walmart made a big splash last year when they launched their overpowered brand of
gaming desktops and not in a good way you're gonna get a
crap power supply a crap SSD i'm just not comfortable telling anyone to buy
this thing this is objectively worse so you'll have to excuse my skepticism when
i saw this 250
notebook from motile also a walmart house brand now on
paper this looks great we're talking ryzen
processor aluminum chassis Windows hello
facial recognition and full fat Windows
10 for 250 dollars and
look at this come here
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tips i got david too you bamboozled me
right out of the box things are going surprisingly well actually now at 250
dollars i make assumptions like that it's gonna have a plastic shell
but i was floored to find out that the
sleek metallic design advertised on the
website doesn't mean a cheap metallic finish on a plastic laptop but rather
that all of the major panels are made of
metal now we saw some speculation that it's a magnesium alloy but given that
this unit has been as cheap as 200 on promo in the past we suspect that it's
aluminum not that the difference is big on a 14-inch model like this one now the
thing is though metal can still be flimsy and this is not the most rigid
laptop shell that i've ever encountered but what i will say is that this is
among the best or maybe even the best feeling 200 machine that i have ever
held and what the metal construction should give it is a bit of extra
durability if you pack your laptop in a bag for school or for work every day on
the topic of daily use the 45.6 watt hour battery is far from the largest
we've seen in this form factor but the ryzen 3200u isn't power hungry and the
motile m141 ended up chewing pretty well
away from wall power and the good news keeps on coming
doesn't it on the left hand for io we've got a kensington lock gigabit Ethernet
with that handy dandy little folding hinge thing that lets you put a full
size jack into a thin and light laptop usb 2 usb 3 and a combo headphone
microphone audio jack what the hell is this thing it's nothing oh okay weird
over on the other side we've got usb type-c another usb 3 full-size HDMI
and a barrel plug for charging actually
if you look at the front lip too there it is there's a little bitty tiny micro
sd reader this is really impressive for a modern thin and light basically unless
you want dual external monitors you're good to go
dongle free and i can understand why you might want an
external monitor or two let's fire up a movie trailer
no time to die trailer wait is this still daniel craig
wow is he the longest lasting james bond at this point i mean he is amazing david
you got any thoughts on this monitor yes it is turned up to the maximum
brightness uh are you sure about that
yes just eyeballing it i would give this
maybe a 400 or 500 to one contrast ratio
and it's really warm looking there's no way
they're grading the movie like that now off camera we ran some numbers and it's
almost as bad as it seemed i was way off on the contrast ratio turns out it's
actually a thousand to one but that doesn't mean that the experience is any
better than i felt like it was the maximum luminance here is only about 150
nits and that perceived warmth may not
have even been to do with poor out-of-the-box calibration this thing
can only handle about 65 coverage of the
srgb color space that is the worst result i have ever seen from an ips
panel onto the keyboard it's got two levels of backlighting with the simple
function f7 or function f6 which is nice
to have especially at this price point but if i turn that on it's got a
significant amount of light bleed which combined with how dim the lights are and
the poor quality of the keycaps means that in a bright room it can actually be
surprisingly difficult to read the legends on the keys
in terms of actually using it though
this is not actually bad i have seen worse keycap stabilization
on laptops that cost literally five times this much like i
can press right on the corner there and if there's anything that causes a
keyboard to feel like junk it's bad keycap stabilization because that means
that if you accidentally don't hit it perfectly right in the middle it might
not actuate or it might have a very different amount of force required and
unnecessary deck flex not the best i've ever seen but at
reasonable amounts of pressure it's not half bad i mean it's not going to win
any blind keyboard taste test challenges or anything but
for 250 bucks this might be the best keyboard i've encountered
as for the trackpad it is mostly really good it's a great size
like they didn't skimp there it uses the Windows precision drivers the
multi-touch gestures work as intended and the shortcut to disable the trackpad
by double tapping this little dot in the corner really nice touch even the clicks feel
reasonably good a little bit of kind of hollow feeling
this but pretty good the only issue we ran into is that there's this odd kind
of dead zone when you move your finger only slightly where the cursor doesn't
track with your finger and there's no combination of speed adjustments pointer
precision settings or palm rejection that we were able to get rid of it with
so that was a little bit annoying but it was something that i think i can
overlook given the price now let's look
under the hood once we get past the six cruise we are greeted with hey
who put that sticker in there we don't even have stickers on lttstore.com yet
just fantastic merchandise and water bottles also in here we've got a single
heat pipe that runs from our 3200 u processor over to this small heatsink
and blower fan it ended up keeping our CPU at around 80 degrees under full load
so that's running a blender render while being audible but
not particularly annoying and this this is something i'm really happy to
see user upgradeable components
now the single RAM slot means that you will lose some performance because
you're running in single channel mode but it also means that you can save a
buck today with the basic 4 gig stick that's in here now and then upgrade down
the line when second hand 8 or 16 gig sticks are cheap
and also while the os is loaded up on an
inexpensive 128 gig SATA m.2 drive
leaving only about a hundred gigs free once Windows has taken up its chunk this
extra slot here is NVMe ready meaning that you could actually add a ton of
fast storage to this thing in a matter of minutes
on top of that this thing even uses an Intel card for its Wi-Fi and bluetooth
this is exactly the kind of stuff that
normally these cheap machines cheap out on to save a buck and get this
when you go to put your bottom panel back on look at that they've even got a thermal
pad between the SSD and the chassis and
in some cases SSD cooling is not configured in such a way that it's
actually going to affect the longevity of the components but because this
heatsink is so large i would actually
expect that to make a difference that's freaking awesome
i'm gonna just put this back together real quick this is all great so far but
because our ryzen 3200u is such a power
sipper and such a low end processor it's just two cores four threads you need to
keep your gaming expectations realistic
we used rocket league as our benchmark with our quality set to high and we got
a reasonable 40-ish frames per second now with a
little bit of quality sacrifice we were able to get to 60 FPS so this is the
great thing about AMD's apus some light gaming is on the table
but that's about it light gaming and the same can be said
for any manner of creative work if you just need to do like some basic
image cropping or something along those lines you're going to be in pretty good
shape but you should leave the 4k video editing to your desktop
bottom line then this thing is freaking awesome sub 500 laptops always have some
kind of horrendous deal breaker like an
unusable keyboard for example but the closest that this one gets is a screen
that's just not bright enough for use outdoors and a little bit of weird
trackpad behavior i mean even the speakers and webcam are passable
and on top of that i mean i already said this but it is worth mentioning again
it's got a metal chassis and freaking
Windows hello facial recognition signing
i mean if i was on a tight budget the immediate competition to this is mostly
running chrome os or last generation hardware i mean that's not terrible but
having a full-fledged Windows experience on a modern AMD processor is better and
the bang for the buck here is impossible to ignore the ryzen 3200 ube that's
packed inside this thing it's not a powerhouse but it does give ample
processing power at a price you can't scoff at so for this particular market
segment i'd say this is a great choice
if you're looking for something with a bit more horsepower however maybe take a
look at our stop buying the macbook air video where we look at some great
options in the five to eight hundred dollar range
and subscribe so you don't miss our video where we're gonna convert an old
laptop into a media center pc i was supposed to mention that earlier but i didn't
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thanks for watching guys that's it go watch that other video about other cheap
laptops it's good