What is the absolute best laptop you can get for 500 bucks? We went to Best Buy
and it turns out it's this. It's from HP, which isn't a bad thing, but as it
[music] turns out, savvy shoppers these days aren't getting their HPs from Best
[music] Buy. They're going to AliExpress or to Chewy.com.
Because on paper, the Chewy Corebook X
is so impressive that it deserves the
first dedicated laptop review [music] that we've done in over a year. I'm
talking more power, more pixels, [snorts] more battery, and more street
cred. That is if their claims hold up to
the scrutiny of the lab. Just like this Segway holds up to scrutiny.
Chewy has been around for probably longer than you realize, primarily
selling their laptops on AliExpress, but recently they launched their own store
where we first saw this machine. And we were floored that you could get a Core
i5 powered laptop with a freaking 1440p
display for just 500 bucks. Normally for
that price, you're lucky to get 1080p. And can I just say it doesn't even feel
like a $500 laptop regardless of spec.
If you asked me how much I thought this machine was worth, I'd say yeah, it
probably starts at $9.99 for like kind of a midspec. It's not like you're going
to get a unibody chassis at this price point, but the fit and finish of this
multi-piece chassis is so good that it doesn't bother me at all.
Power adapter. They definitely saved a buck here, standard barrel jack charger.
With that said, however, it does have,
count them, one USBC port that does take
up to 65 ws of power delivery. So, as long as you have a USBC charger around,
then you can use USB PD. It's also got a USB type A, a headphone, microphone
combo jack, and a micro SD slot. One of
the other really unexpected things about this to me is how big the trackpad is.
It's the little things like, "No way.
Is this a 16x10 display?"
Even better. 3x2. They went Microsoft Surface on this biz.
WOW.
OOPS, I almost threw this box. That was so close. See, there's no
shortage of Chinese companies that can make [music] or rebadge a laptop that
has a decent spec and sometimes even a pretty good price, but they always
compromise on something critical. Whereas, by contrast, this trackpad
feels pretty good. This keyboard is way better than it has
any right to be, and it even uses an
Intel Wi-Fi chipset. Is this thing just
knock it out of the park amazing? Or have $500 laptops just gotten a lot
better? To find out, we explored the $500 options on Best Buy and found a few
key things you're going to want to keep in mind. If you're shopping in this price point, first and foremost, you
should never buy a $500 laptop at full price. You want to be a bargain hunter.
Find something on sale. You should expect something [music] one to two
generations old in the i5 or R5 range.
16 gigs of RAM, a real non-EMMC SSD, and
at least a 1080p display. One thing to really look out for is the Wi-Fi card
that they're using. We were tempted to buy this ASUS Vivo Book until we saw it
had a one by one Wi-Fi card, which is going to make internet browsing, [music]
especially if you're multitasking, significantly slower. So, with all that
in mind, we chose the HP laptop, not HP
Envy, Pavilion, [music] or Spectre. It's literally just called HP Laptop. In
spite of its name, it earned our purchase. It hit all of the marks that
we expect for a budget conscious machine. But how does it compare to the
Chewy? I can tell you right now, it feels
cheaper immediately. Like, holy crap.
It's also Oh, why does it feel so much thicker?
It's not even But it feels thicker. Did you notice that it looks thicker,
right? Oh, you know what? I know why it feels thicker. [music]
Because it is thicker. Watch this.
Boom. Thicker. The Chewy has taller feet, so it's
actually getting more airflow to the bottom vent. With that said, HP
obviously is going to have some advantages here. more robust IO, two
type A's along with a type-C, HDMI out,
full-sized SD card slot, and headphone microphone jack. Does this type-C accept
power and delivery, though? Because it also ships with a barrel jack. Let's try
it. I don't have especially high hopes, though, because on the Chewy, you'll
notice that that USBC port is right next
to the barrel jack where the power delivery is on the main board. On this
one, uh they're on the opposite sides. That's a negatory. [sighs]
Type-C charging is a big deal for me. And for a student or someone who might
be picking up a machine like this, it's probably a big deal for them, too.
Having just one charger [music] in your bag for your phone, your laptop, maybe
you have a Nintendo Switch or something like that.
