this tiny gaming PC is absolutely wild
it's got a built-in controller it's playing Doom Eternal at HD resolution
medium details anywhere from 65 to 80
frames per second and not only that but it's so powerful that I can actually
stream to Twitch TV without a separate
streaming box it's got 8 cores 16 threads onboard Rd and A2 graphics and
not one but two m.2 storage slots we're
gonna have to crack this baby open and see what makes it tick what's this
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meet the GPD winmax 2. it's what you
would get if an Alienware gaming laptop and the netbook had a baby everything
about this is better than the last gen and I have been so excited to get my
hands on this starting with the screen it's touch screen with stylus support
for the artists out there and is just over 10 inches with a 16 by 10 aspect
ratio and a native resolution of 2560 by
1600 that is 299 pixels per inch making
it shockingly sharp and the best part
since this is basically a mini laptop is
that unlike other handhelds the screen is actually a natively landscape display
rather than a portrait one that is constantly running 90 degrees out of
sync we've actually got another video coming out about the Aya Neo air and one
of the problems we run into is when trying to emulate games since the screen
is Portrait you you need some fixes to get older or poorly coded games to
display properly speaking of games the high resolution should also help make
lower resolutions not as interpolated and crappy looking since we've got so
many pixels crammed into a small display like this playing at 720p or 800p isn't
going to be a stretchy mess where the software and the display fight over
which pixels should go where integer scaling should also behave more
appropriately since the screen is simply double an 800p image let's talk I O over
on the right we've got two USB 3 ports at the front power button with included
fingerprint sensor do like to see that on the left this is cool the GPD winmax
2 stands Head and Shoulders Above the Rest when it comes to storage expansion
steam deck micro SD with a single 2230
SSD aneo next 2280 SSD and I don't
believe it has any micro SD expansion aneo air 2280 but you won't be using a
double-sided one and micro SD here we
get a 2280 that's your boot drive we get two SD slots full sized and micro so you
can put two terabytes there and an additional 2230 SSD slot Gen 4 in case
you want you know maximum performance that is easily accessible at the back
with just one screw you could conceivably load this thing up with like
eight terabytes of storage without buying any wild exotic you know eight
terabyte double-sided ssds and that ignores that we could use
external external bridge at the back alongside our headset Jack and HDMI 2.1
Port we have another USB type a and a
USB 3 Type C along with a USB 4 type c
which means that we could actually hook this bad boy potential theoretically up
to a Thunderbolt enclosure or Thunderbolt storage or even an external
GPU not that we thought of that before and we're definitely going to try that
after speaking of games you might think that that high resolution means that
you're going to have a pretty crummy low FPS experience but that's not actually
the case because we've got so many pixels crammed into such a small area we
can run this display at non-native resolutions without nearly the same kind
of awful interpolation that we might have expected from older LCDs also
because this resolution is a multiple of 800p which is the resolution that the
steam deck and other handhelds use you can actually use integer scaling to get
no interpolation whatsoever it just takes 1 whatever value was supposed to
be for one pixel and makes it a two by two grid nice and clean check this out
because of the way that GPD optimized the spacing between the keys on the
keyboard it is shockingly usable in
spite of its tiny size so this isn't just a portable gaming machine it's
actually a usable laptop the touchscreen
being up on the top of the keyboard yeah it's not the most amazing experience
ergonomically but quite frankly I very rarely found myself using it anyway
because ah yes making a return is gpd's
classic little switch that takes our integrated Gamepad and switches it over
from Gamepad mode to
Mouse mode is that awesome or what okay
it's a little slow and it can be a little bit clunky but it was and remains
one of the best implementations of joy to mouse that I have yet used the
shoulder buttons handle your left and your right click and as soon as you're done you flip it back over into Gamepad
mode and you're ready to start playing now I'm not gonna lie it's a little on
the heavy side at just over a kilogram and it doesn't have the world's greatest
integrated Gamepad but especially when you factor in the benefit of the screen
size it is shockingly usable for scale here's a steam deck yes this is a
substantially larger device but this is also a substantially larger screen and
while it might not be the best Gamepad in the world it's
surprisingly not bad holding on to it
like this you've got a little bit of grip on the back of the device and it
manages to not get too hot in the areas that you need to touch it and these
joysticks while they're a recessed style joystick like you might find on a mobile
console they're actually hall effect joysticks meaning that you're concerned
about them wearing out should be much lower than a potentiometer-based
joystick like you would find on an Xbox or a PlayStation controller
I really like the d-pad really clicky
that is one of the best d-pads I think I felt in quite some time
that's a yeah it's very easy to ask it's really nice there are integrated covers
for the joysticks if you prefer not to look at them
um they sit like that and when you're not using them they go back here
personally I think that's the kind of thing that I would probably leave tucked
away 100 of the time but
why productivity it looks like a laptop
makes it look more professional ah yes well sure at my job it's no problem to
be carrying around a gaming device so that really raises the question what
kinds of other fun goodies are we gonna find inside this thing man this is a
really cool device GPD just makes such cool stuff man and these screws are not
