So there are a lot of brands out there that we've never probably really heard of more affordable
laptops and i wanted to find out are they actually any good this model here that retails for around
about 660 us dollars is the DERE v9 max it's a 15.6 inch laptop with a 1440p screen backlit
keyboard large touchpad and an all metal build it is powered by the intel 11th gen core i7 the 1165
g7 and it does have 16 gigabytes of ram and a 512 gigabyte ssd so spec wise it seems pretty
good right so there must be some areas where they've cut back right to reduce the cost
of these machines and is it a machine that's going to run into issues well i want to cover
that in this video here and i'll check out the performance of this model and let you know all
the pros and cons and if a more affordable core i7 laptop like this is worth it or not
inside the box you will find a power cable it is that mickey mouse style plug very common
easy to source and it's a 65 watt power supply small compact size dc not type c unfortunately
so i did want to see what the weights are the laptop it is 19 millimeters the thickness of
it but what about its weight check that out now so it does weigh as you can see there 1.67 kilos
for a 15.6 inch laptop isn't bad but what is the total travel weight with our power supply
just over 2 kilos again not too bad considering the size of it the v9 max has an alloy build to
it so the lid here when you press down there's a bit of flex and the hinge feels okay but you
need two hands to open this up so it feels stiff enough to me hasn't loosened off we've got alloy
right here alloy on the underside and the keyboard it is nice to type on it's not bad they don't feel
like high quality keys all the feedback from them the backlighting on this keyboard it's actually
on level two at the moment is not very bright and what i don't like about it is the paint job
that they've gone with silver keycaps and then the white letters can make it very difficult i
look right here and just the way the light's reflecting to see the tab and caps lock and
shift here it's very difficult so that's one area i hope that the next model that can just give us
a normal size black keyboard with black key caps touch pad all right nice and large it's got a
built-in fingerprint reader that does seem to work well but finer movements i have noticed with this
touchpad you need to press a little harder it's a usable touch pad but now and then the gestures
just don't work so of course it does support windows 10 windows 11 sorry gs just there fine
it's just some of the finer movements can be a little frustrating this touch pad
and i'm definitely using a mouse port wise now on the right hand side we have our dc into power and
charge it usb 3.0 hdmi 2.0 so this is 4k 60 and we do have a full spec type c so it supports power
delivery and video out 4k 60 and usb 3.1 data so that's good to see they've got a proper spec type
c port and on the left side we do have a gigabit lan 3.5 million millimeter audio with microphone
support another usb 3.0 and an sd slot there so the sd cards unfortunately this reader is only usb
2 spec so it's not ultra high speed looking at the underside here you'll see that we've got an easy
access hatch so two screws you can replace the ssd so it's sata 3 512 gigabytes i'll give you those
speeds soon in this review two downwards firing speakers rubber feet here this is the intake and
there is or was a rubber foot here at the back now i've removed it which is easy enough to do
because if you want to gain access to the internals there are two screws you need to get
below that rubber foot so once you do that unscrew all of the screws it just lifts off
it's very easy to gain access to the internals however it's not looking good at all because
we have just a single sodium slot so we're missing out on dual channel ram and to top
it off this ram speed isn't even the correct ram speed it's a little too slow really it's 2
66 megahertz this chipset does support 3 200. it is 16 gigabytes so that's good but yeah just
the single channel and you do have a slot right here to install another pcie well sorry a sata 3
m.2 drive but there is no mounting point for it there's no screw so you're going to have to use
double-sided tape or another form to secure it in place which is not ideal wireless card
not upgradable it is right there soldered onto the motherboard two cheap speakers either side
which do have two speakers within them so in total we've got four little speakers but
they're not great i'll give you a sample of them later on and our battery capacity rather small 45
watt hours for such a powerful chip it only goes for around about four hours a lot of free space
around here free space here too a little bit at the front so they could have i think put a
larger battery in this so disappointing battery life disappointing with the upgrades and for me
the single sodium slot we're missing out on of course that important ram bandwidth
and onto our screen so we do have a top and left and right bezel that's pretty good it's nice and
slim there large bottom bezel the webcam you can barely just see it but it's located down in the
bottom left-hand corner here terrible location it's not a good webcam at all i'll give you a
sample of it just after this however the screen amazing it really is for the price tag this is
a good screen it's probably better than a lot of laptops you see that cost three times the amount
of this one so we have with it a hundred percent of p3 coverage with the color gamut here 88 adobe
rgb ntsc is 86 percent srgb 100 so wow that's that's amazing really for this type of laptop
being an affordable core i7 laptop brightness however is not super good it's an anti-glare
coding the ips we do have resolutions 2560 by 1440p but it's only 252 nits maximum brightness
which for indoor use with the anti-glare coating holds up it's perfectly fine but if you are in
really bright environments you may struggle a little bit but definitely a great screen
that is in this laptop and i i just blown away i did not expect that to be as good as it really is
so here's a sample of our webcam and microphone and as you can see the quality
is downright awful the location of it as i pointed out when we looked at the screen the bottom left
hand side is not good so it kind of looks up your nose and it's right to one side so normally you'll
be about positioned here with your head looking at the middle of the screen so you're always going to
be to one side so you definitely want to be using an external webcam with this laptop the v9 max
this laptop does come with windows 11 pro and we have 15.7 gigabytes usable so there is just
a small portion that is dedicated to the iris xc graphics of course it's scalable so we'll end up
