This seems impossible in a handheld.
We've had this thing for a month and you haven't let me play with it, guys. This
is in Excuse me. It's the GPD Win 5 and it is
the handheld that Microsoft and Asus
might have built if they had an absolutely unlimited budget. Oh
my goodness, it's a little heavy. heavy
in performance. This thing is, I kid you
not, anywhere from double to triple the
performance of the Xbox Alli X depending
on the power profile that you run it in. Even the power adapter is heavy
with performance.
Boom. [laughter]
180 W power adapter. But guess what, friends? You're gonna need it because
the battery on this thing is a detachable 80Wh hour affair. Like
seriously, I think that's about on par with what's in my laptop. And that's not
the only thing they've got in common. This handheld uses the same stricks Halo
chip from AMD as in the framework desktop investment disclosure. That
means up to 16 Zen 5 CPU cores, up to
128 gigabytes of LPDDR5X memory, and up
to Radeon 8060S graphics. If you guys
remember my first experience with Stricks Halo, I was blown away by how
powerful it was and it was in a convertible tablet laptop thing in a
handheld. Has GPD lost their minds? The
answer is yes, but more about that later. This thing has so many industry
firsts. It has an SSD format that I've never seen before. It's got a joystick
technology that I've never seen before. It's the first device I've ever seen
with a battery like this, and I feel like it merits a longerterm review. So,
we're going to do the unboxing. We'll give you the first impressions, and I'm going to be dailying this for at least a
month to give you the full goods. That's the quickest of quick start guides.
Truly excellent work, GPD. How to adjust
VRAM size because that's the kind of concern you have when you rock Stricks
Halo. So that 64 gigs is shared between the CPU and GPU. You can allocate it
pretty much however you like. Risk ultra low TDP configuration. It can do up to
75 watts. That's where you're going to get some of those bonkers performance
numbers, but you can go kind of as low as you want, though we wouldn't
recommend going under about 17. By that point, you start to taper off so much
that you might just be better off with a less expensive handheld. Most of this is
just a physical overview. So, why don't we just do that since we've got the
device right here. Classic GPD. Check this out. This must be for the SSD tray.
Holds a PCIe Gen 4 SSD doing multiple
gigabytes per second. The only drawback is that there's only one manufacturer,
Bwin. So, we're going to have to get our hands on one of those for the full
review. All right, I'm going to leave the battery off while we do the physical
tour just cuz it's heavy. Let's start at
the top. Hall effect two-stage triggers
so you can decide if you want them clicky or if you want them
triggery. Classic clicky shoulder buttons. Up top
we've also got a 3 and 12 mm jack, USB typeA port. That's actually pretty nice
to see on a handheld. Usually they're type-C only. As well as a barrel jack.
Damn. I was kind of hoping there'd be a
separate input jack on the battery itself because then you could kind of
like charge [music] your spare and then
reload and be ready to go. But because there is no internal battery, you'd kind
of have to shut down to swap your battery anyway. Realistically, what I suspect most people will [music] do is
use this battery umbilical cord. This is included in the box. It just wasn't in
ours cuz it's an early unit. So, the way this works is put that on there like
that. Wow. Okay. >> You think most people are going to do
this? >> I think most people is doing some pretty
heavy lifting here. Then you put this
and then at least you can take the weight of the battery off of the unit.
It still weighs almost as much as an Xbox outline. We're only 100 g shy.
>> Yeah. Just put that in your pocket. >> Listen. Hey. Hey. Hey. Hey. depending on
your pockets. Hold on. Don't mind me. I've just got these cargo pants from
ltstore.com. Boom. Just like that. Oh, that that's
pretty sick. Not going to lie, I feel pretty cool right now.
Where the mobility argument falls apart is this power brick. I mean, I guess I
could put it over on the other side. The good news is that you only need the 180
W brick if you want to super fast charge it. We got
>> 2 hours. >> 2 hours. Yikes. Past the barrel jack.
