Hi everyone Chris here and i've got Chuwi's latest laptop that they sent out to me in exchange for
the review you're watching right here this one is called the core book x pro now it has a core
i5 it's the 8259 u with iris 655 graphics this configuration has 8 gigabytes of ram
ddr4 it's 2.4 gigahertz and a mvme ssd which is a 512 gigabyte capacity
it's a kingston drive there's also a spare mvme slot in this it comes with wi-fi ac
sadly it's not ax and the screen in this one it's 15.6 inches 144 hertz
ips full hd resolution the battery capacity it's chewy's largest yet 70 watt hours now in the box
what do we get well we get an eu power cable if you do get the eu version of course and this is
our power supply so it's really nice and small so yes dc charging not type c this one is rated to 65
watts and we'll take a look at the weight so the laptop is 1.81 kilos and then you add the
power supply and the cable which you are going to need of course to lug that around total weight
is just over two kilos now just over two kilos for a 15.6 inch laptop that's not actually bad
now the lid of this one little tiny bit of flex made out of alloy this is where we have the metal
just on the lid here and it does curve around the lip over the edge to help protect that screen
144 hertz panel that we've got in it full hd so lifting it up one-handed i can't i need two hands
for that all right and here we have our keyboard so this one is backlit the travel on it's a little
bit short about 1.4 millimeters the spacing is okay the keys are a little closer together than
what we've seen on other chewy laptops power button separated away from the keyboard this
is good so no accidental pressing of this and if you just lightly tap it nothing's going to happen
so you have to really push down quite hard for it to then register so compromise with the arrow keys
and overall it is good now i'll just show you the backlighting on this one there you go with
the lights off you can see it's a little uneven it just bugs me that the backspace here and the
caps lock brighter than the rest of the keys for some reason but that's about it now typing on it
i've had no problems okay no missed keystrokes nothing strange going on it's an okay keyboard
really no problem with it so this is where it feels kind of weird like it's not a chewy laptop
that i'm reviewing here so we have a little bit of a red stripe around the outside that's painted
on it this is plastic the side here as i mentioned it's just the lid that is the metal sd card reader
usb 3.0 so this sd card reader unfortunately it's just usb 2 speeds so it's not that great it caps
out about 24 23 megabytes per second gigabit lan and a kensington lock slot right there
and then over on the left side here we've got some more ports a type c now unfortunately this does
not support video out all right that's a bit of a shame it doesn't support power delivery either so
don't plug anything into it you could risk it shorting out something so there's a status led
so if i flick this that is to actually disable the webcam this physical switch there will completely
cut it out which is great that's hard wired and along here then we've got another two usb 3.0
hdmi 2.0 spec so that's 4k 60 okay that's good and then our dcn for charging with a status led
now charge time on this it's about two and a half hours for the 70 watt hour battery along
the underside we have a lot of little rubber feet all around here and what's great about
this particular model here the corebook x pro is this ram upgrades easy access panel one screw
nvme drive so this is the 22 by 80. now they were a bit of a pain to get out the single screw is
fine to screw it out but it's just to unclip them so there you can see we have a single sodium slot
and then the eight gigabytes that is soldered into place now what i'm going to do is i'm going
to add eight gigabytes more so i can run this in dual channel just so we can see the possible
performance the maximum performance especially when it comes to that iris 655 graphics that
this eight gen chat chip has in it taking this off you can see there is our main boot drive this is a
kingston and then the second slot right here so we're able to swap out those ssds there is no
reason for us to completely open this right up so i've got an eight gigabyte stick here this one is
ddr4 2400 megahertz from lenovo this and i just slot it in like that clips into place and i just
wanted to mention too the backing material on this so the underside this is a very light alloy very
easy to scratch but at least it is metal gives it a bit of a better feel to it and even these panels
those are made out of that alloy so this is pci e3 spec sata 3 for the two m.2 ssd slots right there
a little bit of a space here but not too bad so for maintenance you can just undo all the screws
you can pull this off and you could blow out or use a vacuum to get dust out of those fans later
on in a few years time so you can see our cooler right here it does have two copper transfer heat
pipes right there and then there's the fins so the cool air comes in from the bottom is blowing
then out the back and that's our sodium slot right here now what's the bad news the bad news is this
is a wireless card it's hidden under here but it is soldered on to the motherboard it's the intel
