I switched to using a PC Handheld as my main Computer…

gaming handhelds are pretty expensive at least as far as consoles go they're basically cheap laptops because of this there are a lot of people wondering if they could use a gaming handheld as their main computer in order to justify that Hefty price T if you wanted to pit a $700 gaming laptop against a $700 PC handheld the PC handheld would actually perform pretty well but it's important to remember that a laptop can do a little more than what a PC handheld can do like G I don't know your taxes I decided it would be a fun little challenge to ditch my main computer for one week and replace it with a gaming handheld emails production work Competitive Gaming everything would be done on here the goal is to just see how practical it is to purchase a gaming handheld over just a regular computer which you can probably already tell is pretty impractical in a lot of ways but the fun here is to see what actually works well and how we can get it to comfortably do the things my main computer can sometimes with some extra peripherals it could be indistinguishable from a regular computer but then it frequently reminds you that it's just a gaming [Music] handheld this video is sponsored by factor a Zam did I forget to feed you and now you're eating my whole Factor meal yeah I'm yeah oh I forgot oh I'm sorry sorry my Frito foot oh I'm so sick of you Factor's fresh never frozen meals are already in Just 2 minutes so all you have to do is heat and enjoy skip the grocery stores prep work and cooking fatigue instead get Chef curated dietitian approved meals delivered right to your door for anybody to enjoy and they've got smoothies and juices and wellness shots I don't do any meal prep or anything so having factor in my fridge ready to go has been awesome it's ready in Just 2 minutes in the microwave but I like to take my time 7 Minutes in the oven I think it's better that way and you can try it for yourself by clicking the link in the description below or going to factor75.com and use code you hungry 50 for 50% off of your first Factor box and 20% off of your next order oh you really shouldn't be in so much human don't tell me what to do and get the ti shirt off and make fit you once you Fe me I'm your responsibility This Ss pretty good though there are a ton of PC handhelds to choose from I didn't want to do this with a steam deck for obvious reasons it would just be way easier if the device was capable of Windows although Linux is capable of a lot of all of the rest of my options I decided to go with the Lenovo Legion go it's not my favorite but most of the reason I went with this one over all the other ones is just because the screen is so large I thought having the detachable controllers would give me a bit more versatility but I honestly left them on almost the whole time compared to all the other handhelds I'm sure this comparatively massive screen was helpful but it's still PED in comparison to even a small laptop screen I also chose the Lenovo for its two usb4 ports this helps me dock it with a lot of bandwidth for high resolution and high frame rate video faster transfer speeds and the potential for an egpu so if I really started to feel like I missed having a powerful computer I could just plug this into a graphics card and make it into a powerful computer I'm replacing my late 2021 16-in MacBook Pro this thing is an absolute Beast I spend most of my screen time on here on the daily I do all my video editing and creative work on here it's insanely powerful for how small that form factor is I even dock it using this Thunderbolt 4 Dock and I use it as a desktop computer most of the time it has not shown any signs of slowing down either it's still crushes multiple layers of 4K video files I do have a video on a second Channel about how I have this set up it's a bit old by now but not much has changed since then for gaming though I usually use this NZXT H1 Mini PC it has a 30 60 TI graphics card in it it's not the best but it's been good to me and it was relatively cheap I use it almost every night to play competitive valin with the boys sometimes hell divers sometimes Call of Duty for the next week both my gaming PC and my 16-in Macbook will be replaced with this Lenovo Legion go that's going to be rough for me cuz I got to do my work on here and it's got to be reliable for that and also I don't want my rank to go down in valerent I've been teetering on gold one I've been silver 3 for a dog's year now for the next week I am legitimately putting this MacBook away I am not touching it it will definitely be missed however I do stream regularly on Twitch and I could set up this Lenovo to do all of the streaming stuff I could set up OBS on there and put all my cameras connected to it and everything but that sounds like such a pain in the ass so I'm going to cheat a little bit so I'm still going to use that NZXT PC as a streaming rig but when I play games they're going to all be from the Lenova Legion go so for the first night that I started this project I played animal well on stream using the Lenovo Legion go connected to my NZXT PC I docked the