It's nice to not have to carry around anything else in your backpack. Oh, and
speaking of backpacks, ltstore.com.
Even aside from that, this machine just looks and feels like it's from 8 to 10
years ago. There's a rough edge here. That's how bright the screen gets. And
this trackpad, you are going to find yourself wishing you had one more like
this. Is this one even at max brightness? This one wasn't even at max
brightness for the comparison. Okay, I need to put the same wallpaper on just
so you guys can get some idea of what's going on here. This is bad. Oh, wait.
No, they're reigning me in. I'm supposed to do a weight test now. Okay, hold on. We'll talk about the displays in a
minute cuz h
in fairness to HP, the screen is notably larger.
And it has a number pad if you're into that sort of thing. But it also has
these arrow keys that make me want to murder someone. I think those are fine.
Let's see you play leero on them. I became very high level in Tetris
battle with keys like that. Before we weigh these, for context, ultrabooks of this size start around 1
kilo or 2.2 2 lb with anything around 3
lb being pretty normal. The Chewy is
2.999 lb. 3 lb exactly. Not bad. And bearing
in mind, of course, that the HP does have a substantially larger display.
It comes in at um 3.5.
Not bad. I think that's pretty reasonable as long
as it has a good sized battery in it. Before we get into the keyboard and
trackpad in more detail, I want to do a quick test that Alex calls the Morocco
test. Because one of the parts of the laptop you will touch more than anything
else is actually the palm rests. So watch this.
That amount of vibration pretty acceptable.
Actually not bad. I'd say similar. But for context, this is what is this? A
dragonfly. Yeah. Okay. So, [music] it turns out there is
a reason that people buy more premium laptops or get their work to get them to
them. [laughter]
I don't mind the shift position. Alex gave it an A minus, taking off points
for the mediocre lateral stability and some key [music] to key inconsistencies.
He also doesn't like the right shift key. I don't mind it. I actually agree
with his grade though because for me, it's the sound and the feel overall that
are holding it back a little bit. you do just get a little bit too much moraca
effect. With that said, this is
relatively very mushy. Some people will prefer the quieter sound, but while I
don't blame the key switches themselves, there is so much flex in the deck that
you're never going to get a clean, solid, tactile touch typing experience
out of this. Coming back to the Chewy, it definitely has deck flex, too. But to
its credit, at least it's more consistent. across the entire board.
Whereas with the HP laptop, there's parts that are more solid and parts that
feel like there's a sinkhole under them. The size on the HP didn't end up being
as big of an issue as I expected it to be. And while neither of them are using
a glass top or anything premium like that, both of them functioned well as
expected, registering everything from taps to drags to multitaps for right
click or whatever else the case may be. He's doing a thing. I don't know what it
is. All that I am doing is opening paint
and paint bucketing red at 255.
[groaning] That is the same red.
[snorts] That is so much worse than I expected.
This looks so flat and dull and
lifeless. On the one hand, it is a matte style display, so it does affect your
perception of color vibrancy, but not that much. Even if it's expected, it's
still disappointing. And color gamut was not the only way the Chewy ran away with
this. It reached a peak brightness of 445 nits with HP stuck in the dust at
280 nits, which isn't as bad as it
sounds. Because our response to brightness is nonlinear, the HP will
appear 82% as bright. But I can tell you
it doesn't feel like 82% as bright. It just like man when you hit this thing,
that's a big difference. One thing we glossed over, does the Chewy have a
backlit keyboard? Oh, yes it does. Okay,
never mind. Um, no advantage HP laptop.
Also, this is cool. Function spacebar is a shortcut for fan and performance
profiles. Back to the displays though. Chewy managed 97% coverage of the sRGB
color space with HP coming in at 63%.
