just a few short weeks ago we got a firsthand look at the latest book in
Lord gab's gospel the valve steam deck
it's the PC Gamers version of a Nintendo switch except instead of running light
casual games it can run the latest AAA titles it looks freaking awesome but the
thing is while valve is definitely pushing the landscape forward when it
comes to handheld gaming they are not the only player in this field and their
competition isn't standing still the
this right here is the GPD win Max 2021
Edition it's the first time that GPD has
ever built a ryzen handheld and it has eight Flippin Zen 2 cores but wait
there's more this is the GPD win Max
2021 Edition Intel Edition the first GPD
handheld with Intel XC graphics and they're the most powerful onboard
Graphics we've seen from Intel yet man
they are going to be some interesting stories to
tell plot twist I'm going to kick things off with the Intel version because this
is the first device we've ever gotten hands on with with Intel's
top-of-the-line tiger Lake CPU the core i7 1195 G7
and on paper anyway it promises to be an
absolute Beast it's got four cores eight threads boosts up to 5 GHz can be
configured to multiple TDP levels up to 25 watts and perhaps most importantly
has 96 Iris XE compute units in its
onboard GPU which means it should be significantly faster than the ryzen 4800
U and who knows maybe even competitive
with the upcoming rdna2 graphics on the steam deck that's what I really want to
find out while we've got it open this is a perfect opportunity to compare the GPD
wi Max 20 21 against what we know about
the steam deck first and foremost the CPU and memory are both soldered to the
main board but that's pretty much a given in any machine this compact where
they differ is the SSD they both use a standard m.2 slot which is great that
means if you're willing to put the work in valve has said that theoretically the
steam deck should be upgradeable but it should be noted that this one it will a
be easier to upgrade and B probably more worthwhile because the steam uses a 30
mm m.2 which up until now I believe only
even goes up to 1 TB of capacity whereas the GPD wi Max 2021 uses an 80 mm m.2
which uh looks like you could only fit a single sided so that's good to know
which means you could go up to 4 tbytes at least presently while we're digging
around in here some other notable features are the Dual stereo speakers micro SD slot the steam deck has one of
those as well for storage expansion the Intel Wi-Fi and Bluetooth chipset as
well as a full fullsize gigabit Ethernet Jack which gives us our first hint as to
what the real intended use of the GPD win Maxes because this is more than just
a gaming machine which isn't to say that it's not gaming focused both valve and
GPD have taken very different approaches to how to handle joysticks if there's
one thing we know for sure it's that lowprofile joysticks do have reliability
issues that we as Gamers have observed over the years so GPD rather than
increased the profile of the Machine by having the joysticks stick up out of it
has actually sunk the joysticks into the top deck of the laptop and then you can
see here they take up almost the entire depth of the machine inside and they've
actually had to build the PCB around them there's no doubt in my mind that
valves handheld has a better integrated controller but to gpd's credit these
joysticks feel pretty darn good for lowprofile ones so does the d-pad and
the abxy buttons have both nice click switches as well as this is a really
nice touch secondary printing on the legend with a cross circle square
triangle for PlayStation users because let's face it you're going to be
emulating games unfortunately both the shoulder
and Trigger buttons use the same switches so if you're super into driving
games or anything where you want that nice fine analog control on your trigger
you're not going to find it here but it does make up a lot of that ground in IO
so in addition to your Ethernet port you've got HDMI 2.0 2 USB type A's and
yes my friends Thunderbolt that means
any number of docking Solutions and even external graphics cards which naturally
we'll be trying later and that's to say nothing about one of the windmax 2021s
biggest undocked benefits the massive
57w hour battery now Intel's tiger Lake
chips they're pretty power hungry but GPD claims that's still good for up to 3
hours of use under heavy load with up to 14 hours under a light load of course
you're going to want to configure your TDP and squeeze even more out of it
right let's screw this thing back together and see if it still works now
that we're in Windows one last bit of IO I didn't show you is this cool toggle
switch right here it changes the GamePad into a native Mouse mode so that unlike
other handheld devices you don't have to have a little utility running in the
system tray it just freaking works so
your left shoulder button is your left click and it actually rebinds um some of the keys as well so
you can see this left analog stick Is WD
so it allows it to work in more of like a a keyboard mouse mode if that is for
whatever reason what you prefer with some games that could be better one
thing I noticed just moving the mouse around though is that while the 8-in
display on the Wind Max 2021 runs at the same 1280 by 800 resolution as the steam
deck and it's IPS and actually gets like
quite quite bright you can see there's a
