- It was a pleasant surprise for me that the System76 Oryx Pro actually did pretty well for this Blog. You guys seem to really enjoy it. ...
- It was a pleasant surprise for me that the System76 Oryx Pro actually did pretty well for this Blog. You guys seem to really enjoy it. 
So here we are again withSystem76, once again, again. This one is the Darter Pro. So far the box looks pretty much the same. (box scuffing) Yep, this is just a shipping box. Unleash your potential. Open box, alright, (box scuffing) lift platform, (parts clacking) and flatten. Oh!(parts clacking) (sighs) Wait! Don't cut it! Packaging is reusable.
A couple of people actually said, oh, that doesn't make any sense. It's, why are you gonna reuse the box? I mean, there's a good reason like if you had to RMA it or something. So let's see. We've also got the power adapterin here and a little card. Only complaint I have aboutthis box is it's huge. But I mean, it's a shipping box, so what do you expect? Nothing too interestingabout the power brick, I don't think. (paper rustling) They do give you a littlecleaning cloth and a SSD, a thermal pad, which is nice. And now we have this card from System76. Oh, a Desktop Sentinel. Okay, (chuckles) Thank you for purchasinga System76 computer, if you, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, I was hoping therewould be more to that but it's just a, hey,it's a warranty thing. This is like a punch out little thing, a little guy that you can stand up.
There we go. Yeah, Melvin. Oh, there's more in here. Yeah, all kinds of stickers here. Enough with all that. What is going on here? Oh, okay. (paper rustling) Oh, that is quite a fetching unit. No, actually it looks, it looks really nice. I mean, I know this is a Clevo design. Actually, I don't haveexactly what one it is here, but it's actually an NS-50-MU. They say it's under fourpounds and I believe them. Let's see if they're lying to us. 3.956, 1.795 kg. There will be some variation in the weight depending on how you spec it out, because this has two DIMM slots, as well as two M.2 slotson the inside for NVME, one of which is PCI Express 4.0, which is very nice.
On the left side, we havethe barrel jack for power, HDMI, a USB 3.2 Type-A, a USB 3.2 Type-C, and a Thunderbolt 4 port. On the back, we got nothing and we've got a vent, actually two. On the right side, we've got a headphone-mic combo jack, an SD card, micro SD card reader, a USB 2.0 port, the power button, and this lovely littlecollapsible ethernet jack. I love those. Oh, also a Kensington Lock port. That's not all there isto the exterior though. If we take a look insidehere, under the lid, we can see that we've got a really weird little camera bump. What's that for? Well, it's a 720p webcam, so there's nothing special about that.
But it also has Windows Hello sensors, and you can use that witha program called Howdy to actually use Windows Hello in Linux. So you're not missing out on that. There is a, I think it's a 73 watt-hour battery, and that is the same batterythat's in the Oryx Pro that we looked at before. Ours is kitted out with a Core i7 1165 G7 with Intel Xe Graphics. 16 gigabytes of RAM and 2x8 configuration, and a one terabyte PCI Express, Gen 3 SSD. Now, why Gen 3? Well, it's gonna be a littlebit less power hungry for one, and two, most peoplearen't gonna need Gen 4. But if you do, the slot is there. ♪ Train ♪ Deck flex is pretty muchminimal for this kind of design, like the lid doesn'treally flex all that much. It's pretty much what you'dexpect from a metal chassis. What else is there to say here?
The keyboard layout lookspretty standard for a laptop, not bad, a full-sizearrow key cluster here the inverted T. Keys feel well stabilized actually screen is a nice matte finish. But we'll see more aboutthat when we boot it up. First, I need to talk to you about honey. Honey is the free shopping tool that finds the best promo codes whenever you shop onlineat specific sites. It works on over 30,000 stores, including Amazon, eBay, Newegg,Razer, Best Buy, Walmart, and many more. Honey gets a small commission from sites, whenever they save you money, get honey for free right now at jointhoney.com/shortcircuit.
Anyway, let's plug it in. Having the power button on theside is actually really good because since this isusing open source firmware you can make it so thatyou can turn the laptop on while it's like the lid closed but yet the power is plugged in. Alright, we're in Canada, we're not French. Why do they keep sayingthat Canadians are French? It's always defaults toFrench when we select Canada. All the Quebecers arelike, "Oh, excuse me." If you are a touch-typer, you can set the keyboardto whatever layout you want via the firmware. Because it's open source. So you can make it Dvorak, you can make it Colemac, you could make it QWERTZ or AZERTY. Anyway, it's really cool. (chuckles) So, here we go. Let's encrypt, 'cause why not? Screw it, one two, three, four, one, two, three, four, Please don't steal my files. By default, they suggest thatyou do full disk encryption. - [Man] Oh, I see. - Just for privacy security reasons. Restart device, let's do it. Booting.
