GAMING ON A CHROMEBOOK??
|Yes, you are seeing that right, that is Hitman playing on a Chromebook! Specifically, a Chromebook from this video’s sponsor, Asus, it’s their CX5 series with the model I’ve got being the CX5500FE and I’m going to be using it to show you all the various ways you can game on it!
Chromebooks, by nature, aren’t designed to be gaming machines. They run Chrome OS instead of Windows, and are spec’d to be thin, light and battery life focused which generally isn’t the setup you want for gaming. Despite that, there are a load of ways to game on this, including some benefits you don’t get on a more ‘conventional’ gaming laptop.
One of those benefits is that since 2016 Chrome OS machines have been able to install Android apps natively through the standard Google Play Store. That means if you want to play your favourite mobile games on a big screen, with a mouse and keyboard, controller or just with a bit more horsepower, you can fire them up on here.
Of course, playing mobile games, while great, isn’t quite the same as playing AAA titles, so how can you do that? Well, Google has you covered there too. Thanks to Stadia, you can stream games straight to your machine from anywhere with a good internet connection – and thanks to this Asus machine rocking WiFi 6, 802.11ac and ASUS WiFi Stabiliser, even over WiFi you should have a rather good time!
But what if you’ve already got a gaming PC at home and you just want to play the games you already own? Well, that’s where the Moonlight app comes in. Moonlight is a free, open source tool that uses NVIDIA’s SHIELD streaming capabilities to let you stream your games both locally in your home, and even over the internet if you’ve got a good connection. There are some drawbacks to that, like if you are travelling a long distance from your house you are more likely to have higher latency, whereas for example Google Stadia has servers around the world that it can stream from meaning much lower latency, but the power to stream and play your own games especially when at home is still fantastic.
Once you’ve got it set up, which is actually pretty simple if you are just doing in-home streaming or you’ve already got a VPN set up like I do, you can fire up any of your games. Let’s play some Cyberpunk!
But what if you want to play a game with a controller? Well, just plug one in! I’ve got Rocket League fired up with this 360 controller and it’s working just as you’d expect. I haven’t played Rocket League in a fair while so feel free to make fun of my skills, or lack thereof, in the comments.
Of course, all of this is on top of this CX5 being an already pretty versatile machine. It’s great for productivity and office work – I actually wrote this video’s script on here – it runs a rather nice and vibrant 15” display which means watching youtube, movies or TV is a really nice experience, plus the harmon/kardon speakers sound great too. That display also folds all the way back, which means especially if you are using a controller you can actually have this setup like an A frame with just the screen visible, or if you want to use it more like a tablet for browsing the web that’s fine too. It also features USI stylus support and includes Asus’ stylus in the box, so if you want to use this as a drawing surface, you can do that too!
Considering the price, the versatility, and the variety of ways you can game on it, I’m actually rather impressed with Chrome OS, and this CX5. If you are too, you can find out more about it at the link in the description below, and I want to thank Asus for sponsoring this video and supporting the channel. I also want to thank you guys for watching, I hope you enjoyed the video, if you have any questions or suggestions do leave them in the comments down below!