fair bit of smearing as I move the mouse around can you see that this is not the
most responsive display I've ever seen to be clear this is not a game breaker
it's only a 60 HZ display so it's not like you're going to be like oh wow this
is just a completely smear mess or anything like that but I have seen
better Moment of Truth do maternal launch we made it this far last time
yeah we made it to where the master chief is standing on his
thing it's not master chief I know you
you had to you had to you had to say something oh oh wow oh oh oh it had a
little little moment there let me flip it into controller mode here holy
shnikes this might actually work which shouldn't really be that impressive but
okay I want to go back o oh it's definitely got some issues some issues
here we go we've got both machines configured to their maximum TDP so
around 25 watts although you can see that according to rivet tuner Intel is
actually drawing significantly more than that sometimes as high as around 35
Watts but the bigger takeaway here is
not necessarily that Intel's drawing more power but rather that Intel is
actually not managing nearly the same frame rate even when it is running
smoothly so what are we getting around 35 40 FPS when it's
going yeah sometimes it doesn't go as
much whoa not only not only that but you
can see our Intel CPU managed 100°
Max meanwhile our AMD system remember
this is with a 4800 U is running at a
pretty consistent 60 plus FPS and this
is at exactly the same setting so all medium native resolution with motion
blur turned off man this is O this is way more
playable you know though I am surprised
at how close this performances to the rdna 2 graphics in the steam deck when I
compared head-to-head and do maternal while I was at valve's headquarters I
found that the steam deck was about 50% faster looking at exactly the same scene
as the aan Neo so let's go ahead and take the a Neo into this same scene and
check this out we're running it anywhere from around 35 up to around 50 FPS but
generally in the 40 to 45 range this is
not what I was expecting but we also know that Doom maternal is not properly
optimized on Intel XC Graphics so let's move on to something else hopefully in
dirt 5 we're going to see a more even competition here the Intel machine
managed to load into the game a bit faster but that's not particularly
meaningful from like a gaming enjoyments
to okay wow this is a dead heat Intel looks like
they might be maybe maybe like three to
five 5% ahead in performance but it's oh
maybe not holy crap I don't remember the
last time I saw anything be this close AMD versus Intel only the results will
tell us the answer in the meantime I want to run the a Neo because this is
the one device that I've had a chance to run head-to-head against the steam deck
so that will hopefully give us an idea of where the steam deck Falls in all of
this obviously I'd rather be testing the steam deck right now but I don't have
one wow these are close when we look at average frame rates they're within about
1% of each other although I still consider this a win for Intel since
their minimums didn't dip quite as low though certainly this isn't as big a win
as Doom maternal was for AMD as for the a&o its result of around 30 FPS seems to
suggest that both of our wind Maxes could very well end up within Striking
Distance of the steam deck though of course it should be noted that these are
both 25 wat TDP CPUs rather than 15
watts next up F1 2021 we're running at
Native resolution low settings TAA enabled man this is a really goodlooking
game even at low oh wow Intel is slaying
it here the 4800u and the AMD wind Max
is already looking like it might end up competitive with the steam deck maybe a
little bit behind but the Intel machine is running at 80 almost 90 plus FPS in
some places like we could actually probably turn this up to medium that is
a big difference in performance
who that's not even close wow Intel's a
solid 30% ahead of AMD on this one then
after that great showing I managed to make it as far as the prologue cinematic
in Halo 4 and I got a fatal error in the
game completely crashed come on Intel
Graphics drivers like you guys are launching a discret card soon you got to
be better than this to be clear I understand there's probably workarounds
for just about all of this stuff in fact GPD even quotes performance numbers from
Doom maternal on their website that are much better than what we observed but
average users can't be expected to go find that stuff this is not a great
experience both of them are running at well over a hundo FPS here though we see
some dips very solid though very solid a thumb stick in two controllers at the
same time would not recommend they call me sticky
man so this is Little Big Planet this is running in a PS3 emulator
rpcs3 and on the Intel system I mean we are getting a solid locked 30fps which
is what this game runs at um but you can
see it's got some problems meanwhile in the AMD system we're getting frame
drops uh it says 29 FPS I don't believe
it this is definitely not uh completely
running properly but we're getting far fewer graphical anomalies although still
some something to bear in mind though is that PlayStation 3 emulation is already
very challenging because of the unconventional architecture of the
PlayStation 3 and Little Big Planet in particular is quite demanding oh wow
this is 60 FPS oh oh oh oh we got a