all the same well that's good to know ours is a kitted out model okay there's
our one terabyte SSD complete with dram cache then we've got our heatsink fan
assembly here that is actually larger than I would expect to find in a PC like
this we've got two heat pipes and then you can see here it looks like the
heatsink fins are quite short but they actually get a lot taller towards the
back which probably contributes to how quiet this thing is even while gaming so
under that we've got the 8 core 16 thread as I mentioned before AMD ryzen
6800u APU that is how we are getting the
absolutely wild performance we're seeing out of this machine also it contributes
to the excellent battery life you can expect from the win Max 2. GPD specs a
67 watt hour battery but opening it up we can see clearly this is a 72 watt
hour battery they say to expect three hours of heavy use six to eight hours of
moderate use which is where most people will likely Fall and 14 hours of light
use depending on the specific applications there's not really much
else for us to see in here we've got our hall effect joysticks which look very
user repairable memory is soldered of
course if you want to get battery life anywhere near that you're not going to be able to have it sucking back 30 watts
playing AAA games like Halo infinite though it's certainly nice to have the
option I mean look how smoothly this is running it's at 1280 by 800 low details
but darn it it's running I got him
oh hey look at that gotta talk about the
merch we just launched the RGB hoodie it's comfortable stretchy and it has
these little colorful bits woven into it for a fun little splash of color without
being you know too fun you know it's gray right oh on the subject of fun I
didn't mention these before but they're actually Z3 buttons on the bottom so you
can bind additional functions to those if shoulders and triggers aren't enough
for you and the triggers themselves analog triggers so racing aficionados
rejoice one thing I will say though is the
haptics are not great the whole device vibrates it actually kind of reminds me
of the way that valve did it on the steam deck can you hear that
the speakers though probably the best praise that I can give them is that I
didn't notice them being you know little crappy laptop speakers they've got two
on the sides two on the front and they actually get reasonably loud and are
pretty clear let's crank them up here we go maybe then I won't have to listen to
the vibrating haptic Motors
for some really good tips on optimizing your performance and battery life I'd
actually recommend checking out the fox's Channel he has put this thing
absolutely through the ringer and found that while the steam deck crushes it for
performance at much lower tdps in the eight to nine watt range once you get
into the 15 watt range the steam decks Max TDP the win Max 2 leaves it in the
dust and you can eke out a bit more performance going up to its maximum of
28 Watts however one of my kind of
bummers with the win Max 2 is that in order to change those performance
profiles you have to reboot go into the BIOS tune them and then boot up into
Windows for comparison Aya one of their competitors has this
cool little overlay that you can adjust your fan and performance profiles
through on the fly but enough about that let's pivot to what I think is one of
the coolest use cases for a device like this I'm going to connect it to an
external RTX 3080 and see what kind of
performance we can pull off this is exciting you required a reboot for some
reason but it looks like our RTX 3080
GPU is showing up
is this Thunderbolt on AMD well yeah okay it's not technically Thunderbolt
but it's functionally the same is it 40 gigabit per second can I run a GPU yes
all right then well you know like what I call Things by the slightly wrong name
are you correct me so yeah if you call
it Thunderbolt I'm gonna tell you it's you as before because now with our
external GPU I am fully expecting to be able to run this display at Native
resolution initially I wasn't that impressed by the
performance we're getting anywhere from 65 to 75 frames per second which to be
clear is fine for our 60hz display but I
kind of expected more that is until I dropped into the settings menu here and
realized that oops once I realized I
have a 38 in here it defaulted me to ultra nightmare
totally unnecessary to have everything cranked like that on such a tiny display
but hey at least we know that we can do it freaking cool oh wow you know what's
Wild this is loud fan mode I mean
compared to the steam deck I was already really impressed by how quiet it was it
has a silent mode hold on here we go function shift
around 85 Degrees yeah that's fine
yeah no kidding remember we're not using the onboard GPU right now though so
that's an advantage don't get me wrong this thing is not perfect and it's not
for everyone we ran into some weird issues with delays in the touchpad input
that seemed to be caused by algorithmic Palm rejection and unlike last
generation model it no longer has an RJ45 Network Port which was a bit of a
bummer to me but what it is is utterly
unique it's not going to compete with the gaming focused design of something
like a steam deck or an eye Neo and frankly it's a worse laptop than pretty
much any other dedicated laptop at this price point but if what you want is the
one device that does it all there's nothing else that does it quite like
this there are people out there that are using their steam decks as their only
computer and power to you but for most people that's going to be pretty
frustrating when you're on the go and in the same way there's a lot of folks out
there that use their laptop keyboard and trackpad pretty sparingly but actually
do a fair bit of gaming well guess what let's not something like this you don't
have to carry a Gamepad so are there many of those people probably not but
there are certainly enough for GPD to keep existing and keep pumping out these
devices and I'm glad because this thing is super cool just like our sponsor
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go check out our video on the ultimate steam deck we actually cut a hole in the
back of it and put like a hot rod style cooler sticking out of it legitimately
made it way faster