I sent $385
to the NWNLAP Factoe outlet on
AliExpress and in return I received
this. It's got a 16in 2560x600
type screen, a fully mechanical keyboard, 16 gigs of RAM, five free
included accessories, including this sleeve, and an aluminum shell. This
might be the best value gaming laptop that I have ever seen. Unless they
skimped out on this. That is so cool.
And on this. Oh no.
And if they screwed this up.
The closer we look at this thing, the more questions we have. But spoiler
alert, I can't even begin to guess what
the designers were thinking when they built the NWNLAP H16. Right out of the
gate, the product page for the NWNLAP notebook 16.0 in is about 4 miles of
laughably inaccurate information. Starting with the price, we paid $385
for this thing. But we have no idea what the real price is. Somewhere in the week
between it arriving in our office and us writing this script, the price almost
doubled to $660. Then a day later, it
dropped below what we paid to $375. Then there's the fact that I have never heard
of NWNLAP. It seems like what they've done is put their sticker on the bottom
of a machine that is actually from Dee,
which explains everything. No, actually
that explains nothing. Who the heck is Dee? I've never heard of them either.
The only information I could find on Google is this company profile on EC21
that introduces Deak as a laptop OEM/ODM
with the most excellent circuit design.
According to this page, they have between 50 and 100 employees in
Shenzhen, China, and they were established in 2011. But then, according
to this same page, the last time they logged in was 10 years ago. So, this
information could be out of date. No worries. I'll just click through to their website and oh, let's take a
closer look at the included sleeve and the other free gifts. That's pretty
sleevey. Oh, you know what's funny? It's mouse pad material. It's just sewn
together. I have to know now, though. Is there like a rubberized backing on the
inside of this? Oh, you know what? No, I don't need to bring out my keys because
I have my Jerryrigg everything knife available at ltstore.com.
I think it is. No, no. The sleeve is a
denser foam and it has a different backing on it. Oo,
it includes a gaming mouse, 3D gaming
mouse. This is no two-dimensional mouse. We also get a USB to Ethernet adapter,
but don't expect it to be a very impressive one. This is Wait, what does
this thing work? Really? We found drivers and tested it. Half of
the contacts in the RJ45 port are
missing. It's only fast Ethernet, which by today's standards is not fast.
Megabytes per second is what you're going to get from one of these. And then
your final free gift is some orange key caps for your gaming keys. On the left,
we've got a whole lot of nothing. On the rear, we've got USBC, mini HDMI, an AC
and barrel jack, and a USBA. There's
another USBA over on the right along with a micro SD slot. It's nice. I like
to see that. A headphone jack and a webcam storage slot. Now, hold on a
minute. That's right. This is an idea
that I actually pitched ages ago back when ASUS was dumping webcams from all
their gaming laptops. It's a magnetic webcam and it actually uses magnets and
these pogo pins to attach to the top of the display. No need for a notch, no
need for a cutout or a big tall upper bezel.
These guys must watch LT. And what's really cool is if you weren't NWNLAP and
you were able to build out an ecosystem of accessories here, you could put other
stuff there, like a better microphone or uh um okay, I don't have too many ideas,
but definitely a webcam. You got to give them credit. The aesthetics aren't
really any worse than any other gaming laptop these days. I've seen laptops
that cost twice this much with more chassis flex than this has. It's pretty
rigid. Uh, let's go ahead and turn the I really hope this display gets a little
bright. Hey. Yeah, not bad. And the
display is one of the highlight features of this machine. It's advertised as a
golden ratio display. And what that means is that it uses a 16x10 aspect
ratio. And you know what? This is one of the things that I feel is absolutely a
fair marketing point for this product. 16x10 is so much better for anyone who
can make use of a little bit of extra vertical space. uh be you a writer, an
avid reader, uh a video editor. It's like that many more tracks, that many
more lines of text. It's freaking awesome. It's also an IPS type matte
panel with good, if decidedly last gen viewing
angles and brightness. Like, man, if all I wanted was a big fat 16x10, I mean,
it's 60 Hz, but like for for under 400 bucks for the whole machine. Wait, what
do you mean you can't find my camera? Come on. Oh my god, this mouse is Can
you hear the sound it makes?
