**The PC vs Laptop Debate: A Blind Test**

In this video, I'm joined by Anna to conduct a blind test to determine whether she can reliably tell the difference between a high-end gaming laptop and a custom-built gaming PC. We'll be testing various scenarios to see if she can accurately identify which one is the laptop and which one is the PC.

**Initial Impressions**

As we begin the test, Anna seems quite confident in her ability to distinguish between the two systems. However, I'm not so sure... Maybe it's because I've seen some weird results from our previous tests? Okay, let me just double-check... Yeah, this feels like the PC. Oh wait, you said that was the PC again! So, what do you think?

**Results**

Anna, here are the results. What do you see? Hmm... Yeah, you were pretty close, but you said the last two were the same. How much of a difference could you really feel? The difference was very subtle; it was kind of more instinctual.

As I started playing, there would be some times where it would feel slightly more stuttery, and sometimes it would be fine – it would be kind of the same. But still wasn't night and day, not as clear-cut as David made me think it was gonna be.

**Test Number Two**

Oh, this is definitely the PC test number two, yeah! This is the PC. Okay, test number three? Three... Yeah, this is the laptop!

**Further Analysis**

Let's see if it's clear cut for me. Oh, this is definitely the PC test number two, yeah! This is the PC. And this is the laptop again.

Test number eight, cool! This is the PC. It feels like the difference between a laptop and a high-end gaming system – like this is exactly the difference I'd expect; it's huge!

**David's Points Revealed**

I really hope I got everything right. It's night and day; you could tell immediately; it's huge! I'm actually really surprised you couldn't tell after doing my blind 1440p comparison tests. I was very surprised that Anna said she couldn't reliably tell the difference between the two, and she was mostly guessing.

**The Game-Changer**

After this, we said okay screw it – we're just gonna go balls to the wall here! We're gonna crank the game settings to ultra and turn on ray tracing. At this point, she could easily tell the difference, but I still think that this has taught us some interesting things about perceived gaming performance.

**Takeaways**

Now, let me know in the comment section below what your main takeaways are from this video. For me, there are a couple that stand out:

1. **Frame Rate Doesn't Matter as Much as You'd Think**: Despite the huge frame rate difference between these two systems at 1080p, it was very difficult for both Anna and I to reliably tell the difference.

2. **Monitors Are a Huge Bottleneck**: If you're gaming at 1080p like most people are, you really don't need to care about getting modern high-end hardware. Even with a high refresh rate 1440p monitor, a 3080 is overkill for most games.

3. **Perceived Performance Improvement Is Relative**: Just because there's a measurable performance difference between two components doesn't mean that there's going to be a perceived difference between the two of them – and that's gonna change from person to person!

**Conclusion**

I hope you enjoyed this video or found it entertaining, or whatever! Like and subscribe to the channel for more videos like this one, and until the next video, bye!

WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enit's time for another blind test video where anna oh and i are gonna see if we can tell the difference between what is essentially the gaming pc equivalent of saitama and just like a solid gaming laptop now i know on the surface this may seem a little bit pointless obviously you can tell the difference between a 3080 and a laptop based 2060. it's like doing a blind test comparison between a glass of water and a pint of straw rum but it's actually more nuanced than that we did learn some things make some friendships had good laughs memories all those things but before we get into that we have a sponsor for today's video today's video is sponsored by lenode which is an affordable powerful way to host linux based servers in the cloud if you want to host your own game servers the node is for you they support games like rust cs go and minecraft the java edition which we all know is clearly superior to the bedrock edition you can also use lenod to host your own plex servers which is very useful if you're looking for a place to host your new wordpress website lenode is an affordable and reliable option for that not only that but lenode has some of the best customer support in the business i mean just look at how seriously this dude takes his customers support regardless of your paid here you'll get through to a person that will help you sort out your problem if this sounds good sign up using the link in my description for a 100 60 day credit thank you very much lenode for sponsoring this video before we get into the tests let me just set the scene for you a little bit starting with the system specifications now as far as the ubermetron gaming pc goes it's some of the best gaming performance you can get at the moment the cpu it has in it is an i9 10850k which has 10 cores and 20 threads running at 5.1 gigahertz as far as the graphics card goes we have this chonkometron rtx 3080 many matrons here today for some reason and then finally it's paired with 32 gigs of ddr4 3200 megahertz now in terms of the laptop that we're using for this comparison it's the razer blade 15 that i used in a comparison video with it's its six-year-old stablemate in my last video so if you haven't seen that go check it out in the description below um but basically this laptop is based around an i7 10 750h which has a mere poultry 6 cores and 12 threads which is significantly less than the i9 and it runs at about 4 gigahertz if you're lucky while gaming as far as the graphics card goes it's got an rtx 2060 which is a much smaller number than the 3080 and then finally it's got 16 gigs of ram running a ddr for 26 66 megahertz now that we've had a look at the specs let me just run you through how i actually went about doing these blind tests now i set up a monitor uh multiple monitors depending on the resolution that we used and i'll get into that a bit later but i set up a monitor with a mouse keyboard and a set of headphones in one room and then i had the pc and the laptop set up in another room and then i connected them with long hdmi 2.0 cables i also manually set their fan speeds so yeah you wouldn't be able to hear any variation because they were just at max tilt the whole time anyway other than that we used battlefield 5 running at high settings which is not a super demanding game but it is pretty demanding and we started off with 1080p resolution but we moved up to 1440p and tried some different settings later on as well but we'll deal with all of that as we get to it so now with the boring stuff out of the way let's have a look at the test situation so here we have control number one okay so i'm not a battlefield pro um where do i just run do i just like yeah just go forward basically hey you killed someone okay so this isn't actually this doesn't feel like it's the best experience ever oh but that's actually just because i'm running slow we may have forgotten the headphones for the first one but it's just the controls so it doesn't matter oh that's my person my bad this feels more jumpy oh this feels way more stuttery do i keep reloading on purpose okay so we just finished the two control tests what do you think so comparing a and b i found it very difficult to tell the difference but i have a suspicion that b is the laptop b is the slower device i think but i'm not sure we'll have to discuss okay so now let's do the eight blind test results where you don't know if i'm changing or not okay oh oh you got someone good job that was pretty nice nice uh it's a really good gaming experience like i have no qualms with this so what what do you think this is i would say this is the laptop okay cool yo i'm struggling to tell the difference like this is just a good gaming experience so which one do you think it is um i think it's a laptop i've thought the last three have been up oh i'm gonna die again look at mine so what do you think do you think this one's the pc i think this was the pc okay very good test number four okay i'm just gonna be straight up and say that i cannot tell the difference currently i'm just um i'm gonna say that this one i feel like this is really smooth again so i'm gonna say that this is the uh pc test number six okay so this is uh i think this one's the the the pc i think it's really good i think it's really smooth test number eight oh okay i think this is that bomb was super high def so i'm gonna say this is the pc so here are the results uh i don't know if you can make sense of what my what my notation is but here you go all right um that's pretty foul i think the last