Lenovo and captured it using a gy capture card just like I would a Nintendo switch or an Xbox or anything else I even plugged an Xbox controller into this Dock and everything the biggest issue was the controller it really wants to use the lenovo's controller because I guess that's registered as player one there are two solutions one is to just leave the controllers off when you boot up the system that way it won't recognize those controllers the second is to just load your game using steam where you can use steam input to force a different controller to be player one I actually kind of like this setup people use two piece P setups all of the time for streaming one PC for playing the game and one PC for streaming the game streaming can be a pretty GPU intensive process so streaming a GPU intensive game on just one computer could diminish the quality of both the game and the stream so I've been kind of flirting with the idea of streaming games from something like a Lenovo Legion go as a second computer and I think I might just do that cuz this was pretty cool that night after the Stream it was Val time with the boys I don't want to be doing too much work here to set up the Lenovo station so I just plugged my Lenovo into the dock that my MacBook usually goes into you should watch that other video for a deeper dive on how that works but essentially I have my mouse keyboard audio interface and two monitors all hooked up into this one setup with one cable this one cable allows all that to work through my Lenovo Legion go and it still charges it too with the full power that it needs this handheld is not power enough for 4K 144 HZ on both monitors so I limited it to just 1080p 144 HZ on just my left monitor which is the one that I game on and the right monitor just mirrors the Lenovo screen so I have valerant running with Discord on my second Monitor and my audio interface picking up my crisp voice luckily valerant is super optimized so I was getting over 100 frames per second basically the entire time and it felt pretty indistinguishable from for my usual setup aside from the fact that I'm using half the resolution but honestly that doesn't really matter the games were fine I I mean we played bad but that's not the lenovo's fault that's my fault so we're only one night in and I already have a few key takeaways the first being that this thing is just so goddamn loud you're going to want to wear headphones while you're using this thing especially while playing a game because the fans are just burring the whole time there's also no smart power scaling so it's either quiet mode or custom full blast there is a smart setting for the fan curves though so I've been kind of manually toggling between quiet mode custom with smart fan speed and custom with full fan speed obviously I reserved full for when I'm doing heavy gaming or something power intensive while downloading stuff off of steam the entire device is slower not just internet speed but the whole device it was even hard to just open a web page or or just a folder on another monitor I have to put it in full power mode just to download Call of Duty there's also just random weird glitches when trying to get the dock mode set up but that's to be expected with with a Windows machine honestly so far this all seems pretty manageable it's a little Annoying compared to what I'm used to but it doesn't seem debilitating at all it it seems like this is going to be doable day two started off and I usually start my days off with a cuple coffee and my laptop or my iPad sitting on the countertop watching a stream or a podcast or something once again this thing is so godamn loud I even have it on the smart fan curve and it just randomly Roars up even when I just have Chrome open the speakers are also abysmal my 2015 iPad sounds light years better back to the original state and our issue matched this one the controller on the Lenovo has a mouse mode but I never used it I don't usually use a mouse with my MacBook I usually just use the trackpad the trackpad on the Lenovo isn't great there's no click so you kind of just have to double tap I used this sometimes for precise movements but honestly I spend most of the time just tapping the screen have to be honest I was a little afraid of the lenovo's uh video editing capabilities because that's my job and I need to do that and I was also extremely curious of the EG capabilities on the Lenovo Legion go thanks to a previous video on this I had a Razer core egpu enclosure just sitting around I went to Micro Center and I picked up a 4070 super I picked this one specifically because it's an upgrade from what I already have in my PC so when I'm done with this I can just put it in there if if I can figure out how to fit it now I was almost convinced to just get an AMD GPU because that would be way cheaper and this has an AMD so so you'd think that it would be more compatible with this but after about 10 seconds of research it looks like the drivers just don't play nice together there's a lot of driver Tom Foolery that you have to do and I've used my 3060 TI with this setup before and it was essentially plug- and play