Best advice I have. Off, on, off, on as many times as it takes to get it to
Oh, just do it a bunch of times. Well, that's unfortunate. I guess my idea is not as good as I thought. Uh,
one idea we have is to try to pull out the pins a bit.
Yes. See any flaw with this?
No, this seems pretty good to me, too. Hi. Just uh checking out the Oh crap.
Well, not every one of my ideas is good in practice. That's as staying in there
as it is. Oh boy.
I mean, I guess it kind of stays. The screen looks great. Cannot emphasize
that enough.
Wait a minute. These aren't speakers at
all. No, they are purely decorative. Oh no.
Okay. Where's the sound actually coming from? They're coming from the bottom. At
least they're stereo and they do not sound very good. However, they get loud
enough and are clear enough that I don't think that watching just random content
is going to be a huge problem. What about the keyboard? It's a greenaxis
mechanical keyboard with what they're calling multi-geear backlighting to let
your fingers dance. They appear to be using a replica of the Chalk is Kale's
low profile line. I mean, remember when Kale was the ripoff switch company? How
the turntables have turned. The feel got a pretty mixed reaction around the
office, but most people had their expectations happily exceeded once they
heard the price. As for me,
they're a little mushier than they could be. I'm definitely detecting some
inconsistency between the keys. This has
hands down the best keyboard I've ever seen on a laptop under $500. Not evening
close new standard of entry-level laptop
keyboard. If all you need to do is type,
this thing might actually come away from this with a recommendation. There are
some quirks. For some reason, three of
the function keys all have exactly the same function. See this brightness down
one? It doesn't go down. It just cycles through all the brightness levels. But
there are some things the keyboard does right even when it comes to
functionality. For example, it has function keys to turn off the backlight
of the display and to disable the touchpad. The trackpad is not big by
modern keyboard standards, especially for a 16-in device, but it is
surprisingly usable. Two-handed, which a
lot of the time can have issues with lower-end laptops where the palm
rejection will kick in and it won't work. And it's perfectly responsive. I
man, I was expecting to just dunk on this thing, and I actually kind of like
it. Wa! Shut up. It has fingerprint
login and it works. And who are we sending our fingerprints to? Actually,
on that subject, it's time to explore our Windows installation, and things are
about to get a lot weirder. The writer for this video has a list of four
strange changes that have been made to the stock Windows install, and I'm
supposed to see how many of them I catch here. Oh, that poor CPU at 100%.
Opening up Task Manager. That's a little rough. Celeron. Now that's a name I've
not heard in a long time. But we got 16
gigs of RAM. 2400
megahertz. Is this DDR3? It is DDR4.
It's just really slow DDR4. Who even
still makes 24 and Wait, am I am I out
of touch here? Is 2400 DDR4 slow?
Yes, it's slow, right? Like that's really slow, right?
This is a 10 nanmter chip. This is not
old. Launched in Q1 of 2021. This is a
10 watt chip. Should it be obvious?
Um, one of them is pretty obvious on the desktop. I think the others will be a
little more obvious if you're poking around. Okay, I give up. What is it that's not
default about the desktop here? It's the icons. They've enabled the snap
feature so that you can't move an icon where you want it to. It always goes to
the end of the list. Interesting. Now, this isn't like, oh,
phone home, you know, weird hackery nonsense or anything.
We'll get to that, but it does indicate that they have
absolutely made changes to Windows before shipping it with this machine.
Now, this is something I should have checked right away. How on earth is this
licensed? It just doesn't say.
That's not how Wait, hold now. Hold on just a gosh darn minute here.
A laptop that's already on. No, no. I've got the best laptop.
Everything about this appears to be completely normal. This is activated
using my organization's activation service. Okay. Can I get updates? These
lights here, which I assumed were for like num lock and caps lock and stuff,
appear to be purely decorative. I can get updates. I'm afraid I'm not going to
find the weird stuff about this thing. Hit me with it. What's weird? I I can't
figure it out. Hidden files was enabled by default.
Oh, okay. Okay. What What What else is there? Missed the batch file.
Which one? This one.
Wait. Whoa. Okay. Hold on just a gosh
darn minute here. Okay. There's a Win10 JH batch file here that I accidentally
started for a second there. Uh we're going to go ahead and open this in
Notepad. I see a lot of product keys.