one was a really clear indication of those two because i went from the gaming pc a couple rounds so that you can potentially get used to how the pc feels and then move down to the laptop which if there was a big performance difference between the two i feel like you should have noticed it there yeah yeah there was very little performance difference between them i really really basically couldn't tell the difference either the whole time it just felt like a great gaming experience there were there weren't any particularly large stutters and it was just so hard to tell the difference test number one either it's the pc again or i really can't tell the difference um that's the look of confidence i think this is the laptop but yo it's so close uh this is the pc i think this is the laptop again but yeah i think this is the pc again david's results are fairly decent only fairly eight out of ten okay so it was the last two you the last one was the laptop the last one was the laptop yo it felt it it honestly felt exactly the same as the previous one this is really impressive because i was convinced this was the pc like it is so close yeah so what we're going to do now is we're going to switch over to a higher end gaming monitor and this is where there's going to be a big difference in my opinion i think going to the 1440p monitor it's going to be like you're easily going to be able to tell that okay so now we're trying out something that's much less in the laptop's favor we're doing 1440p 1440p test number one this feels like the pc can i change i mean i know i can't really change my answer but i i think that the last one was the laptop and then this one's maybe the pc i think it's a ptu test number five maybe it's the laptop no maybe it's the pc okay why do you think that um it seems pretty smooth i think it's the pc what do you think this one's the best i think it's the pc okay this feels like the pc again i think oh wait but you said that this was the pc again so you think that this is the same as the previous one yes here are the results anna here you go what so yeah you were pretty close but you said that the last two were the same so how how much of a difference could you really feel the difference was very subtle it was kind of more instinctual like as i started playing there would be some times where it would feel slightly more stuttery and sometimes it would be fine and it would be kind of the same but so it still wasn't night and it still wasn't light it wasn't that easy it was not as clear-cut as david made me think it was gonna be okay cool well let's see if let's see if it's clear cut for me okay oh this is definitely the pc test number two two two yeah this is the pc okay test number three three yeah this is the laptop yep this is the pc this is the pc again and this is the laptop this is the laptop again test number eight cool this is the pc it feels like the difference between a laptop and a high-end gaming system like this is exactly the difference i'd expect it's it's huge let's have david's points revealed i i really hope i got everything right it's it's a night and day difference you could tell immediately it's it's huge i'm actually really surprised you couldn't tell after doing my blind 1440p comparison tests i was very surprised that anna said that she couldn't reliably tell the difference between the two and she was mostly guessing so i explained to her specifically what differences to look out for and then we redid her tests where she still couldn't reliably tell the difference between the two so after this we said okay screw it we're just gonna go balls to the wall here we're gonna crank the game settings to ultra and turn on ray tracing at this point she could easily tell the difference but i mean the blade 15 was running at an average of like 30 frames per second so it would have been really weird if she couldn't in that situation but i still think that this has taught us some interesting things about perceived gaming performance let me know in the comment section below what your main takeaways are from this video but for me there are a couple that stand out now the first and definitely the biggest takeaway for me from all of this is the fact that frame rate doesn't seem to matter as much as you'd think despite the fact that at 1080p there was a huge frame rate difference between these two systems a frame rate difference that mostly fell within the refresh rate of the monitor which means we should have seen the difference it was very difficult for both anna and i to reliably tell the difference between the two in fact that last test of mine at 1080p i was so convinced that it was the gaming pc over the laptop that i actually went and double checked the inputs of the monitor like they feel so similar at that resolution which brings me to point number two monitors are a huge bottleneck if you're gaming at 1080p like most people are you really don't need to care about getting modern high-end hardware in fact even with a high refresh rate 1440p monitor a 3080 is overkill for most games most games and then the second big takeaway for me is the fact that perceived performance improvement is relative so just because there's a measurable performance difference of like 30 between two components doesn't mean that there's going to be a perceived 30 difference between the two of them and that's gonna change from person to person so yeah i don't know how useful that information is but if you liked this video or found it entertaining or whatever like and subscribe to the channel for more videos like this one and