New laptop has arrived!!

Quick Warning: there is a lot of computer talk in this journal entry! XD my inner tech geek is coming out full force here!

A few days ago, I decided to purchase a new laptop for the purpose of livestreaming outside my room/studio, particularly while I'm petsitting my puppy.


It's finally arrived in the mail, and I've been busy putting together programs and installing my necessary software. So far, I now have Clip Studio Paint EX, and I went with upgrading my annual plan for CS with dual-device annually, so my tablet has also been upgraded to EX too. With that said, my desktop will be for my main projects and streams, my laptop will be for streams outside my room, and my tablet will be for drawing when I don't want to be tethered to a multiscreen setup, as well as when I'm going out and want something light to sketch on.


For anyone who didn't get the last journal, my new laptop is an Asus Zenbook 14. It's usually priced at around $700, but I got it from Best Buy for $460, and for the price, it's really good. The only things that concern me is the 8GB of LPDDR4X ram, which is the special kind of ram that is soldered to the motherboard, making it unupgradable in the future. It also only has one m.2 slot for storage, and the on board storage capacity is 256GB. I'm going to shred through that, so I got a 1TB m.2 drive, and when my next payday comes, I'll get the needed tools to upgrade the drive. For now, I have a 256GB USB 3.2 flash drive plugged in to save all my stuff while the laptop only saves programs specific to streaming.


The good with this laptop is it's got an AMD Ryzen 5 5500U, a six core/12 thread CPU with clock speeds ranging from around 2.5 to 3.1GHz. It also has an NVIDIA MX450 GPU, which while it's not that powerful, it is a dedicated GPU with 2GB of GDDR6 VRAM. It's going to do this laptop a world of good since it isn't sharing the already limited RAM with the CPU. To simplify the description of this laptop, it's pretty decent for the money I paid, and I love the design and performance.

I benchmarked the laptop by running Spyro Reignited Trilogy, which while plugged in, runs at 60 frames per second at 720p with the high preset. I assume Crash 4 and the N Sane Trilogy will also run, along with a wide variety of older games, emulators, and even a few recent titles on lower settings. This is so unheard of for me since my last laptop was an HP Stream 11 from 2011, which I've used from 2014 to 2018, and that computer can't even hold its own OS within the 32GB flash storage. It's been a while since I've had a laptop, and the only ones I've owned have been really old, really low spec'd, and slower than aging.


I'll still have a lot to do as far as setting this up goes, and I have a Kamvas Pro 13 coming in the mail as well. When that comes, I will be testing out art streams on this laptop. This also means I'm changing my livestream layout. I can't wait to share more with you guys once the screen tablet arrives!


In the meantime, stay tuned for more Patreon and DA posts in the coming weeks