using more when it does need it so this particular laptop with the core i7 the 1165 g7 it feels
quick and snappy so basic computing tasks like spreadsheets documents i won't go over because
it's pretty straightforward that the performance is going to be good here it is fast and snappy
even though it's yes only running in single channel configuration with our ram so it does
have four cores eight threads 4.7 gigahertz is the max turbo 28 watt part it's still reasonably good
even though now it's getting a little old but it's a big step up from what we had before with the 9th
gen and the 8th gen performance wise geekbench 5 you can run this on your own laptop you can
install it it's free run the benchmark compare it to see if this is faster or maybe it could
even be slower a single core score there isn't too bad but it could be faster because of the
ram situation same with the multi-core score there and cinebench r23 did run that of course
and performance says it's all right i expected it to actually be a little bit slower after 10
minutes of continually looping it especially with that multi-core score but it didn't do too bad it
seems it's not really affected too much by the single channel ram at least with that particular
benchmark now in the device manager our ssd um no idea what brand this is as you can see it's a g5
35 in w 512 gigabytes uh the speeds of it aren't actually too bad say 3 however so would have been
great if it was a pcie ssd which would be a hell of a lot faster than this but that's
what we do have at least it's 512 gigabytes and not small like 256 or something so reasonable
performance from it now dated wi-fi ac it really should be wi-fi ax if you ask me the ax 201 is
actually quite a cheap card it's only about eight us dollars to buy it and but again the motherboard
only has this one on so non-upgradeable sadly uh focal tech is the fingerprint reader which is
in the top left-hand corner of the touchpad that i showed you before seems to work alright sometimes
it can be a little slow but um now overall it's not too bad faster than typing in a password
and of course you see iris xe graphics which i'll get onto later on in this review here so nothing
else really of interest in there when it comes to the device managers so general performance is good
quick and snappy but what about video playback now the jellyfish file that i always test out
normally and there it goes it does the little choke the stutter at the start
once it gets going it then seems to smooth out although it takes a little while longer here
oh and still dropping frames so that performance just straight out with native windows there moving
tv player it's finally working good but wow that was about 10 seconds of continually just dropping
frames which is not good to see now this file i found tends to play a little bit better but again
dropping frames at the start just go full screen with it this is 4k hevc by the way
once it's going yes it is fine then and it looks like really it's not dropping
any frames now with video playback demanding files that is then what about 4k 60 playback
this is always demanding and normally you get a lot of dropped frames i do hope my internet
connection is going to keep up with this so just make that full screen and it seems to be
doing okay so enabling the stats here you will see that dropping frames yes continuously
every second it's dropping well about four frames even more sometimes the laptop has those four
downwards firing speakers if you saw that clip of the internals they're not huge they aren't really
high quality speakers at all as you can imagine but they do make up what they lack in at least
quality in volume so they're pretty loud they're not bad and you should be able to hear at least
presentations and things through these laptop speakers here's a sample of them at 100 volume
and a very quick look at gaming so we know what this particular ir60 graphics can do if it's
in dual channel and the ram is running at the correct speed because remember it's only 2666.
if it was dual channel 3200 we could probably get about 40 50 maybe even 60 frames per second here
so it's certainly underperforming because of the ram speeds which really does affect
that iris xc graphics so that's it's just a lot disappointing here because it should be just so
much better than what we are looking at right now performance wise it's laggy so not really i would
say for gaming even though they do advertise that because it's simply just too choppy 1080p that is
right now with gta 5 so you probably want to lower the resolution down to 720p to get a better more
playable frame rate finding my little linux test here so linux manjaro is running just fine in it i
have internet connection drivers everything seems to be working including all of the audio controls
the display out is also working hdmi out and bluetooth all of that touchpad works so it seems
to have all the drivers there so that's great so that brings me on to the final thing which is the
battery life unfortunately it's only a 45 watt hour battery which for a powerful 28 watt part
that's in this the core i7 is simply not enough it's not sufficient battery capacity it will only
run for just scraping over four hours now that is with the brightness set too by the way 30 and me
just doing relatively light tasks so the battery life is not impressive at all so all up a laptop
like this to answer the question that i was asking at the start is it worth it it is and it isn't
because there are definite areas where things could be better like for example the keycaps being
silver makes the keyboard a little hard to see the touchpad is okay but it's not amazing and it skips
sometimes with the finer little movements when you're using it the cursor can jump about which
can be a little bit annoying webcam quality as you saw was terrible it does get a little hot but we
see that i'm seeing that with a lot of the other intel's around that and the performance isn't too
bad but as i pointed out it's only single channel ram so there's lots of areas of compromise it will
cover those basics you'll be able to do and edit even video files at 1080p or even 4k if it's just
basic edits the screen is one area that i i was not expecting it really did surprise me because
whoa that screen is actually really good for such a laptop at this price point even laptops that
i've reviewed that cost well over 2 000 us dollars won't have the kind of color gamut coverage that
you do get with this panel but it's only around about 250 nits the maximum brightness which
for indoors use is still actually fine so there are so many things going for it but then there's
a lot of cons against it there so it really just depends on your budget what you're after here
so that is the dairy v9 max a 660 or so us dollar core i7 15.6 inch laptop thanks a lot for watching