after downloading the NVIDIA drivers I don't want my docked play to affect my undocked play so I went with the 470 super which costs over $600 that's almost the price of a Lenovo leging go this is extremely impractical but also super fun to do the egpu that I'm using only has one Thunderbolt 3 port and that has to be connected to the Lenovo Legion go luckily the Lenovo has two USBC ports in order to get stuff like a mouse and keyboard plugged in what I did was I had one cable plugged into the egpu from the top and my Thunderbolt 4 dock plugged into the bottom I had the main screen using the egpu via HDMI 2.1 and my Lenovo screen as a second monitor for a Discord for some reason it did not pick up my other monitor but that's okay I didn't really want to use it anyway luckily the boys didn't want to play Val that night so I had the night to work out all the Kinks with this setup and it seemed like things were going pretty good after reinstalling Call of Duty twice that night I played animal well in bed that game is great you should try it but what I noticed is that the auto brightness setting on this just never worked so so far this whole time I'm pressing this button to bring up the little Lenovo menu and I'm constantly changing the brightness adjusting the fan curves and changing power modes and stuff I feel like I'm driving a stick shift car the next day I decided to write down some of my thoughts using an on-screen keyboard would be a nightmare so I've been using this small foldable keyboard I'll link all the peripherals that I use in the description below with Amazon affiliate links this is extremely compact but the keys aren't too small I typed out a lot of this script on it makes this thing feel way more like a laptop although I do need a surface to rest this whole setup on it's a split keyboard which isn't really a problem I've used split keyboards before but for some reason I just can't get used to the b key being on the left I guess I'm just now realizing that I'm pressing the b key with my right hand and I don't think you're supposed to do that but that's just too many keys on the left side you're telling me there's just n and M on the right and n nnm Jesus Christ here's another key takeaway from this so far usually when I'm just sitting around I'm on my laptop and when I'm on my laptop I'm doing things I'm looking at email I'm working on future projects I'm messed around in Kat or something I'm doing something that feels like I'm being productive I have been doing none of that this whole time I am significantly less productive not because this is a gaming device I just don't want to use this it's cumbersome I was actually on my phone significantly more this week than I ever have been cuz I just don't want to use this Lenovo Legion go a lot of the time I actually wrote a significant amount of this script on here too on the third night we played val and I used the egpu and it seemed like it was going well with around 300 frames per second we did a practice round before we jumped into competitive and the driver crashed this is unacceptable what if I got kicked out of a game mid-match the boys would kill me so I had to ditch the egpu and have the Lenovo set up the same way that I did the other night I plugged it right into the Thunderbolt 4 dock I'll have to figure out those egpu problems later and that I did because on night four I streamed this time me working out the Kinks on this egpu and for some reason tonight the egpu felt horrible it was saying I was getting high frame rates but it didn't feel like I was getting High frame rates it was choppy the input lag was terrible this is way different than what I experienced the other night maybe it was the capture card maybe it was the Hub I was using for controller and keyboard connections it turns out the problem was leaving the lenovo's screen on at all I didn't think this was going to be a big deal especially if it's just mirroring what's happening on my other monitor I thought that wasn't going to add too much system resources but it turns out the Lenovo screen is using the AMD drivers and the monitor was using the NVIDIA drivers and those do not play well together so towards the end of the stream I disabled the Lenovo screen and for good measure I reduced the 4070 to just 1440p 120 HZ this ran flawlessly in both valerant and Call of Duty getting around 250 frames per second in valerant and around 130 in Call of Duty this fixed everything that night I played val with the same Conn ction I tried the other day with the egpu plugged into the top and the Thunderbolt 4 dock plugged into the bottom I did this because I wanted my audio interface of my keyboard and mouse all to be connected through through one port except this time I only ran one Monitor and it felt indistinguishable from how my desktop computer runs the game if not even a little better which should make sense this is a slightly better GPU than what's in my desktop computer one weird Quirk on this night is that it randomly decided to detect my two monitors running through display port through my Thunderbolt cable as separate monitors so my Lenovo had four monitors