until the next video bye youit's time for another blind test video where anna oh and i are gonna see if we can tell the difference between what is essentially the gaming pc equivalent of saitama and just like a solid gaming laptop now i know on the surface this may seem a little bit pointless obviously you can tell the difference between a 3080 and a laptop based 2060. it's like doing a blind test comparison between a glass of water and a pint of straw rum but it's actually more nuanced than that we did learn some things make some friendships had good laughs memories all those things but before we get into that we have a sponsor for today's video today's video is sponsored by lenode which is an affordable powerful way to host linux based servers in the cloud if you want to host your own game servers the node is for you they support games like rust cs go and minecraft the java edition which we all know is clearly superior to the bedrock edition you can also use lenod to host your own plex servers which is very useful if you're looking for a place to host your new wordpress website lenode is an affordable and reliable option for that not only that but lenode has some of the best customer support in the business i mean just look at how seriously this dude takes his customers support regardless of your paid here you'll get through to a person that will help you sort out your problem if this sounds good sign up using the link in my description for a 100 60 day credit thank you very much lenode for sponsoring this video before we get into the tests let me just set the scene for you a little bit starting with the system specifications now as far as the ubermetron gaming pc goes it's some of the best gaming performance you can get at the moment the cpu it has in it is an i9 10850k which has 10 cores and 20 threads running at 5.1 gigahertz as far as the graphics card goes we have this chonkometron rtx 3080 many matrons here today for some reason and then finally it's paired with 32 gigs of ddr4 3200 megahertz now in terms of the laptop that we're using for this comparison it's the razer blade 15 that i used in a comparison video with it's its six-year-old stablemate in my last video so if you haven't seen that go check it out in the description below um but basically this laptop is based around an i7 10 750h which has a mere poultry 6 cores and 12 threads which is significantly less than the i9 and it runs at about 4 gigahertz if you're lucky while gaming as far as the graphics card goes it's got an rtx 2060 which is a much smaller number than the 3080 and then finally it's got 16 gigs of ram running a ddr for 26 66 megahertz now that we've had a look at the specs let me just run you through how i actually went about doing these blind tests now i set up a monitor uh multiple monitors depending on the resolution that we used and i'll get into that a bit later but i set up a monitor with a mouse keyboard and a set of headphones in one room and then i had the pc and the laptop set up in another room and then i connected them with long hdmi 2.0 cables i also manually set their fan speeds so yeah you wouldn't be able to hear any variation because they were just at max tilt the whole time anyway other than that we used battlefield 5 running at high settings which is not a super demanding game but it is pretty demanding and we started off with 1080p resolution but we moved up to 1440p and tried some different settings later on as well but we'll deal with all of that as we get to it so now with the boring stuff out of the way let's have a look at the test situation so here we have control number one okay so i'm not a battlefield pro um where do i just run do i just like yeah just go forward basically hey you killed someone okay so this isn't actually this doesn't feel like it's the best experience ever oh but that's actually just because i'm running slow we may have forgotten the headphones for the first one but it's just the controls so it doesn't matter oh that's my person my bad this feels more jumpy oh this feels way more stuttery do i keep reloading on purpose okay so we just finished the two control tests what do you think so comparing a and b i found it very difficult to tell the difference but i have a suspicion that b is the laptop b is the slower device i think but i'm not sure we'll have to discuss okay so now let's do the eight blind test results where you don't know if i'm changing or not okay oh oh you got someone good job that was pretty nice nice uh it's a really good gaming experience like i have no qualms with this so what what do you think this is i would say this is the laptop okay cool yo i'm struggling to tell the difference like this is just a good gaming experience so which one do you think it is um i think it's a laptop i've thought the last three have been up oh i'm gonna die again look at mine so what do you think do you think this one's the pc i think this was the pc okay very good test number four okay i'm just gonna be straight up and say that i cannot tell the difference currently i'm just um i'm gonna say that this one i feel like this is really smooth again so i'm gonna say that this is the uh pc test number six okay so this is uh i think this one's the the the pc i think it's really good i think it's really smooth test number eight oh okay i think this is that bomb was super high def so i'm gonna say this is the pc so here are the results uh i don't know if you can make sense of what my what my notation is but here you go all right um that's pretty foul i think the last one was a really clear indication