 Huge laptops have never really been my thing. As many of you know, my daily driver is a Razer Blade 14, but it's not like I haven't noticed that as marvelous as a thin and light with a GTX 970M still is, it thermal throttles, it's loud, and it still falls short of the true performance of a desktop computer. Something that many people desire in a mobile system. So it is for those people and the ones who just like over-the-top tech that I say stay tuned, because the Sega NP9870U2G is the fastest laptop I have ever laid my hands on. Corsair's RMI series power supplies feature premium components for great performance with very low noise. Check out the link in the video description to learn more. Let's start with a look at the outside of this beast of a machine. On the top of the shell is a chromed plastic Sega logo and some software customizable lighting accents. On the bottom is, whoa, that is a lot of ventilation holes. There's one spot over here for the subwoofer, but most of the rest of the bottom of the unit and even some of the front is mesh. Kind of like my Halloween costume that one year. I.O. I would describe as very good with dual killer E2400 gigabit LAN ports, three USB 3.0 ports, and dedicated headphone mic optical and line out audio jacks on the left. SD, more USB 3.0, Thunderbolt 3 with a type C connector. Mmm, yeah, and a couple mini display ports on the right, and finally HDMI and yet another USB 3.0 port on the back. Opening her up, we find pretty much what we'd expect on a large all the bells and whistles gaming laptop. The wrist rest and keyboard area are plastic, but actually very sturdy. The upward firing speakers are loud and actually sound pretty darn good, and while I wish the touchpad was a little closer to the front edge, the included fingerprint scanner is a nice touch and it tracks really well. Finally, the keyboard with its software customizable RGB backlighting and macro functionality gets a solid B. There's a bit more keycap wobble than I'd personally like, and the travel action is a little mushy, but it didn't affect my typing speed, and it's very, very quiet. Which brings us to the screen. What can I say? Whew, it's nice. This is a 17 inch 60 Hertz IPS panel with Nvidia G-Sync technology for a tear-free gaming experience, and with a couple minutes of tinkering, I had it running at a hundred Hertz on this sample unit that Sega sent to me, though your mileage may vary. But if I'm gonna say something outlandish like, this is the most powerful laptop I've ever laid my hands on, then I'd better be backing it up. So let's crack her open and find out what treasures be inside. First things first, that is a desktop LGA 1151 socket hidden away under all of those heat pipes, and connected to one of the three heatsink fin arrays at the back of the laptop's chassis, friends, and it is full of none other than a full desktop Core i7 6700K Skylake quad core. Yup. And the holy balls doesn't end there. Prying up the keyboard reveals two 16 gig sticks of DDR4 memory, giving this laptop a maximum capacity of 64 gigs, portable workstation anyone? And while I'm not a huge fan of systems that are pre-configured with the boot drives in RAID 0, that, my friends, is two of Samsung's fancy pants new 256 gig NBME 950 Pro drives that are tearing up the benchmarks all over the internet. Two of them! I mean, using this thing is noticeably faster and more responsive than even a standard SSD. Something that made more sense to me when I finally ran CrystalDiskMark and realized that it was putting out sequential read and write speeds of 2 to 3 gigabytes per second. Holy actual ****! Flipping this puppy over, things get even better. Hiding away in this corner are a couple of 2.5 inch hard drive slots that you can use to either configure the laptop with more storage directly from Sega or upgrade later. And yes, finally, the centerpiece, the desktop class GTX 988 gig that Luke showed off back at Nvidia's event has made its way finally to us. This is a really cool, unique piece of hardware. First, there's the fact that it's a non-standard width, which precludes any possibility of shipping an SLI configuration in this chassis anyway, even if Sega could figure out some way to power and cool it. And second is something that's not as obvious to the naked eye. The fact that it's really up to the individual notebook manufacturers to determine how to tune the GPU for performance. They can limit its power or allow it to thermal throttle, a scenario that will still result in better performance than a lesser GPU, or they can throw six heat pipes at it like Sega did in hopes of taming the beast to the point where it runs exactly the same as a desktop card. So I ran it side by side against a desktop test bench with the same hardware to see just how close they got. And while it might be surprising to anyone who didn't see the massive cooling solution inside this puppy, I wasn't exactly floored to see it perform literally exactly the same as my desktop, which doesn't take anything away from how impressive this kind of performance is in what is certainly larger and heavier than a MacBook Air, but still a portable device. But there's more to a laptop, too, than its sheer FPS, and I need to talk about the experience as well. In our standard Crysis 3 Skybox thermal test, sitting on the table at room temperature, our 980 hummed along at a mere 70 degrees while maintaining a rock-solid boost clock of 1228 MHz. I mean, no wonder this machine's scores were so darn close to the desktop ones. And on top of that, while the rear exhaust vents are quite toasty, the keyboard and wrist rests stay cool with the keyboard being the only part that's barely noticeably warm to the touch. Sounds like a dream, right? I wouldn't know. My ears are broken. Which is a little unfair. At least it's not the same high-pitched fan noise of the Blade 14, but this is no G751 either. So if you were expecting the NP9870U2G to be quiet when it's under a 3D workload, then you'd be a little bit disappointed with your purchase. But if you were expecting a few hundred watts of thermal dissipation to sound like a few hundred watts of thermal dissipation and adjusted your expectations accordingly, would you be happy with this laptop? I sure think so, assuming you can afford it. As configured, this machine costs well over $3,000 US dollars. But even if it's pricey, what impresses me the most is that it's possible at all. It was only a couple of years ago that my team and I marveled at being able to take a mini PC from Shuttle with a Core i7-3960X, 16 gigs of RAM, and a graphics card with us to CES in a duffel bag with a 23-inch IPS monitor in someone's suitcase so that we could edit our videos quickly and in high quality on the road. And here we are, a mere few years later, able to do the same thing or better with a laptop. Holy crap, right? Speaking of holy crap, you know what's amazing? For $10 off your purchase of $50 or more, you guys can go to ifixit.com slash Linus and enter the code TECTIPS at checkout. Hold on a second, Linus, what's ifixit? Why would I want to buy anything there? Ah, great question! If you've ever wanted to repair a tablet or a notebook computer or phone and you've been like, best guide for repairing device X, the odds are excellent that you've ended up over on ifixit.com. They've got all kinds of fantastic guides for tearing down devices and repairing them, replacing batteries to get the most out of the stuff that you paid your good hard money for. And the thing that most people don't know and where the offer code comes in is that ifixit not only has these guides, but they've got all the tools you need. Suction cups, prying tools, tweezers, magnets, hard-to-find screwdriver bits, all that stuff available on their site. They even invented a tool to apply consistent heat directly to adhesive-laden case components so you can get them apart. It's called the Eye Opener. Haha, because it's for opening eye devices. Anyway. Anyway, don't worry about the jokes or the product names. Worry about heading over to ifixit.com slash Linus and entering code Tech Tips at the checkout. So thanks for watching, guys. If this video sucked, you know where that button is. But if it was awesome, get subscribed. If you're not already, hit that like button or even consider supporting us directly by using our affiliate code to shop at Amazon. Instructions are up there. By buying a cool shirt like this one, link up there. Or with a direct monthly contribution through our community forum, which gets you a little contributor badge. Now that you're done doing all that stuff, you're probably wondering what to watch next. So check out that little button in the top right corner to see a video where I build an 8-core desktop gaming rig with a CPU, motherboard, and 16 gigs of RAM for under $150. It's real.