**A Review of the $300 Laptop: Performance and Cooling Issues**

I recently had the opportunity to test a $300 laptop that promised decent performance for its price. With a 3D Mark score of 682, graphics score of 604, and CPU score of 25.66, I was eager to see how this laptop would perform in real-world scenarios. However, as soon as I started running demanding benchmarks like Time Spy, I noticed a major issue - the laptop's cooling system struggled to keep up with the heat generated by the processor and graphics card.

The built-in fan was able to spin up quickly when the temperature reached 90 degrees Celsius, but unfortunately, it couldn't do much to mitigate the thermal throttling. Even with a laptop cooler/stand with two fans, we only managed to drop the temperature by 5 degrees, still falling short of the ideal operating range. This led me to wonder if there were other ways to improve performance without relying solely on cooling solutions.

To investigate further, I ran some real-world gaming tests using popular titles like CS:GO, Project Cars, and Doom. The results were mixed, but overall, the laptop's performance was decent for its price point. In CS:GO at medium settings and 720p, we averaged around 82-83 FPS, which is playable. However, in Project Cars at medium settings and 720p, the average frame rate dropped to around 27 FPS - a significant drop from what I would expect from this hardware.

One game that caught my attention was Doom (2016) at medium settings and 720p using the Vulcan backend. Unfortunately, I couldn't get Afterburner to display on top of the game, but the built-in FPS counter showed an average of around 42 FPS. This is slightly disappointing, considering this is a popular title that should be playable even in lower-end hardware.

Skyrim Special Edition high settings at 720p was another interesting test. We averaged around 45 FPS, which is respectable for a game that requires more processing power than the laptop's graphics card can handle. However, GTA 5 on normal settings and DirectX 11 at 720p showed an average of around 40-41 FPS, which is still somewhat underwhelming.

In all fairness, there are two major killers to the performance we saw - heat and single-channel memory. If I could get my hands on a laptop with dual-channel memory, even if it meant sacrificing some headroom in terms of cooling, I would expect much better performance across the board. The CPU is certainly capable, but it's clear that the system's limitations are holding back its full potential.

**Additional Observations and Conclusion**

One aspect of the laptop that impressed me was the display. With a 1080p resolution, minimal bezels, and a matte finish, this is a respectable screen for a laptop at this price point. However, there are two things I would like to see improved - first, the cooling system could benefit from additional cooling solutions or redesigns to better manage heat dissipation. Second, adding an extra RAM slot would greatly improve performance on this little machine.

Given the price tag of $299, I must say that I am generally pleased with the laptop's performance and features. It may not be the most powerful system out there, but it does offer good value for its price point. If you're looking for a budget-friendly option for casual gaming or everyday use, this laptop is definitely worth considering. However, if you need raw processing power for more demanding tasks, you may want to look elsewhere.

**Future Tests and Experiments**

As I mentioned earlier, I would love to test some emulation on this laptop in the future. If there's enough interest, I can create a full tutorial video showing how to play Dreamcast, GameCube, PS2, PS3, 3DS, and Wii U games on this system using various emulators and software solutions. Just let me know if you're interested!

