This year, it is not difficult for us to find some strange phenomena, and the prices of some so-called "AI PC" thin and light laptops have exceeded the "quasi-high-end standard line" of 6000 yuan. On the other hand, the price of the Core i7+RTX 4060 independent display game laptops led by Colorful Hidden Star G15 24 is gradually approaching the "mainstream price segment" of 5000 yuan. I don't know what kind of products you would be more inclined to if you have a budget of 6,000 yuan?
Back to the point, in 2024, is it reliable to spend 6,000 yuan to buy an RTX 4060 gaming laptop? Let's take the colorful hidden star G15 24 to test it!
Two-dimensional + sci-fi elements, Rainbow Hidden Star G15 24 has to take care of young people
Many people first know that Colorful starts from the board, and now Colorful has entered the notebook industry for more than three years, and its influence in the notebook market continues to expand, subdividing the product lines such as the star and the hidden star, and has accumulated a good user reputation because of its excellent cost performance and the configuration and functions required by the user.
Compared with the main national style, high-end, thin and high-performance, the Hidden Star series has more outstanding performance in terms of "scientific and technological modeling" and "cost performance", which is more in line with the needs of young user groups. For example, the previously released Rainbow Hidden Star P16 TA has allowed many players to use the RTX 4070 independent graphics game laptop for more than 7,000 yuan. In people's hearts, Rainbow Hidden Star has become the new "king of cost performance".
This year's newly launched Rainbow Hidden Star G15 24 is the main 5-6000 yuan price segment, with 2K resolution 165Hz high brush screen and i7 processor and RTX 4060 independent display direct connection to the game laptop, support ray tracing and DLSS3 and other new technologies, but also have up to 233TOPSIntering power。
So can it learn from the success of its predecessor and become a more accessible "2K high-quality 3A artifact"?
First of all, from the point of view of appearance, Colorful Hidden Star G15 24 still maintains the youthful and highly recognizable appearance design of the series, and the carbon gray color scheme in the hand gives people a low-key feeling.
According to the official introduction, the design of the Rainbow Hidden Star G15 24 shell is inspired by the "spaceship". From the design of the center of the A side, it is not difficult to see that this is a spaceship ready to go, preparing to go to the universe to explore the unknown realm, and explore the huge stars hidden in the shadows.
The metallic strip in the center features the colorful light and shadow reflections that are the signature of the Rainbow family, giving the impression of an alien energy circulating inside when viewed from different angles.
The elongated offset design heat vents are also very futuristic and technological, further highlighting the avant-garde design language.
This time, Colorful also synchronized the Hidden Star G15 24 released the "Hidden Queen Virtual Spokesperson", which has been displayed on the new desktop. ACG + Sci-Fi style elements, whether it is for ACG culture lovers or cutting-edge players who simply pursue fashion and technology, the design of Rainbow Hidden Star G15 24 can be said to be attractive.
In terms of C-surface keyboards, the keyboard feel of notebooks has always been the focus of many people's attention. The Colorful Hidden Star G15 24 has moderate key travel and excellent rebound feel, so even for long gaming or typing, it will not cause wrist fatigue. The keyboard also has a numeric keypad. Perhaps due to cost limitations, there is only a white backlight.
In terms of interfaces, the Colorful Hidden Star G15 24 retains three traditional Type-A USB 3.1 ports, plus a new Type-C port (USB 3.1 Gen2) that supports DP 1.4 video output, an HDMI and a standard RJ45 network port. Whether it is an external U disk, a mobile hard disk, or an external monitor and a wired network, it can meet daily needs, in terms of interface layout, the RJ45 network cable interface on the right side is easy to occupy the operating space of the mouse after connecting the network cable, and some models of notebooks have moved all these interfaces to the rear side of the fuselage.
The appearance of the Colorful Hidden Star G15 24 runs through the entire fuselage with a sci-fi and futuristic design, which is more acceptable to most young people.
The 2.5K high brush screen performs very well after simple color correction!
Secondly, as a gaming laptop, the display experience has always been one of the most concerned links.