Ouch. You know what? I bet that's a big part of why the perceived difference in
brightness is so much greater. Oh yeah, because color plays a major role there
and this ain't got it. As for accuracy,
Chewy managed an average Delta E2000 of just 2.4 with a maximum of 4.8 8 whereas
HP was 3.9 average maximum 19.7. That's
what poor color gamut is going to do to you because even if the panel's
calibrated, it just doesn't have the physical capability to represent those
colors. With that said, it's not like I'm going to recommend the Chewy for
professional color work or anything like that. It's not quite at that delta E of
two that we'd want to see, but if you're just casually editing photos for
uploading to Facebook or something, it's a great little machine for it. Speaking
of getting work done on your laptop, let's talk performance. For the CPU, the
Chewy is equipped with an Intel Core i5 1235U. That is a 10 core processor with
two performance cores and eight efficiency cores. And while it's only a
generation newer than the i5 1135G7 in
the HP, the jump from 11th to 12th gen
in laptops was huge. We are talking a
71% increase in Cinebench multi-core scores.
Now, in more singlethreaded workloads, the gap isn't as large, but the Chewy
still managed to smoke the HP in every
test we threw at them, which includes games. While neither of these is
marketed as a hardcore gaming machine or anything like that, we do expect people
to play casual games like Dota 2 or Rocket League on them. And especially
with the turbo mode enabled, which gives it about 11% more performance, the Chewy
stomped all over the HP. Like obliterated it. Also, I just can't get
over how bad that HP looks. It's like a Gears of War filter.
Yeah, I'm not over it either. This looks like a completely different map or like
they did a pallet swap or something on it. Look at that.
It looks brown. The grass looks dead. Oh, wow. Did we do a sound test on
these? Listen to how much louder the HP is.
I'm not even running the game anymore. And the Chewy.
I think the HP is louder in my microphone.
Yeah, it's dead quiet. Wait, is that in the
script? No. Oh, yeah. Well, I don't think we even
need a sound chamber to tell which one won that test. Another thing you need to
look out for in budget laptops are cashless SSDs. But to explain why that's
terrible, let's take a look at this one terabyte drive from XPG. Right here, we
can see the NAND flash memory chips, which are what store your data. And you
can think of them kind of like the shelves in a library. Over here, we have
the SSD controller, which is kind of like the librarian. And now between
them, we have the DRAM cache, [music] which contains a map of where all of the
data on these flash chips is stored. Kind of like the computer that a
librarian would use. Without [music] the DRAM cache, that map of the library gets
stored onto the nan flash, which is way
slower. Kind of think of it like making that poor librarian switch back to using
[music] index cards. As a bonus, since the map of the SSD is stored on the NAND
flash [music] itself, the reads and rights are way increased, which means a
lot of cashless SSDs have a shorter warranty period than one with a proper
cache. Uh, I was supposed to do a demo here showing how sometimes Crystal Disc
Mark can be deceiving. The Chewy actually outperformed the HP in our
initial runs, but I guess that [music]
it's um garbaged up enough at this point
that it's showing its true colors. And yeah, this is this is what we're looking
at here. It's noticeable in day-to-day use, but there is a silver lining. Under
these two screws right here is an open M.2. a two slot that I would recommend
you start saving up to fill pretty much as soon as you buy this thing. [music]
Cool little thing I noticed. By the way, there's a little thermal pad, a little
spacer that allows that SSD to dissipate heat using the [music] chassis. Hey, we
did another run of this to get a a B-roll shot of the results. And it the
Chewy is winning again. I wonder if it's thermal related as well or something.
This is very eccentric behavior from it.
No, it's just the cash and if it's filled up or not. Got it. Got it. Now, let's find out if
you should be saving up for some speakers and a webcam. Hey. Oh, hi,
Alex. Hey. We got both set to 720p. Yep,
that's the max. They'll both do. [music] And wow, the Chewy is bad.
If I had to guess, I'd say they didn't calibrate it for white skin.
Wow, that's not fair at all.
Look, I'm I'm completely blown out. I
love this. the CPU pillow behind there. ltstore.com looks like just a solid
brown thing on the bottom.
Not what it looks like at all. Let's see. Where did we completely lose that
detail? Right around here.
Tiny. [music]
Boommy and unfocused. I'd take the chewy.
Oh, I don't know. The HP is so much louder and has so much more low end.
So much more distortion though. Distortion. Yeah.
I'd take my phone over both. Your phone also costs more than both.
Yeah. Are we taking apart both or just the Chewy? Might as well take apart both.
Oh, this is just two screws. A HP. What?