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhey guys the CTA Prime back here again today we're gonna be taking a look at a relatively inexpensive rise and powered laptop by Motul they also offer the rise in three thirty two hundred you version here with four gigs of storage for around one hundred and ninety nine dollars so in this video we'll do a quick unboxing I'll go over the specs and then we'll get right into the testing phase I'm really interested to see if this thing's really worth two hundred and ninety nine dollars on paper it definitely looks like it is so there's not much going on in here we do have a user manual a 65 watt wall charger and the laptop itself they are claiming that this laptop is 2.5 pounds and that's pretty good for a decently powered laptop like we have here and overall this thing is very very light they do offer this in three different color variants there's black rose and silver which is the one I chose here the top is aluminum I don't believe the bottom is here but I'll get into it a little later in the video it's a nice little design very sleek super lightweight and we have that four core Rison 3500 u so this is known as the Motul 14 actually this one is the m1 42 we have a 14 inch 1080p display and surprisingly enough for the price here we have minimal bezels a decently sized trackpad and overall the keys feel pretty decent I mean it's definitely not top of the line but it'll get you by over on the left hand side we have our Ethernet port one USB 3.0 port one USB 2.0 port and our 3.5 millimeter audio jack for headphones moving over to the right-hand side we have one USB type-c port another USB 3.0 port full size HDMI output and our power input the chassis itself seems very well ventilated it'll pull air in from the bottom to cool that CPU off and vent it right out the back and a nice little surprise I had no clue existed on this unit is a backlit keyboard I was expecting it to be non backlit but we do get some LEDs in the back here it's not the brightest or the cleanest setup that I've seen but it'll definitely help you out in that dark situation moving over to the specs for the CPU we have the Rison 5 3500 you four cores eight threads base clock of 2.1 gigahertz with a max boost up to 3.7 built in radeon vega 8 graphics at 12 hundred megahertz 8 gigabytes of ddr4 24 hundred megahertz ram 256 gigabyte to SST a 14 inch 1080p display it comes pre-loaded with Windows 10 home and it weighs 2.5 5 pounds so like I mentioned the specs here on paper look really good for a 300 dollar laptop but we do need to get in to see how this thing really performs but first up I wanted to pull the bottom off and just see what we're working with if there's any upgradability at all so since this is running a risin chip with built-in Radeon Vega graphics this would really benefit from dual channel memory but unfortunately there's only a single slot in here and that's really disappointing I was hoping there was a free slot so I could add some extra memory or even just to 4 gig sticks and keep it at 8 gigs this little setup would definitely benefit tremendously in the graphics department if we had two slots here but if you ever wanted to add another m2 SSD there is a free slot in here it'll sit right across this ribbon cable and we can mount it on the other side so you could expand the storage quite easily on this machine so this is looking like a pretty decent machine for the price but we do need to get into some performance testing first up I'm gonna run some benchmarks and then we'll get right into some PC gaming so I personally don't have a lot of experience with these Ryze and mobile chips but I do have a lot of experience with the desktop variants like the 2400 G the 22 the 34 and the 32 so I'm gonna throw those in here for comparison and I completely understand this is a lower powered chip but overall it handles itself quite well when you compare it first up we have Geekbench 5 at the very top we have the 3500 view which is in this laptop single-core 844 multi-core 2525 now I was actually surprised to see that this did beat out my 2400 G in single core performance but the 2400 G did come ahead and multi-core scores and that's really because that 2,400 G can sustain the boost clocks longer than the 3500 you but either way you look at it this is pretty impressive for a little mobile chip next up we have Cinebench r15 and this is where the base clocks and threads really come into play the 3500 u 65535 this is the BMW test the 3500 you at 2 minutes and 55 seconds the 3400 G was 2 minutes and 20 seconds moving down to the 2200 G at 3 minutes and 29 again those extra threads really help out with this rendering test so the 3 tests you just saw really hit the CPU and don't do anything with the GPU so now it's time to move over to some GPU intensive tasks first up we have 3dmark with the time spy benchmark total score 682 graphics score 604 cpu score 25 66 I mean it's really not that bad for a $300 laptop but I think the major downside to this whole set up is the heat this thing thermal throttled pretty quickly when I was running time spy and we hit a maximum of 90 degrees Celsius and the built in fan does spin up I mean it doesn't sound like a jet plane but it is noticeable the problem is it can't keep this cpu and GPU combination cool enough inside of this unit so I wanted to see if we could get any better performance out of this if the chip was cooler when I was running these tests but unfortunately even with a laptop cooler / Stan with for fans Belton we only dropped 5 degrees we're still hitting that thermal throttle limit but time spy's a pretty taxing benchmark so let's go ahead and get into some real-world gaming and see how this performs first up we have csgo medium settings 720p get an average of around 82 to 83 fps it's definitely playable here I can really feel here if we had that dual channel memory setup in this thing it would do much better with every game here about the C it's really unfortunate they only added a single channel slot next up we have project cars to medium settings 720p in an average of around 27 FPS which is really bad here I'm not exactly sure what's