connected to it right now one HDMI two display ports and the onboard display I disabled all but one and everything went smoothly hopefully next time I plug my Lenovo into all this it will remember my settings and everything will be fun day five was another test of performance I started off the Day writing on the Lenovo just like I did the other other day but this day I also recorded that factor ad that you might have seen or skipped at the beginning of this video I have to then edit this video a real test of performance I'm a little nervous to do that on here because I don't have any of my presets or anything so I'm basically raw dog in this edit I decided to start the edit using just the Lenovo no egpu just to see how it did I was pleasantly surprised by how well it was able to preview the 4K footage that was until I started editing two layers of 4K video at a time see I wasn't actually standing next to Zim that was a little bit of movie Magic so after a few minutes of editing I decided to finish this edit with the egpu plugged in weirdly this didn't really help too much I messed with some settings it wasn't using Cuda processing for some reason so I switched that on that should work better on the egpu but it didn't for some reason allocating more RAM to work with Premiere actually did work it's just not much ramp to go around so it only gave me a little boosted performance I had to frequently render the whole timeline so that I could see what I was doing also if you're curious about how I make Zim's mouth move I just use an app called My Talking Pet and manually track the mouth afterwards if you know an easier way using AI or something let me know because it sucks doing it this way when I was rendering this out I noticed that the gpus fans weren't really spinning this is supposed to be a really GPU intensive task and it is but this GPU just wasn't getting hot so I guess it didn't feel the need to start spinning the render did take a bit but all in all this went relatively smoothly I only missed my Mac a little bit that night we played a little bit of valerant nothing really changed this whole setup still handled it like a champ and I'm still silver 3 godamn it day six started with me waking up watching videos on the Lenovo while I made food and going over this script and I've got to be honest today is day I've got to film this video so I can get it over to Benny to edit it what I have left to do today and the final day is I got to go through script notes which means looking at the script and going through all the footage and marking what goes where tonight I have the podcast which I usually use the MacBook for to look at stories and cast them to the streaming PC and stuff and tomorrow I have to finish the edit for this entire video uh you something's weird here have you noticed yes you're are using an a Lenovo right now I am not using my MacBook that I usually use uh I'm doing a video this week where I use my Lenovo Legion go as my main computer I've been like editing and stuff off of here it's been a goddamn nightmare all right let's just go right into the the first topic now I usually uh what I do is I cast my MacBook screen over to the streaming computer why are you laughing I'm going to I'm casting my Lenovo screen it's right there I'm I'm laughing fun I'm laughing in preparation for the nightmare that the show is going to resolution is a little wonky and I can't crop out a lot of the the ads I'm so sorry okay it's actually not too bad having this casted in Discord to that computer look everything everything's fun you could scroll around and everything it's just uh it's just hard to do it on such a tiny little little tiny little baby screen and I'm here it is now the final day and this has easily been the worst one we'll start with last night when I was playing valerent and my Thunderbolt doc decided today was the day where it just wasn't going to use the ethernet port it kept randomly dropping connection mid-match because I was using Wi-Fi I didn't want to use Wi-Fi I wanted to use the ethernet on the dock right before that match the doc also wasn't reading the SD card slot so something was wrong with the dock connection I just had to unplug it and plug it back in but I didn't know it was going to do all of that today though I spent a really long time going through my script notes and looking through all of the footage on here and that sucked this is an absolute nightmare to go through all of the clips cuz on Mac you can just go into a finder window and preview everything but these file types don't preview well on Windows and even in a Premiere timeline this thing takes a second to start when you select a clip so it's it's just been a drag it was easier for me to go through the footage on the camera itself than it was for me to wait for everything to load on here a large portion of this video was edited on the Lenovo Legion go my editing is usually a collaboration between me and my editor Benny I put things together then he takes it and puts more things together then I take it and and screw around with it some more so tonight I'm going to take what Benny edited and and finish