Oh, okay. Do we know what this is doing? As far as I can tell, this is how
they're doing their Windows activation. Got it. Pinging a couple Chinese websites to
double check that it's working, I think. Oh my god, this is hilarious.
Look at this error handling. The defined key is not found. Haha. Product
activation successful. Sorry, failure.
The last kind of quirky thing we noticed is the way that they partitioned the
boot drive. We've got a 200 gig partition for Windows and then a 150 and
then a 125. Why they did this, I don't know, because there hasn't been a real
benefit since the days of slow mechanical drives when you could short
stroke your drive by creating your operating system partition just using
the area of the disc around the outside where the sequential read speeds were
higher. On SSDs, it's everything's kind of stored all over the nan flash, so it
just doesn't matter. The performance might not be as bad as you might think.
This CPU apparently has a reflex of 2.9
GHz. Intel calls it the burst frequency,
not to be confused with boost frequency. Let's see what kind of frequency it'll
hit when we're actually running a sustained load. Four cores, 2.5 GHz. I
mean, I'd have been happy to have this in a laptop 5 years ago. That's four
real cores. I got to say, I'm coming around on this thing. Other than the
sketchy operating system, which I would absolutely remove and reformat before I
connect this to my home network, for example. It's kind of an okay machine
for the price. Let's open it up and have a look at what's inside this beast.
Please tell me that this is an M.2
upgrade slot. That is so cool. The SSD
is a little less awesome. It's got an eene extension on it. No,
half of this SSD has no SSD on it. You
guys ready? I have no idea what's in here, but whatever it is is definitely
interesting. It's about 50% mechanical keyboard, machined aluminum chassis.
That is a very small battery. It was also advertised as having 5,000
milliamp. Do we know what the voltage of this battery is? Okay, hold on. Andy,
what's up? Uh, what is the voltage of this battery?
7.6. That is super weird. It's probably fine
for a 10 watt CPU, but not the kind of capacity you'd expect in a 16-in
chassis. What else we got going on here? Perfectly adequate heat pipe cooling
solution. Better than you'd find on many MacBooks these days, actually. They call
this hurricane cooling. Is there Denzel Washington in here somewhere? The
motherboard is extremely small, which makes sense given that this is a class
of processor that you would normally find in like a netbook class product.
Uses an Intel Wi-Fi chipset, though. Where's my weird off-brand wireless
chipset? Should we game on it? Let's do it. The product marketing features a lot of
gaming imagery. All right, let's open up with CS:GO. More like CS slow.
Oh, it defaulted to high. Oh my god. 8x
MSAA was enabled. Oo,
not promising. We're getting a stuttery 15 frames per second. This is all low.
Technically, the game is running. I did manage to get a kill there a second ago.
You know, it's smoothing out a little bit, though. Oh, wow. Yeah, you're better than me.
Yeah, I'm running at 2560 by600.
Like, it looks great when the frames render. If it was me in high school, I'd
be like, heck yeah, I can play the game. What about Genchin, though?
Let's get full cut scenes, by the way. No,
they claim you get 50 FPS in this game. Sure do.
Because this is not 50 FPS. I can tell you that much. It's also not as bad as I
thought it was going to be, though. Ooh, but our render resolution is at 6.
So, it's not that. It's more like 1080p. Everything but crowd density is minimum.
Yeah, this is not as fast as
that's not good. It's not at 50 FPS. Certainly not when the action gets
heavier. But once again, it's playable. And personally, I think I'd rather play
on something like this with a nice big screen than on a little tiny mobile
device. I can't recommend this machine because of some of the sketchy things
that we observed, particularly this installation of Windows. But the reality
of it is that brand new, I have never seen anything that comes even close to
the value proposition of it, especially for certain use cases, like if I was a
writer, for example. It's kind of mind-blowing. There are some other
options if you don't mind buying used. Uh, we'll have a couple of them linked
down below. Flashing a couple on screen right now. But other than that, I just
have never seen this kind of value in a laptop. So, I guess good job
Dee or NWNLAP or whoever you are. If you
enjoyed this video, you might also enjoy our video on the ONN laptop from
Walmart. It didn't fare quite as well. Did this Did the game just crash?
Looks like it did. Did the game just like Was that due to inactivity? Because the
launcher is still here. That was
pretty weird. It's not a gaming machine. Okay.