going on this is the worst performing game that I tested on this laptop here we have the 2016 version of doom medium settings 720p using the Vulcan back-end unfortunately I couldn't get afterburner to display on top of this but I do have the built-in FPS counter listed on screen I'd say we're getting an average of around 42 fps here I was actually expecting this game to perform a little better this is something I still play on a regular basis Skyrim special edition high setting 720p get an average of 45 fps I had to throw GTA 5 in here and surprisingly it's really not all that bad normal settings DirectX 11 720p getting an average of around 40 to 41 fps so overall from what I've tested so far there's two main killers here for the performance we're seeing Heat we're at 72 degrees Celsius here with this game and single channel memory I know for a fact that we would get much better performance and every single game that I tested with dual channel memory even with the temps we're seeing here on the CPU I did go through and test about five more games here I just came up with a couple charts 1080p and 720p all of these are tested at medium settings and this is the average FPS I got so overall I really do think this is a pretty nice laptop for the price here this does have AC Wi-Fi built-in and I did run a quick test not bad at all and this also has bluetooth 4.2 built in the built-in speakers definitely put out enough sound and it is marked with th X and this is a bit misleading because th X only works through headphones that are THX certified one thing I really like about this laptop is the screen now it's not the highest resolution out there but it is 1080p very minimal bezels and it's got a matte finish to it but for the price this is a really nice display to put in here there are two things I wish we're a little different about this laptop first the cooling system I think it's a bit lean for the CPU we have in here at idle do in regular work web browsing and even YouTube viewing is fine but as soon as you put a decent load on that GPU it jumps right up to 70 degrees Celsius the next thing I would like to see change than this is adding an extra Ram slot these built-in Radeon Vega graphics really benefit from high ram speeds and dual channel memory this setup only supports 2400 mega Hertz Ram so adding faster Rams kind of out of the question but adding an extra slot would greatly improve performance on this little machine but it's really hard to complain about a system like this when the price was only 299 dollars and in my opinion just like it's it's it's well worth that price so that's pretty much it for this video guys I really appreciate you watching I know a lot of my regular viewers are gonna want to see some emulation running on this unit so if you're interested let me know in the comments below I can make a full emulation video on this laptop from Dreamcast GameCube ps2 ps3 3ds and even Wii U if you're interested and if you have any questions or you want to see anything else running on this laptop just let me know in the comments below but like always thanks for watching youhey guys the CTA Prime back here again today we're gonna be taking a look at a relatively inexpensive rise and powered laptop by Motul they also offer the rise in three thirty two hundred you version here with four gigs of storage for around one hundred and ninety nine dollars so in this video we'll do a quick unboxing I'll go over the specs and then we'll get right into the testing phase I'm really interested to see if this thing's really worth two hundred and ninety nine dollars on paper it definitely looks like it is so there's not much going on in here we do have a user manual a 65 watt wall charger and the laptop itself they are claiming that this laptop is 2.5 pounds and that's pretty good for a decently powered laptop like we have here and overall this thing is very very light they do offer this in three different color variants there's black rose and silver which is the one I chose here the top is aluminum I don't believe the bottom is here but I'll get into it a little later in the video it's a nice little design very sleek super lightweight and we have that four core Rison 3500 u so this is known as the Motul 14 actually this one is the m1 42 we have a 14 inch 1080p display and surprisingly enough for the price here we have minimal bezels a decently sized trackpad and overall the keys feel pretty decent I mean it's definitely not top of the line but it'll get you by over on the left hand side we have our Ethernet port one USB 3.0 port one USB 2.0 port and our 3.5 millimeter audio jack for headphones moving over to the right-hand side we have one USB type-c port another USB 3.0 port full size HDMI output and our power input the chassis itself seems very well ventilated it'll pull air in from the bottom to cool that CPU off and vent it right out the back and a nice little surprise I had no clue existed on this unit is a backlit keyboard I was expecting it to be non backlit but we do get some LEDs in the back here it's not the brightest or the cleanest setup that I've seen but it'll definitely help you out in that dark situation moving over to the specs for the CPU we have the Rison 5 3500 you four cores eight threads base clock of 2.1 gigahertz with a max boost up to 3.7 built in radeon vega 8 graphics at 12 hundred megahertz 8 gigabytes of ddr4 24 hundred megahertz ram 256 gigabyte to SST a 14 inch 1080p display it comes pre-loaded with Windows 10 home and it weighs 2.5 5 pounds so like I mentioned the specs here on paper look really good for a 300 dollar laptop but we do need to get in to see how this thing really performs but first up I wanted to pull the bottom off and just see what we're working with if there's any upgradability at all so since this is running a risin chip with built-in Radeon Vega graphics this would really benefit from dual channel memory but unfortunately there's only a single slot in here and that's really disappointing I was hoping there was a free slot so I could add some extra memory or even just to 4 gig sticks and keep it at 8 gigs this little setup would definitely benefit tremendously in