it has no flashy plastic design no RGB lighting no overclocking and
the performance isn't even very good but make no mistake the gpd win max arguably
packs more pc gaming punch per liter than anything that's ever come before it
and i was lucky enough to be sent a pre-production unit so
let's have a look at it together instantly see your current and past
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the first thing my wife said is that it reminds her of the aspire one given the
thickness of the gpd max and the cramped keyboard that's not entirely an unfair
comparison but a lot was learned from the early netbooks and performance has
come a long way since Intel atom gpd ended up taking a shockingly zero
compromises approach to the win max and the highlights of its specifications
include 16 gigs of lp ddr4x memory 512
gigs of NVMe storage an 8-inch 500 nit
display lightning fast wi-fi 6 and enough i o to embarrass some laptops
that are twice its size but the star of the show is the 10 nanometer Intel
quad-core processor that manages to turbo all the way up to three to three
point three gigahertz under light real world all core loads guys that is just
about the same base frequency as a 4770
desktop chip and it comes loaded with iris plus graphics 940. yeah we're gonna
have to get to that eventually it uses onboard graphics but as we've seen so
many times before a complete product can be more than the sum of its parts
yes my friends that is gta 5 running on
the win max but hold on it's worth talking about some of the setup first
one of the first things i did was pop into the BIOS and toggle the CPU's TDP
to the maximum 25 watts it's pretty typical these days for Intel to have
configurable thermal envelopes for their mobile chips but usually the device
manufacturer will pick one for you and design a thermal solution that allows
the chip to go as fast as it can within that limit
not here now it's a little kludgy and requires a reboot every time but leaving
this to the user allows those folks who are mostly interested in retro game
emulation to extend their battery life considerably by tuning power consumption
down or by disabling cores while offering maximum performance to those
who are looking to play older aaa pc games or emulated games from much newer
consoles when it comes to real world performance other than a couple of
misleading bits in the marketing i'm thrilled in truly heavy workloads the
1035 g7 falls well behind a 4790k let's
be honest but playstation 1 emulation was flawless playstation 2 was super
fluid in fact almost anything that's normally CPU bound even dolphin which is
notoriously CPU heavy due to the gamecube and wii's ibm processor ran
more like i would expect it to run on something that would fit in my lap not
something that would fit in my hand even gpd's representation of the pc gaming
experience is pretty upfront modern demanding aaa games will run as
long as you don't mind cranking down the graphical settings and living with a
30-ish FPS experience as for older aaa
games these run oh it crashed yeah it's an early
unit and the firmware and the hardware are both not final so i did run into
some issues here but until it crashed it was running great i
mean it's crazy because i remember when you needed a top-tier gaming pc to run
batman arkham asylum this thing though you can basically max it out running at
60fps with only very occasional stutters
and that's at native resolution and therein lies some of the magic built
into the winmax is an hips panel that's rated for 500 nits max brightness and
runs at 1280 by 800 resolution that is
pretty low for a modern display and if you have sharp eyesight the experience
is not as good as they seem to make it out to be in the indiegogo pitch gpd
points out how the pixel pitch so it's the pixel density of their display
compares to common laptop and desktop display sizes and pixel counts the
problem is that the way that you would typically hold the gpd max puts it much
closer to your face than those other displays so you need more pixel density
in order for it to reach retina levels where you can't make out the individual
pixels i do understand the design limitations at play here though it's not
like the iris pro graphics we're gonna be able to drive anything higher than an
hd panel anyway and playing at a lower
but still native resolution is definitely better the alternative
truthfully i'd have done it exactly the same way i just felt that it was a
little disingenuous to make the comparisons that they did
some more good news though is that i absolutely love the built-in controller
as we've seen on previous gpd products there's a rocker on the side that
toggles the controller between mouse mode with the shoulder buttons acting as
left and right click and gamepad mode which uses standard x input meaning that
it usually requires no configuration to just work
this is far and away their best effort so far the abx y buttons are
delightfully clicky but not loud the d-pad is the best i've seen on anything
that isn't a dedicated game controller and the analog sticks they might take up
a ton of space internally that might have been great to use for battery but
they were totally worth it the tension on them is just right the plastic
ribbing on the top is the perfect balance of control and durability and i
got no annoying dead zones putting me in perfect control all the time i had to
complain about the gamepad i would say the shoulder buttons are a little light
for my taste the intake fan on the bottom actually makes my fingers cold
when i'm playing if i'm not wearing a warm hoodie from ltteststore.com that is
the win max itself is heavy enough that you pretty much have to rest it on
something if you're playing for more than about 15 minutes back to the marketing though my final beef is this
while it is true that playstation 3 emulation is possible with the win max
you're going to be limited to the much lighter games from that console and the
xbox 360 for that matter if you want frame rates of 30 FPS or more now i did
technically run some heavier games this
is bioshock 2 for example but as you can see the experience was
not great one way around this would be to use the
Thunderbolt 3 port on the back to hook up an external GPU that is super cool
like Thunderbolt 3 in this thing dang like i have long been a Thunderbolt 3
graphics card enthusiast but all the compact Thunderbolt 3 graphics cards
that i'm aware of either never made it to market or have gone extinct meaning
that if you want to do that you're stuck tethered to a big old brick that's
plugged into the wall at that point i mean why wouldn't i just
use a normal controller and play on the larger display of my real laptop or tv
or something but Linus you might say maybe the winmax is your only computer
you use it as a handheld on the go and you dock it at home you simply must have
a solution to this problem
given the luxury pricing of both the win max and an egpu i find that scenario
pretty hard to swallow but at least hey the option is there if
you're into it and performance is shockingly good the windmax's open
airflow bottom might give it a bit more flex than i'd like and
it can get pretty loud but it allows the dual fan cooler to
breathe extremely well and kept the CPU in the high 60s to low 70s throughout my
testing all of which was done again at max TDP i bet a macbook air would need
water cooling for that we should test that
get subscribed to see it just make sure too though that a webcam yeah it took me
a while to realize it's missing one and a separate keyboard is part of your
docking solution if you want to go that route i really wanted to like the
keyboard and the touchpad they included dedicated f keys which i appreciated and
it's pretty neat how in controller mode you can kind of thumb the trackpad
around but the arrow keys are terrible this caps lock should absolutely be
tabbed and it's just too cramped to really game comfortably on not to
mention that i can type faster on my phone than i can type on this thing
that's really the final nail in the i'm gonna make this my only computer pipe
dream for me i see the win max as a second or maybe
even a third pc but that does not mean that i don't like it
this is a really cool device once they
sort out those stability issues that prevented me from even testing battery
life i'd expect 10 hours or maybe more
in our light office benchmark which is pretty darn good considering the 57 watt
hour battery that's 10 nanometer for you like anything though it's full of
sacrifices and it lacks the kind of polish that you might expect from the
likes of dell if that weird alienware nintendo switch thing ever comes to
market but bottom line if you're the kind of person
who was already salivating over the prospect of a handheld emulation monster
and you were just waiting for me to say yep it pretty much does what they said
it would do then go now just buy it this is without a doubt one
of the coolest pcs on the market and it may be a long time before something this
unique comes along again you know else might not come along again anytime soon
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enjoyed this video maybe check out our preview of alienware similarly equipped
switch clone thing from ces this year wow remember trade shows
that feels like a lifetime ago hey