Lots of ventilation up here for a pretty innovative sounding cooler that they're
calling Frost Wind. It features a titanium aluminum alloy fan blade
design. Not to mention thickened purple copper [music] heat pipes. Not sure what
I was expecting at the end of thickened purple, but copper heat pipes. That was
that was probably it. Did I already say that this is USB 4? Therefore, you could
connect an external GPU if you really wanted to. It can do 100 W with USB PD,
but of course, your charging will be um
pretty slow if you're using it. Next to it is a recessed reset button. That's an
inconvenient choice. >> It's a BIOS reset. >> BIOS reset. Like if I'm like
overclocking and tuning, I can reset my BIOS. That's wild. Uh we've got micro
SD. I know, I know. I just said suck at micro SD, but we still like you
on weekends. The bottom, we had that SSD tray. Another USBC port. Love this. Love
to have both top and bottom capabilities. You heard it here first.
The Win 5 is very uh versatile lover.
No, seriously though, uh this one is not USB 4 though. This is USB 3.2 Gen 2, 10
Gbit per second. Now, let's have a look at the face. She may not be just a
pretty face, but she's got a pretty face. Hold on. I might need to put the battery on. Oh, yeah. Hey, there's those
aluminum titanium aluminium fans. Also,
R4 and L4 buttons back here. >> Okay,
good job. It kind of looks like a monstrous PSP with a giant tumor on the
back. Hey. Uh, does the power button have a fingerprint sensor?
>> It sure does. >> Very nice. Got that biometric authentication. Let's fire this bad boy
up. Also on the front, we have a type of
joystick that I've never heard of before. Capacitive joysticks. So, that
doesn't mean capacitive surface on the top for like switching between gyro
aiming like on the new Steam Controller. What that means is that there's a piece
of plastic in the other end and then you've got a completely contactless
sensor mechanism around it that detects changes in voltage as the little plastic
piece swings and moves around. Basically, in a nutshell, it's supposed
to be maybe even better than TMR, which
is kind of mind-blowing how we had zero progress on joysticks since the [music]
Dreamcast, and then all of a sudden there's like all this innovation. God,
they're smooth. I mean, they touch nothing, right? So, there should be no
drift. And apparently the dead zones are like
very small, pretty decent feeling D-pad. I wouldn't say that your diagonals are
going to be the easiest to hit, but if you don't mind the more arrowy style of
D-pad. Yeah. I And I don't I like moving
down, we have a back button. I assume it goes back. Home button probably takes
[music] you home. Current window/ desktop. So, select, start, desktop,
keyboard. We've also got volume controls and ooh, menu, which is the Xbox button.
Okay. Yeah, I can work with that. I can't wait for this to get the Windows
Xbox full screen gaming experience thing. You can actually like hack it in
now, but we haven't [music] cuz unboxings are, you know, supposed to be
based on the out of the box experience, but I'm definitely going to do that for
the longer term review. >> Yeah. One more button. >> Oh, apparently there's one more button.
Well, this isn't really a button. This is a mouse. How cool is that, right? But
basically, it's a little optical sensor. And so instead of being, you know,
having a mouse that you move over top of a stationary surface, you move the
surface over top of a mouse sensor. As you can see, clearly not the greatest
thing [music] in the world, but it can be better than using your joystick for
joy to mouse. Or you can just use joy to mouse if you really want. And you can actually toggle that right up here. Just
hold that down and you can move your mouse ever so slowly. Don't don't worry,
you can adjust that if you really want. And then I assume these are my clicks.
Oh, they sure are. Before we fire up any games, this is a perfect time to talk
about the screen. It's 1080p, 500 nits,
120 Hz, and does support variable refresh rate. I can't say for certain
that it's the same screen that's in the LA Xbox, RD, Alex, LAX. But the specs
are sure very similar, and we achieved just over 500 nits in our real world
testing. Please tell me this has tape to tape on it. Oh, and now is the perfect
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Before we run the game, now is a perfect time to talk about one more thing, and
that is motion assistant, which really
is not what it sounds like it is. See,
unlike some of the other handheld makers, GPD does not have a super slick
overlay interface for interacting with their devices. Like, you are you're
going into the BIOS or you're opening up this jank ass looking utility.
>> It's got themes. >> Ew, that's nice. John, is this the
Windows 98 theme?