see-through Sumo you check this out look at my see-through Sumo here knocked out
baby I won I just clicked a a bunch this is totally playable oh for sure no this
is this is like perfect this is totally usable wait a minute his clothes
appeared yeah we just unlocked the frame rate so my oh wow the uh game speed is a
little different but assuming that the in game physics is not tied to the frame
rate because the developer a Chad um
this is a way this wow my entire character is at the loading missing yeah
this is very fast and very broken I'm at like anywhere from 100 to 120 FPS I'm
like 90 but different map but I imagine that's probably has to do more the
graphics not the the map I guess if you want to play Tekken six it works pretty
good yeah I wouldn't recommend unlocking the frame rate though it seems a little
more broken on the Intel one like I don't have that much stuff missing yeah
oh it's definitely more broken on the Intel machine but it runs faster now
mark bench our Benchmark for Premiere was designed for much more powerful
systems than these ones but it can still tell us a lot so you can see here we've
got four separate 4K Clips all playing back at the same time and on our Intel
system it actually handles it and the
transitions reasonably smoothly albeit at 1/8 resolution meanwhile on the AMD
system we go from usable but not perfect
to not really usable one thing that's
nice about these that I didn't mention before is if you want it there is a
trackpad it's not the greatest experience ever but there are times when
it'll probably come in handy for you all right let's go ahead and start our
encoding Benchmark now yeah I think our poor Intel system is just going to get
slapped here there it goes it's just slow yeah if it can manage a victory
here I'll be impressed wow this 4K encoding Benchmark ended up not even
being close the Intel machine's been done for a solid 20 seconds already and
the AMD machine is still finishing up even though we started the Intel machine
slightly afterward cuz I misclicked so the big pattern that's emerging here is
Tiger Lake and XC Graphics when they work they're fast and when they don't it
sucks of course one of the key benefits of going with the Intel version is that
you're not necessarily married to the onboard Graphics let's go ahead and dock
it to this Gigabyte egpu box here it's
got networking USB and of course an RTX
380 graphics card in it let's see if it just fires up for us here look at that
just like that oh we're going to need some drivers oh look at that Jake Jake
preet up the drivers for us I need a mouse pad LTT
store.com boom I mean let's see if it'll play Doom maternal
now how do you like me now it's got this
it's got this don't even worry about a thing keep the the this way up another
key benefit of Thunderbolt I don't need my power adapter anymore I can just get
power from the Thunderbolt connection to my dock casual 100 plus FPS Doom
maternal absolutely maxed out it's actually running at that too like this
is very smooth CPU is at 83° in terms of
power it's pulling anywhere from around 27 to 2 8 watts so considering that
we're not even touching the integrated Graphics that's pretty impressive like
just absolutely no stutter whatsoever butter smooth who needs stutter when
you've got butter now for dirt five we got this
crank to ultra high we're going to turn on some Ray traced vehicle Shadows
honestly the car Shadows are so soft
because of the the the fact that the sun's behind the clouds that I'm having
a hard time telling if they like look better because they're R traced or
whatever yeah which is probably an indication that it's working yeah this
is not a trivial game to run and it's
like 55 to 60 FPS the whole time at 4K
I'm just I keep watching these car Shadows here yeah I'm looks now that
they're a bit harder that is
very like accurate but something we haven't talked about up until now is
what is the GPD when Max even like to use as a controller right now great
Everything feels accurate and responsive the switches are all nice and
clicky but I also have the device
resting on a table in front of me if I had to actually hold it up it's pretty
heavy and the ergonomics are far from perfect compared to most controllers
where you're kind of cradling them like this and your thumbs have this great
degree of movement on the Wind Max
they're kind of stuck like this and it kind of brings your elbows in sort of
funny so the design is only going to appeal to people who want a gaming
device that is also useful for other things because even though the keyboard
quite frankly sucks for typing it's obviously a lot better for typing than
just not having one at all what we can't
fault is the performance despite the fact that neither of the 2021 Edition
win Maxes have rdna2 graphics and not to
mention that they're only running ddr4 rather than ddr5 they both get
surprisingly close to where we're expecting the steam deck to eventually
land so as long as you don't find the form factor offputting you may not have
to wait although you will definitely have to pay a significantly higher
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no credit card required at freshbooks.com Linus if you guys enjoyed this video
check out our first impressions of the steam deck or maybe the full review of
the a& Neo man this this handheld console Space is really heating up right
now and that's not just joking about how the Intel one runs hot oh hey got him