of those two because i went from the gaming pc a couple rounds so that you can potentially get used to how the pc feels and then move down to the laptop which if there was a big performance difference between the two i feel like you should have noticed it there yeah yeah there was very little performance difference between them i really really basically couldn't tell the difference either the whole time it just felt like a great gaming experience there were there weren't any particularly large stutters and it was just so hard to tell the difference test number one either it's the pc again or i really can't tell the difference um that's the look of confidence i think this is the laptop but yo it's so close uh this is the pc i think this is the laptop again but yeah i think this is the pc again david's results are fairly decent only fairly eight out of ten okay so it was the last two you the last one was the laptop the last one was the laptop yo it felt it it honestly felt exactly the same as the previous one this is really impressive because i was convinced this was the pc like it is so close yeah so what we're going to do now is we're going to switch over to a higher end gaming monitor and this is where there's going to be a big difference in my opinion i think going to the 1440p monitor it's going to be like you're easily going to be able to tell that okay so now we're trying out something that's much less in the laptop's favor we're doing 1440p 1440p test number one this feels like the pc can i change i mean i know i can't really change my answer but i i think that the last one was the laptop and then this one's maybe the pc i think it's a ptu test number five maybe it's the laptop no maybe it's the pc okay why do you think that um it seems pretty smooth i think it's the pc what do you think this one's the best i think it's the pc okay this feels like the pc again i think oh wait but you said that this was the pc again so you think that this is the same as the previous one yes here are the results anna here you go what so yeah you were pretty close but you said that the last two were the same so how how much of a difference could you really feel the difference was very subtle it was kind of more instinctual like as i started playing there would be some times where it would feel slightly more stuttery and sometimes it would be fine and it would be kind of the same but so it still wasn't night and it still wasn't light it wasn't that easy it was not as clear-cut as david made me think it was gonna be okay cool well let's see if let's see if it's clear cut for me okay oh this is definitely the pc test number two two two yeah this is the pc okay test number three three yeah this is the laptop yep this is the pc this is the pc again and this is the laptop this is the laptop again test number eight cool this is the pc it feels like the difference between a laptop and a high-end gaming system like this is exactly the difference i'd expect it's it's huge let's have david's points revealed i i really hope i got everything right it's it's a night and day difference you could tell immediately it's it's huge i'm actually really surprised you couldn't tell after doing my blind 1440p comparison tests i was very surprised that anna said that she couldn't reliably tell the difference between the two and she was mostly guessing so i explained to her specifically what differences to look out for and then we redid her tests where she still couldn't reliably tell the difference between the two so after this we said okay screw it we're just gonna go balls to the wall here we're gonna crank the game settings to ultra and turn on ray tracing at this point she could easily tell the difference but i mean the blade 15 was running at an average of like 30 frames per second so it would have been really weird if she couldn't in that situation but i still think that this has taught us some interesting things about perceived gaming performance let me know in the comment section below what your main takeaways are from this video but for me there are a couple that stand out now the first and definitely the biggest takeaway for me from all of this is the fact that frame rate doesn't seem to matter as much as you'd think despite the fact that at 1080p there was a huge frame rate difference between these two systems a frame rate difference that mostly fell within the refresh rate of the monitor which means we should have seen the difference it was very difficult for both anna and i to reliably tell the difference between the two in fact that last test of mine at 1080p i was so convinced that it was the gaming pc over the laptop that i actually went and double checked the inputs of the monitor like they feel so similar at that resolution which brings me to point number two monitors are a huge bottleneck if you're gaming at 1080p like most people are you really don't need to care about getting modern high-end hardware in fact even with a high refresh rate 1440p monitor a 3080 is overkill for most games most games and then the second big takeaway for me is the fact that perceived performance improvement is relative so just because there's a measurable performance difference of like 30 between two components doesn't mean that there's going to be a perceived 30 difference between the two of them and that's gonna change from person to person so yeah i don't know how useful that information is but if you liked this video or found it entertaining or whatever like and subscribe to the channel for more videos like this one and until the next video bye you