>> Well, [snorts] like 3.1. >> There is a lot of really cool stuff that
you can do in here with respect to power limits, CPU boost, fan speed control.
You'll just have to figure out how the freick to do it. You can configure so
much in here. You can even configure things that don't work. So, you can see
there's two different TDPs, a pluggedin ACT TDP and a not pluggedin DCTP. But
not plugged in actually caps at 45. So, we'll be we'll be running 45, I guess.
FPS limit. Okay. All cores auto. Oh, you can set a maximum CPU frequency. That
might help you conserve some of your power limit for your GPU, for instance.
Start gyro simulate.
Cool. Let's just not do that anymore for now.
Whoa. Listen to them fans.
They go, man. They're goers. Already I
like the button layout better than the Xbox ROG Ally X that has other buttons
and joysticks in the way of your ABXY. These are like kind of critical for
gaming. It's so flipping heavy. Ergonomics. Uh not bad though. Got a
nice little rounded business here. Wow,
that fan though. Is this a custom fan curve, John?
>> It's probably the defaults, but you can turn them down when you're at that 45
watts if you are okay with it being a little bit hotter. God,
this is sick, dude. It's so smooth. This seems
impossible in a handheld. And it is because I can't actually support the
weight. [laughter] It's hand, but it's not really held.
Holy crap. And this has got to be at higher
settings than I'm used to running out on handhelds. Like, there's reflections
everywhere and stuff. Okay, I want to know what it's running at, you guys.
1080p. Okay, that's already pretty cool. Dude,
this is on like medium. That's insane.
The craziest part though is how smooth it's running. This has got to be like
I'm afraid to say a number so high because it seems like it couldn't be right. But this has got to be like 80
FPS. I'm going to say 90. I'm going to say 90. Damn, I should have stuck with
my first guess. We're around 70 FPS. But I mean, that's what variable refresh
rate will do to you. it'll be really good and make things seem smoother. And
it especially helps it feel smooth when your FPS is super consistent. And we're
hovering between about 62 and 72,
which is enough to make variable refresh rate feel really good.
Uh, is this joystick not working? Are we back? Are we back to mouse control? Damn
it. We're back to mouse controls.
Yes, I will reconnect my controller there. Now, let me control. There we go.
All right. Wait, what the hell?
I can't steer. Am I missing something here, folks? All I can say for sure
right now is,
oh my gosh, this performance is absolutely incredible. But you are going
to need some crazy speakers to overcome this fan noise.
in this area.
>> Not bad. Front facing. I really am not
happy with not being able to use my joysticks right now. Okay, I'm going to
relaunch the game one more time. Man, that fan though.
>> You're only at 45. >> Whoa. Yeah. And the exhaust air is
freaking hot and it's everywhere. That's
one of their claims about the cooling design is that it's like uniform
something. So that's cool, I guess. Hey,
there we go. Now I can drive.
Can you adjust your dead zones in this game? Oh yeah, dead zone.
>> Whoops. Whoops. Oh god.
Apparently this shouldn't be a thing with the finished units, but for now I
do have to have a little bit of an inner dead zone. Um, either way, let's try
them as they're running right now. Oh, that's that's nice and responsive now.
All right. Now, I suck donkey butt at
aiming with controllers, but let's still give it a shot. Dude, even as they are
now with the dead zones I had to configure, these just feel so smooth.
Now, to be clear, there is some aim [music] assist obviously, but even
getting it close enough can be a problem for me often.
The craziest part of what we just saw is that was at 45 watts and the Labs tested
it at up to 75 watts. So, here's a preview of the kind of performance you
can expect out of this thing. We're actually going to have an accompanying Labs article to go along with the short
circuit and then maybe we'll do even a little bit more testing when we do the
full LT after I've had a bit more time with this thing. It clearly has some
drawbacks, but if you were looking for the deluxest of the most deluxe
handhelds, I mean, this is it. This is the all
bells and whistles for now.
I kind of wish the battery could kind of, you know,
kickstand or something, you know, like that'd be pretty that probably be kind
of janky, though. Subscribe to ShortCircuit.