raw performance of the GPU in the Xbox One X. One weird thing though is all the news we can find about it talks about two gigs of HBM2 RAM built into it, but we already know from task manager that the one in this system is going to be a little hamstrung because it's sharing GDDR5 memory instead. The takeaway though is that this is basically a PC running basically Windows. Like there are some interesting bits here and that's that the pre-installed operating system is actually Windows 10 Enterprise long-term support branch. So the particular build we're running here is actually from 2016, but then with current security updates, there is more to it though, where is this going to be? Here we go. Then just a regular old Windows 10 install. Unfortunately though, see this guy right here. Half of our boot drive is actually partitioned into this BitLocker encrypted partition here. So that is going to be Subor's specially modified IOT edition of Windows, but it's not ready for prime time yet. Subor says that that platform will launch in Q1 2019 with a slew of domestically produced games as exclusives for their console. So let me know in the comments if you guys want to see like a let's play update with some Chinese games next year. For now though, even though we can't actually try that aspect of it, we can discuss why Subor would bother with this console mode thing instead of just leaving it running regular Windows. Well, for one thing, if we look at the full spec sheet, the Z plus only has eight gigs of RAM that's shared between the CPU and GPU, just like an Xbox one. And it's even as we mentioned before, GDDR5 just like an Xbox one. That means that Windows is eating a significant chunk of available memory. And that makes for a less than ideal experience when you're trying to run big AAA titles. Hence the need for a slimmed down IOT version of Windows. The other less obvious reason is DRM. Subor says that they're able to use their customized OS to enable a form of DRM that's not possible under standard Windows, which they say is required to attract some of the exclusive titles that they've got lined up for the platform. Now, as much as DRM is a dirty word, they're positioning themselves as an early pioneer for dedicated gaming platforms in China. And they feel that they need to do everything they can to build developer confidence. So this entire product, honestly, might look highly unnecessary to folks in regions with established console markets, but you might not realize that home game consoles were actually banned entirely in China way back in the year 2000, because of fears of how they could affect childhood development. And the traditional companies that you might think of, like Nintendo, have struggled to find a strong foothold in China, even with the easing of restrictions back in 2015. So then, with mainland China nearly 100% reliant on PCs for non-mobile gaming, and the console market pretty much non-existent, Subor is trying to combine a console with a PC to give us the Z plus that we have right now. It'll be a genius move if it works. So let's test it out and see just how well it works, at least today, by comparing its performance against a low-end Ryzen desktop with a roughly comparable graphics card. Well, right out of the gate, it seems as though having just two gigs of memory set aside for the GPU is gonna cause us to run out of RAM during complex scenes, like in Shadow of the Tomb Raider's GPU-heavy forest scene, despite the graphics core itself having more than enough horsepower to keep up. And we know it has more than enough horsepower because we can actually drop the in-game settings a little bit, and we can increase the resolution significantly. This confirms that we're not running into some kind of a bandwidth problem here, we are just running out of VRAM. So the sweet spot seems to be medium details at about 1440p. The main takeaway, though, really, is that the system's not quite stable, we ran into problems, particularly in DirectX 12. So it's clear to us that the hardware has the power and that with a more optimized driver and OS, along with a bit of developer effort, this experience could be a lot better. More physical memory would certainly go a long way too. For now, though, we can only talk about what we can measure. And when we look at the numbers, the Z+, in spite of its faster CPU, just cannot match the Xbox One X in terms of either speed or visual quality in most titles. And it couldn't even break past the performance of our holiday PC buyer's guide $500 system. And that's a problem when you're closer to $620 to $725 with tax. Now moving on, Subor is marketing this thing as also a PC. So we fired up some productivity benchmarks. Compare it again to our holiday gaming PC at $500, we're actually looking at inferior single threaded performance, but superior multi-threaded performance as a result of not only the addition of SMT, so that's eight threads to go along with our four cores, but also the use of faster GDDR5 memory. This is especially apparent when we look at the relatively large disparity in handbrake encoding performance. These tests also revealed that our GPU is being held back in more ways than we thought by poor driver optimization. Its performance is all over the map. Look at how it trounces even the GTX 1060 in most of Luxmark, then takes losses in Blender and V-Ray. Overall, the Z plus performs pretty admirably with the biggest bug bears being its GPU performance and lack of dynamic memory allocation. Now the graphics performance is going to be harder to overcome since it's just flat out a weaker chip than you'd find in a top tier gaming console even today. But its CPU performance is superior and the new OS could give the Z plus the ability to cut back GPU memory during CPU intensive tasks and vice versa improving performance in both once the new software arrives. With all this in mind, this type of chip is almost certainly what's going to make up the entry level of a new breed of console. And in spite of the Z plus's incomplete state and poor windows gaming performance, it's a very big market they're going after with next to nothing in terms of direct competitors. So with the right software improvements and developer relationships, they could be onto something. But I don't expect them to make any headway into the North American, European or Japanese markets anytime soon. Speaking of making headway, if you're trying to build a beautiful website for yourself and you're just not making any headway, why don't you try out Squarespace? Squarespace is all in one platform, makes it easy to get set up and running quickly. They have award winning templates that you can use as a starting point for a wide range of projects. And if you ever need additional help, Squarespace offers webinars, full series of help guides, or you can even contact their 24 seven customer support via live chat and email. If you already have a third party domain, you don't have to give it up. 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