You But that's good. No, it's definitely underneath these
feet. Oh, I'm not opening it then. That's dumb.
You heard it here first. HP certified
Yeah, it's great. It's so unnecessary. Just put the screws
here and here. It doesn't matter. It's a $500 laptop. Who are you trying to
impress? Or like there and there. Yeah, like you did on this much more
premium model, you
you [laughter] I do still like your laptops, though.
This one's great. Oh, wow. This is really not as easy to take apart as I was hoping. Oh,
I think they did it, too. Chewy, you
Certified Oh,
Okay, well, it comes off a lot more easily now. Oh, I'm sorry. Are you guys
just noticing that the top of the screwdriver is still
spinning?
Coming soon. ltstore.com. One of the things I wanted to see in
here was the battery. Chew's equipped this thing with a 46Wh battery, which is
a little over 10% more than the capacity of the HP. [music] And that combined
with a 12th versus 11th gen CPU should add up to significantly better battery
life. Unfortunately, in the real world, things don't always work out the way
they do on [music] paper. As a baseline, our HP laptop was able to last an
impressive 6 hours and 52 minutes in our
battery life endurance test. [music] Now, Chewy claims 8 hours of battery
life on their website, but in our testing, we only managed 3 hours and 17
minutes. Yikes. [snorts] Now, normally we do our endurance tests
in the balanced profile with battery saver on. The logic being that we've
heard from multiple laptop makers that less than 10% of users ever touch a
laptop's power profiles. But for the Chewy, we were so disappointed that we
wanted to see what happens if we run a battery test in their eco mode with the
screen at minimum brightness and it still only lasted for 3 hours 41
minutes. Double ouch. We reached out to Chewy to see if maybe we got a model
with a bad battery, and their response is one of the most incredible takes
we've ever seen, with them saying 3 and 1/2 hours is expected for continuous
usage, while the claimed 8 hours is for on and off usage when you're using your
laptop intermittently. I mean, by that logic, I get 80 hours of battery life
out of my laptop when I leave it in my backpack over a long weekend. How?
Seriously.
Oh, do you have the email?
It's possible that some of this is due to power management of the CPU, so maybe
it could be improved with a BIOS update. I saw that um Framework actually had a
blog post recently talking about [music] the challenge of dealing with things
like USB power management, CPU power management for one of their upcoming
laptops, investment disclosure. But Alex's theory is that most of this is
coming down to that 1440p display. I mean, that is a big part of why we liked
this thing so much in the first place, but having a higher resolution, higher
brightness panel has a big effect on your battery life. For general
usability, I'm sure that some people would sacrifice some battery life for a
better screen, but I'm sure that a lot of people would actually feel the
opposite way about it. Oh jeez, don't take it out. Don't take it out. Remember, it's on and we still
need to get the webcam stuff off of that.
Oh, okay. Here, here, I'll show that. Originally, we did think that it had no
DRAM cache, but a system info tool told
us it did. I don't see one. I don't either. You know what? If I had to guess, I'd
say it's probably using system memory [music] for our cache, but it's just
like a slow crappy controller. Yeah, maybe. So, it's probably just doing a really
poor job of managing it or something like that. And maybe that fooled that
utility that you guys were using. There's This does not have DRAM on it,
Bill. It's physically not there for that matter. Does the uh does the HP
have a DRAM cache? Oh, yeah. It has an actual Samsung SSD.
One thing that we did notice though is that it does get slower under really
really long workloads cuz this is a plastic, which isn't a great heat sink,
and it does overheat. With that said, in talking to people about what's important
to them in a laptop, you'd be surprised how many don't need to run long Blender
renders and don't care if it eventually overheats. And I was also surprised to
find out how many people didn't care about decent battery life. I mean, I get
it. If it's just going to sit on your desk at home or on your desk at work and
only be a couple of hours away from the wall a day, that might be liveable for
you. So, if you're in that boat, the Chewy is fantastic in every other way
for the price. Otherwise, you might have
to make some compromises on spec for a
more not fatally flawed product. We'll have both of them linked down below.
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If you guys enjoyed this video, wasn't really a review per se, but we did check
[music] out the cheapest laptop on the market, and it was