TINY Laptop TESTED – Gaming & More!
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2018-05-06
·
2,026 words · ~10 min read
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way back in 2008 it was my job at NC to
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Hawk these things netbooks these were a
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big push from Intel and their partners with the idea being that they were tiny
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little laptops with really long battery life and enough performance for net
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likee tasks like web browsing one small
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problem
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okay let's do another take only one small
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problem they were mostly sh so bringing us into the current year
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it is 2017 and there is one company that
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believes they can bring the netbook back
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to its former glory GPD and this is the
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pocket which smashed its Indiegogo
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crowdfunding goal raising over $3
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million but does the netbook really have a place
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in the modern
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day the be quiet! purebase 600 features a
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versatile design noise insulation and
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optimization for different liquid cooled radiator configurations learn more at
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the link below all right so rewinding everything
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you get in in the box for your $459 if you buy it on Indiegogo or $5.99
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$600 if you buy it retail is right here
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you get a USB type-c cable you get a wall wart with a type-c plug and you get
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the GPD pocket itself in many respects
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this is actually quite similar to their last crowdfunded device the GPD win
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which was more of like a more of like a kind of handheld keyboardyoutube
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expect the world's most amazing performance but it can run cine
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bench and I mean lots of other day-to-day stuff I mean here let's fire
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up a Chrome browser that didn't feel too bad fire up Netflix I mean it's quad
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core processor 8 gigs of RAM it's it's actually fairly
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usable and they've made a lot of other improvements since the uh spiritual
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predecessor as well notably in terms of
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build quality and display so that's what
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a netbook felt like these were like plastic cheap toys and this one does
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cost a fair bit more but and this doesn't seem to have been unintentional
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here you get like this unibody aluminum style construction with the uh with the
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screws closing it in on the bottom there and you get this really rigid feeling
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screen the thing feels really nice in the hand and for the display instead of
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a low resolution TN man of these come a long way you get a 1080p IPS s 7in
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display so that's a pixel density it looks really good I turned it down to
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150% scaling cuz I found that was kind of my sweet spot but it is very very
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usable even at this size compared to how much stuff you could put on before 7,000
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milliamp hour battery meant that our PC Mark battery life test came in at over 5
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hours which is a really impressive result for running basically Full Tilt
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all the time meaning that this thing and
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last but not least with all those improvements plus the fact that they've
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made it truly pocket
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sized is a really different kind of
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device but there's always a but isn't
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there there are some things that time
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couldn't change and that's the size of human hands the interface could be
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better so some people will be thrilled to see the nipple return from the IBM P
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pads of your but this split left and right click and having them so close
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with this Ridge here makes for not the most um ergonomic experience unless you
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are really good at you know this kind of this kind of work if you uh if you catch
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my drift there also the
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keyboard I I don't know how anyone
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managed to make a keyboard worse than a netbook their previous device actually
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felt better because it was intended to be used with just thumbs whereas this
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sits in that awkward Middle Ground where it's hard to use with thumbs but almost
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impossible to get your hands on they've made some very weird changes I didn't
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realize just how off it was until I tried to play a game and I put my
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fingers on WD and figured out that W was
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way the crap over there like I have some suggestions get rid of caps lock why do
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we need a caps lock button uh move backspace up so that I don't keep
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hitting delete instead of backspace that's very unnatural um colon really
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needs to be here but then where do you put enter I mean in some ways I do have
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ideas but in other ways I just don't know how you can fix this and typing
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without a lot of specific training on this device is going to be a real
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challenge okay so next I want to take a look at gaming performance but while we
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wait for uh Windows Live or whatever to
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install we decided to open it up and have a look at the inside this thing is
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like 60% battery so here's our here's our Wi-Fi so
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there's our two antennas there's our 2 W
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CPU here's our 8 gigs of RAM always love
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opening this stuff up oh and actually I guess now's a good time to check out IO
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so we've got a fullsize USB 3 super
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speed we've got a headphone jack I mean
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you can't take that for granted these days my
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friends we've got a micro HDMI I'm not a
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huge fan of this connector but it's better than Mini at least in terms of
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fragility and more importantly this is really cool we've got a USB type-c so
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that is used for charging but it can
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also be used for a dongle so something
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like this where you can adapt that single port to multiple USBS HDMI
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gigabit networking I've actually done it and I've also tested this you can plug
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your dongle if you've got one of those ones that's made for the MacBook into
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the wall and the whole thing will charge it'll power the dongle your devices and
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the laptop if you have a powerful enough wall wart which is pretty freaking sick
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so let's go ahead and fire up uh Batman Arkham Asylum shall
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we come on you rat bastard okay so
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obviously the point of this isn't that
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torch light is the most difficult game in the world to run but rather that for
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basic games you actually can can run them directly on the device itself you
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can see at medium to high settings we're actually getting about you know 15 to 25
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FPS which is playable but not really something
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that I would recommend what I'm more into for a device like this is thanks to
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its use of a decent AC Wi-Fi chipset
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this is what I'm more interested in so I'm using steam in home streaming on a
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gaming computer elsewhere in the office and getting an utterly seamless 1080p
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game streaming experience on this little
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portable device hit the buddy no I missed the
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Buddy and actually the audio experience on the built-in speaker speakers they
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seem to be a little confused themselves about they call it a stereo speaker but
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last I checked you need two physical speakers for stereo audio so I'm yeah it
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sounds like it's coming out of one part of the keyboard the point is it's
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actually reasonably loud and up to about 60 65% volume it's pretty Distortion
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free it's a very good experience which I guess leads us to content
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consumption and we're going from strength to strength here 1080p Netflix
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is looking really really sharp on this
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little tiny display and plays back with
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no dropped frames whatsoever and it's actually it's nice that the hinge folds
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back this far it's a little bit inconvenient that it's kind of hard to access the touch controls at the very
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bottom like the Windows taskbar but in terms of like kind of sitting and
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watching a movie on it honestly it's a it's a pretty darn good experience and
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1080p YouTube same thing so you're looking at about 50% CPU usage if you're
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watching like a a reasonably fast-paced video at full HD
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but for me a lot of those use cases are not that dissimilar from what you could
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do with uh you know a Windows-based tablet so it becomes sort of a question
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of form factor and IO this keyboard is
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going to require a lot of adjustment but
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the pocketability kind of gave me a a
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different idea for for how I see this as something where out of desperation you
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might actually use it like this when you're sitting on a plane or on a or on
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a trainer something like that but normally it's more about like taking the
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vast majority of the local storage you actually need like 128 gigs 8 gigs round
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like it's a decent little machine and being able to really carry it around
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with you and plug it in with a single cable solution to a desktop type display
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now it's running older Intel HD graphics so it's like DisplayPort 1.1 so at
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Native resolution on this Ultra wide we're running at uh 30 HZ or something
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like that and then using an HDMI adapter
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here I think we were only even able to get up to
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1080p but it is still the ability to
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just take it plug it in and be using your computer wherever you go that is
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very appealing to me and enabled by USB
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type-c so I guess the real question then
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is is would you spend $459 on Indiegogo or $5.99 retail on it
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I guess it depends on the kind of consumer are if you were waiting for a
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modern Netbook I think they've done a fantastic job but if you think the
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netbook should have been buried put in the trash can you do it
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again oh there's no garbage can there this time well then you won't be that
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