Colorful Hidden StarG15 24 is equipped with2.5K(2560x1440)High-resolution IPS wide viewing angle panel,Compared with1080P,Its pixel density is nearly 1.8 times higher,Even if you zoom in,The picture is still delicate and sharp,It can also restore richer details when playing games and film and television works。
Colorful Hidden Star G15 24The screen comes from BOE, the software identification model is NE156QHM-NY2, the screen is tested with a color calibrator, and the measured color gamut coverage is94.2% sRGB, and the maximum brightness in the center area of the screen measured by the luminance meter is336nits.
In terms of color accuracy, this screen has a color cast in the factory default state, but because the foundation of the screen hardware is not bad, so after we calibrated the color, we found that the screen color accuracy can reach an average △E=0.2, and the color accuracy performance is very good.
In addition, this panel also has a high refresh rate of 165Hz, which is undoubtedly a linear improvement for the smoothness of the current popular FPS shooter games. As long as your hardware is strong enough to sustain a high frame rate output, you can deliver an ultra-low responsive gaming experience that matches your gaming experience.
The performance configuration is sufficient, i7-13620H+RTX4060 on the Oita!
As a notebook for games and creative people,Colorful Hidden StarG15 24It can be said that it has invested a lot in the choice of core hardware。 The first is the CPU, which uses a 13th Gen Intel Core i7-13620H processor, with 10 cores and 16 threads to cope with all kinds of games and high-intensity creative work.
According to our tests, in CineBench R23/R24 tests, the processor's single-threaded and multi-threaded performance was in the upper reaches of the price range.
CineBench R23多核15480分，单核1848分。
CineBench R24 multinucleus 802 min, 单核 110 min. GPU minutes 9357 minutes.
Paired with the i7-13620H is NVIDIA's latest RTX 4060 laptop GPU, which is based on the Ada architecture and has an overall performance improvement of about 20-25%, as well as a significant increase in ray tracing capabilities.
The theoretical performance of the GPU, corresponding to the 3DMark Fire Strike in the DX11 scenario, has a GPU graphics score of 26626 points.
It is worth mentioning that the Colorful Hidden Star G15 24 also adds the function of direct connection of the independent graphics card, which can maximize the performance of the RTX 4060, especially the extreme frame rate performance of high-frame games such as "CS2".
Among the triple-A titles we tested, the Rainbow Hidden Star G15 24 powered by the RTX 4060 was able to drive 2K resolution smoothly, with an average frame rate of over 60 fps, and some games could exceed 100 fps if DLSS was used.
Forza Horizon 5 is a well-optimized game for Windows, now with DLSS 3 and NVIDIA Reflex for boosting frame rates with virtually lossless image quality, as well as delivering low latency and responsiveness.
At 2560*1440 ultra-high resolution, the average frame rate can reach 90 fps without DLSS3 and frame generation enabled.
After enabling DLSS3, we tested it again and increased the frame rate to 111 fps, an increase of up to 23%. The high frame rate is a great improvement for the racing game operation experience, with the 165Hz high brush screen, the picture presented in front of us per second has been doubled, and the braking points, entry and exit points of each corner are easier to find.
Similarly, the advantages of RTX4060 independent graphics, direct connection of independent graphics and 165Hz high screen swiping are also reflected in FPS games such as "CS2". Measured at 2560*1440 resolution and preset high quality settings, the frame rate of the Desert City 2 map can reach about 200 frames.
With an RTX 4060 GPU, it's natural that everyone wants to experience the charm of ray-traced games. So as a 2K dessert card RTX 4060, can the Rainbow Hidden Star G15 24 easily cope with the ray-traced image quality of "Cyberpunk 2077"?
We still maintain the 2560*1440 resolution, set the image quality to "Ray Tracing: Low" quality, and after the game's built-in benchmark tests, we found that the average frame rate can reach 78 frames, which is very smooth.
With a resolution of 2560*1440, the average frame rate of "Dying Light 2" under ray tracing image quality can also reach 76 frames.
2560*1440 resolution, high-light tracing image quality "Bright Memory: Wireless" also won an average of 64 frames.
In addition to gaming, RTX 40 series GPUs also have powerful creative performance and AI acceleration capabilities, which can play more advantages in creative fields such as video encoding, 3D rendering, and AIGC.