This'll be familiar to anyone who's seen the Oryx Pro video, or if anyone who's used Pop OS. But here's the Pop OS desktop. It's super clean. And it's got this littletiling thing here. What's that? That, I don't think wasin the Oryx Pro video. You can basically just doeverything via the keyboard now, so I can do, I can hold down the Windowskey and press the arrows, to move around betweenthe different windows. Let's see what all the shortcuts are. Yeah, so I can increasethe size like that. It's cool, if not superuseful for everybody. And because it's basedon Ubuntu, I can install Steam, if I go into the Pop Shop.
I wanna know, just how well Intel's XeGraphics works under Linux. Because unlike Nvidia, it's not a proprietary driver. It is open source. Basically everything onthis machine is open source, with the exception of CPU microcode and the Intel Management Engine, which System76 actually disables by default, or at least as much as they can, because it's a security risk. So you have pretty much totalcontrol over the hardware. Processing shaders. Oh, God! The progress bar went backwardsand it straight up says, "known Intel driver issues. Not supported." Alright, let's put it down to the test 'cause we just spent the past15 minutes installing it. Play. Doom Eternal, I donno know why they don't make this skippable. Oh, man. Alt + Enter. So it looks like itjust doesn't like Intel. Okay. Let's, see us go. Just need to wait for this cutscene to end 'cause they added this for some reason and you can't skip it.
Alright, cool. We're in business. Oh, oh, here we go. (video pops) Oh, can I not? Oh. (chuckles) This is horrible. Palm rejection, is a thing, so I can move and I can turn, but if I press a key on thekeyboard and try to turn, I cannot do that. So I need to stop, to turn. And I got killed by a bot. (man laughing) - [Jono] How is it lookingthough? Like frame rate? - [Anthony] Frame rate is like 70 or 80. There's actually a lot of weird graphical glitches going on here. I don't think the driveris perfectly adequate yet, which would explain why itdidn't really work very well in Doom Eternal. Alright, so gaming isn'tthis thing's forte, at least not right nowuntil the driver is, you know, improved. But that's not too bad because this machine isn't reallymeant for gaming anyway, it's more of a portable workstation. - [Jono] How much is thisspec going for right now? - The current spec, Ithink is $1550 roughly, I'll have the full price on screen here, but it's $1,099 for the base unit.
So that's I think with theCore i5 and eight gigs of RAM and 250 gig SSD. So, with that in mind, let'stest that out the speakers. (upbeat music) I think the speakers are coming up, yeah, the speakers are on the bottom. (upbeat music) - [Jono] Can we use this video also as a screen quality check? - [Anthony] I mean, the screen looks fine, nothing fancy as far as likeHDR or high refresh rate goes, but it looks pretty spot on to me. Lemme load up Linus Tech Tip feed video and see what that looks like. You know, it looks likea perfectly fine display. It is IPS. So it's not going to letyou down in that regard. You're not gonna havedifficulty seeing it off-axis. Brightness of the screen though, this is as high as it goes. Let's do like half brightnessiPhone right next to it, yeah, yeah. I mean, the thing about this is that it's actuallystraight-up a Clevo design. So, if you've seen one of these, you've seen them all, physically.
So, there's not really a wholelot else to say about it. The secret sauce as it were, is all in the operating system and in the firmware. For the money, it's not a bad machine. It's just not amazing, it's not gonna outdo a MacBook Air M1, which is on around this price point. So it really depends on whatyou value as a consumer. Like would you prefer a Windows laptop? I mean, maybe, would you prefer Mac OS? Also maybe. But if you prefer Linux, if you want to get into somethingthat you can tinker with because you can change so many things like the battery charge rate, the battery, I think the maximum charge youcan probably tweak as well. You can change the TDP of your CPU, to turn it down or turn it up, the keyboard, basically,anything you can think of, which is really cool. So, there is a littlebit of overhead for that, and I think that shouldbe kinda considered, when you look at the pricefor this kinda thing. Like the thing is, this is here today. It works, it is very well integrated. As far as integration goes, System76 is probablymore deeply integrated with the hardware and the software than any Windows PC manufacturer, just as a result of the coreboot, the custom firmware forthe memory controller.
But they don't take that away from you, they give it to you, and that counts for a lot. Yeah, I mean, if you're looking for a nice portable workstationthat you can upgrade, that you can service and that isn't actually like, it doesn't really have any major downfalls aside from the factthat the speakers suck, it's, it's good. They do have their ownin-house laptops coming though. There'll probably be a couplemore generations of these before they actuallymanage to get a laptop out. But when they do, I'mlooking very much forward to seeing what they can come up with. Thanks for watching, get subscribed, so you don't miss thenext time we take a look at a obscure piece of hardwarefrom a semi obscure company.
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