the graphics department if we had two slots here but if you ever wanted to add another m2 SSD there is a free slot in here it'll sit right across this ribbon cable and we can mount it on the other side so you could expand the storage quite easily on this machine so this is looking like a pretty decent machine for the price but we do need to get into some performance testing first up I'm gonna run some benchmarks and then we'll get right into some PC gaming so I personally don't have a lot of experience with these Ryze and mobile chips but I do have a lot of experience with the desktop variants like the 2400 G the 22 the 34 and the 32 so I'm gonna throw those in here for comparison and I completely understand this is a lower powered chip but overall it handles itself quite well when you compare it first up we have Geekbench 5 at the very top we have the 3500 view which is in this laptop single-core 844 multi-core 2525 now I was actually surprised to see that this did beat out my 2400 G in single core performance but the 2400 G did come ahead and multi-core scores and that's really because that 2,400 G can sustain the boost clocks longer than the 3500 you but either way you look at it this is pretty impressive for a little mobile chip next up we have Cinebench r15 and this is where the base clocks and threads really come into play the 3500 u 65535 this is the BMW test the 3500 you at 2 minutes and 55 seconds the 3400 G was 2 minutes and 20 seconds moving down to the 2200 G at 3 minutes and 29 again those extra threads really help out with this rendering test so the 3 tests you just saw really hit the CPU and don't do anything with the GPU so now it's time to move over to some GPU intensive tasks first up we have 3dmark with the time spy benchmark total score 682 graphics score 604 cpu score 25 66 I mean it's really not that bad for a $300 laptop but I think the major downside to this whole set up is the heat this thing thermal throttled pretty quickly when I was running time spy and we hit a maximum of 90 degrees Celsius and the built in fan does spin up I mean it doesn't sound like a jet plane but it is noticeable the problem is it can't keep this cpu and GPU combination cool enough inside of this unit so I wanted to see if we could get any better performance out of this if the chip was cooler when I was running these tests but unfortunately even with a laptop cooler / Stan with for fans Belton we only dropped 5 degrees we're still hitting that thermal throttle limit but time spy's a pretty taxing benchmark so let's go ahead and get into some real-world gaming and see how this performs first up we have csgo medium settings 720p get an average of around 82 to 83 fps it's definitely playable here I can really feel here if we had that dual channel memory setup in this thing it would do much better with every game here about the C it's really unfortunate they only added a single channel slot next up we have project cars to medium settings 720p in an average of around 27 FPS which is really bad here I'm not exactly sure what's going on this is the worst performing game that I tested on this laptop here we have the 2016 version of doom medium settings 720p using the Vulcan back-end unfortunately I couldn't get afterburner to display on top of this but I do have the built-in FPS counter listed on screen I'd say we're getting an average of around 42 fps here I was actually expecting this game to perform a little better this is something I still play on a regular basis Skyrim special edition high setting 720p get an average of 45 fps I had to throw GTA 5 in here and surprisingly it's really not all that bad normal settings DirectX 11 720p getting an average of around 40 to 41 fps so overall from what I've tested so far there's two main killers here for the performance we're seeing Heat we're at 72 degrees Celsius here with this game and single channel memory I know for a fact that we would get much better performance and every single game that I tested with dual channel memory even with the temps we're seeing here on the CPU I did go through and test about five more games here I just came up with a couple charts 1080p and 720p all of these are tested at medium settings and this is the average FPS I got so overall I really do think this is a pretty nice laptop for the price here this does have AC Wi-Fi built-in and I did run a quick test not bad at all and this also has bluetooth 4.2 built in the built-in speakers definitely put out enough sound and it is marked with th X and this is a bit misleading because th X only works through headphones that are THX certified one thing I really like about this laptop is the screen now it's not the highest resolution out there but it is 1080p very minimal bezels and it's got a matte finish to it but for the price this is a really nice display to put in here there are two things I wish we're a little different about this laptop first the cooling system I think it's a bit lean for the CPU we have in here at idle do in regular work web browsing and even YouTube viewing is fine but as soon as you put a decent load on that GPU it jumps right up to 70 degrees Celsius the next thing I would like to see change than this is adding an extra Ram slot these built-in Radeon Vega graphics really benefit from high ram speeds and dual channel memory this setup only supports 2400 mega Hertz Ram so adding faster Rams kind of out of the question but adding an extra slot would greatly improve performance on this little machine but it's really hard to complain about a system like this when the price was only 299 dollars and in my opinion just like it's it's it's well worth that price so that's pretty much it for this video guys I really appreciate you watching I know a lot of my regular viewers are gonna want to see some emulation running on this unit so if you're interested let me know in the comments below I can make a full emulation video on this laptop from Dreamcast GameCube ps2 ps3 3ds and even Wii U if you're interested and if you have any questions or you want to see anything else running on this laptop just let me know in the comments below but like always thanks for watching you\n"