We tested the RTX 4060's rendering performance in ray-traced scenes using the Blender Benchmark (4.1.1), which measures the number of hardware renders per minute to show how high the hardware rendering performance is.
Among them, the "monster" scene has a rendering score of 1605 points, the "junkshop" scene has reached 900 points, and the "classroom" scene has reached 863 points, which is a high score level that is difficult to achieve with pure CPU rendering.
The RTX 4060 independent graphics card also has super AI computing power, which is officially said to reach 233TOPS. We used Procyon AI Inference to test its FP32 and FP16 computing performance, with scores of 831 and 1723 points, respectively, which is much higher than other AI hardware with only 10-digit TOPS.
In terms of actual AI applications, we try to use StableDiffusion for Wensheng diagrams. We tested the sampling and distribution as Euler a, with 50 iteration steps, 10 total batches, and 2 single batches, and produced a total of 20 512*512 resolution images, with a total time of only 1 minute and 56 seconds.
With a powerful CPU/GPU, the Colorful Hidden Star G15 24 also provides dual SO-DIMM memory slots (expandable up to 64GB DDR4 3200MHz), and dual M.2 PCIe 4.0 SSD slots, allowing gamers to further upgrade their memory and hard disk capacity in the future.
The original factory configuration of this machine in my hand is Western Digital SN540 hard disk, which itself is PCIe3.0*4 specifications, measured read 3335MB/s, write 1506MB/s, and the performance is relatively average. And the 512GB capacity version has a lifetime of only 150TBW, which is far from the 600TBW of the 2TB version. The capacity of 512GB is also very limited for the growing game, so it is recommended that users who are able to replace or install a high-capacity PCIe 4.0 M.2 SSD to store and run the game.
Although the hard disk and memory specifications of the Rainbow Hidden Star G15 24 are not as good as those expensive RTX 4060 laptops, in general, whether it is high-performance creation or heavy gaming, the overall performance of the Colorful Hidden Star G15 24 is worthy of its price, and it can provide players with an experience that exceeds expectations. It's a great choice for users who like single-player games, esports, and some light to moderate creative work if they happen to have some hands-on leveling ability.
The performance of the 135W machine is released, but the battery life is limited
As a high-performance gaming laptop, heat dissipation performance and battery life are also important factors that affect the user experience. The Colorful Hidden Star G15 24 adopts a new "ice crystal cooling architecture", including thickened 10mm+8mm dual heat pipes, as well as a dual turbofan heat dissipation design.
According to our tests, using AIDA64 FPU+FurMark dual baking in berserk mode, the Rainbow Hidden Star G15 24 can reach 135 W power consumption release at full load, of which the CPU is about 35W and the GPU is about 100W.
The noise level of 135W power consumption does not exceed 60 dB at full load, which is a relatively quiet noise level that people can accept for a long time.
In addition, the Colorful Hidden Star G15 24 also adds the design concept of "hot zone bias", that is, the main heating area is far away from the palm position, reducing the risk of users directly touching the hot part. Our test found that when the room temperature 26°C air-conditioned room is used at full load with 135W power consumption, its heat generation will not make the surface temperature of core areas such as WASD exceed 37.1°C, and the temperature of the whole machine is controlled within an acceptable range, which will not be hot, and the experience is very good.
In terms of battery life, using office software in pure integrated display + energy-saving mode, Colorful Hidden Star G15 24 can achieve 4 hours of office battery life (PCMark10 modern office battery life), which is not ideal for users who expect to use the notebook for a long time outside.
Brief summary:
In general,Colorful Hidden StarG15 24As a product with RTX 4060 independent display,As long as the entry-level game laptop6000The price is within 6000 yuan,And its performance、Heat dissipation and battery life are within the good range I expected,Achieve a balance of performance and high cost performance,And in screen performance、The design and user experience of human-computer interaction details such as keyboard feel are well-intentioned,Impressive。 I recommend it for users with a budget of about 6,000 yuan, who have 2K high-quality triple-A games or e-sports games, or who need to use large-scale AI applications.