it on here and and I'm not looking forward to that I did it it only crashed twice it's 3:30 in the morning I should have mentioned this earlier in the video but the second day that I was doing this experiment I got a text from my manager who was saying that a certain other PC handheld company reached out to me for a sponsorship and they said we have a really good idea we want you to do something like this and they sent me an article of somebody spending one week using only so and so handheld as my main computer literally the same idea that I'm doing I said no because I was already a day and a half into the project and I did not want to start over also doing it as a sponsorship doesn't feel right because most of the fun of this is all of the problems that you will have and a sponsor is not going to let you include all of those problems I've been doing this experiment to get a better understanding of why anybody would want to main a PC handheld as their main computer whether or not it would work for me and whether or not it would be even practical for anybody do you hear this thing I definitely have an answer now this reminds me of back when I was in college it's not that kind of story I had a Microsoft Surface Pro 2 I really wanted that computer and when I got it I loved it but I was just being really stubborn that computer sucked this is reminding me a lot of that because it's a it's a tablet PC hybrid but this is a lot more powerful and a lot more capable of a lot more things that one was not I guess that might be an extreme example of this people want PC handhelds but they're expensive as far as handhelds go the justification these people might give themselves is that they're cheap as far as laptops go and these PC handhelds could even be more powerful than other devices in that price range so I can see why somebody would convince themselves that this might be a good buy for them because this could be capable of a lot if you dock it and use it like a desktop computer and I'm here to tell you it's not really at all practical I used a lot of peripherals in this video and all those peripherals cost money just the Thunderbolt dock alone that I use in this video is over $300 for that price what $11,000 total you could definitely get a gaming laptop that has all the ports you need to connect it to a display and a mouse and keyboard and all that stuff it might seem enticing for you to use this for its upgradeability because in the future if you want to get something more powerful you can just connect an egpu to it but you could also just do that with a laptop and I'm willing to bet that a lot of PC handhelds will be obsolete a lot quicker than some of these laptops in this price range I also think that I just value having a laptop more than I value having a gaming handheld I guess I do more work than I do play games PC handhelds are Boutique devices for people who already have computers at home and also have money to burn I'm sorry but you can't use this video to convince your parents to get you a Lenovo Legion go for college although look I am pleasantly surprised by what it's capable of after this I think I will be using it as a second computer for when I'm streaming games maybe this convinced you to get a PC handheld as a cheap gaming PC to use alongside your existing computer like a Macbook or a Chromebook that isn't capable of gaming but those are definitely capable of work I can see that being a good justification as for me I can't wait to turn on my MacBook again I've missed it so much and I'd rather kill myself than ever have to edit anything ever again on this stupid fing Lova Legion go what do you guys think I'm sure a couple of you are using PC handhelds as your main computers let me know how that's been going leave it in the comments below add me on Twitter any and all this other social media garbage what could I have done differently look I know that people like to throw justifications out there like oh it's not so hard you just have to update some drivers you just got to change these settings blah blah blah it all adds up and it's all a pain in the ass hey I'll see you over on twitch.tv/ Wolf then we can hang out there sometime and talk about this stuff but of course the most important thing that you can do to help support this channel is just subscribe right here you helped me hit 900,000 thank you so much and share this video with the friend a friend who is thinking about getting one of these instead of a computer this could help them I'm sure thank you very much have a good week

Channel: WULFF DEN

Views: 175,079

Keywords: Wulff Den, WulffDen, Wolf Den, WolfDen, Bob Wulff, lenovo legion go, Nintendo Switch, PC Handheld, gaming pc, steam deck, steam deck alternative, handheld, handheld gaming, steam handheld, lenovo handheld, lenovo, lenovo gaming, legion go, legion, lenovo legion, best pc handheld, portable, retro handheld, joy con pc, lenovo joy con, lenovo controller, lenovo legion go egpu, pc handheld egpu, egpu, nvidia pc handheld, nvidia, thunderbolt egpu, pc handheld external graphics

Id: LE4aNhxbqgo

Length: 26min 8sec (1568 seconds)

Published: Thu May 16 2024