3165 and that's just wi-fi ac so it does not have wi-fi six unfortunately which is
i think a big mistake and then now the screen this one is a really strange choice from Chuwi
here to put a 144 hertz panel into this particular laptop with this kind of spec it really does need
a dedicated gpu it needs to be a gaming laptop which this is not so it's a full hd screen so
that's 1080p it's ips matte coated anti-glia maximum brightness very disappointing so
it's actually currently on its peak brightness right now and that is 213 nits only so srgb 66
ntsc 48 adobe rgb of just 50 and 50 p3 so a true disappointment in terms of screen quality and this
laptop it should be brighter we should have better color coverage than this and we've seen it in some
of the other laptops so this screen is a huge step backwards and now the downwards firing speakers so
these ones they sound okay here's a sample at a hundred percent they do lack in volume and base
so it ships out with windows 10 home now it is fully activated no problems with the license
none of those kind of issues that we had maybe about five years ago with some of these brands
long gone now if you look in the device manager you'll see that under the ethernet we've got real
tech okay so gigabit and then a wireless card as i pointed out is very disappointing non-upgradable
the intel ac card here so the 3165 now really they should have gone with the ax 200 wi-fi 6
card would have been so much better the internal storage that we've got with this one the 512
gigabyte mvme drive pcie 3.0 spec the speeds here you can see it gets around 1 500 for reads
rights are okay but for an mv nvme drive it's a little slow and it should be a little bit better
than this it's only a basic entry level kingston drive from them so if you want faster get yourself
something like the samsung 970 evo plus now the general performance of this laptop i won't go into
spreadsheets documents because the core i5 here the 82 59u handles everything just fine start menu
no lag i've got a bit of applications and things i've been opened here in the background
uh but what i wanted to show is 4k footage here is it going to drop frames in youtube
this is with chrome so i'll go into full screen enable our stats there and okay 16 drop frames
out of almost 2000 now that i've been playing this clip back that's actually pretty good so
really most of the video you will throw at it so h dot 264 hevc vp9 codex all playable
not a problem with this chipset whatever you throw at is going to be great their performance
so a couple little benchmarks here that i do have that i wanted to show you so this is geekbench
five the score's okay i have seen over a thousand for single core score and close to four thousand
with this particular configuration well with this chipset so it's still okay this is an okay score
but starting to fall behind a little bit now the 11th gen certainly are quite a bit quicker than
this and integrated graphics performance so this is night raid here just to show you you can run
this on your own hardware this particular benchmark if you wanted to or geekbench
you can see that again it's it's an okay score and this is our cinebench r23 score so 2684 points
i have been monitoring the thermals every time i've been running all these different benchmarks
and gaming and whatnot i've had it running in the background hw info so what have we gotten
up to here with the thermals this is always a bit of a concern here uh hot okay so 91 degrees
is what it will get up to on that uh 82 59 u so it's a hot chip and it gets a little loud with
the fan noise so maximum wattage is pulling here according to hw info is around about 50 watts at
peak so yes thermal throttling did take place throttled down those clocks a little bit there so
if you undervolt which you might be able to do where you should be able to do that
through the bios you can probably lower those temperatures down a little bit and help boost
the performance here's a sample of the fan noise now exactly what it sounds like under load
and now our webcam so this one is 720p max it has dual array microphones and the quality as
you can see and standard kind of lighting here so i turned off my powerful studio lights and what i
would call a normal ambient level of lighting here not great at all and when you type on the keyboard
you can hear a little bit of that noise coming through so poor webcam but at least we do have one
with the core book x pro now this speaker pc can edit video this is 4k adobe premiere pro and my
clips here from my sony a6400 so they're 4k 100 megabits per second and the timeline here is okay
it's not super fast playback is at least here just running at the quarter playback resolution
that's fine and even if you set it to half or full i probably wouldn't run but half not really
dropping any frames so that's good there what about the export times so what i'll do is my
standard test here which is always one minute of the youtube preset okay so that's
the youtube 4k preset there selected and we'll see how long it's going to take to export that
start on the timer export and it shouldn't take too long you can see it's going through
it relatively quick here the iris pro graphics will aid this okay it finished up there at
approximately one minute and 22 seconds or so which is not too bad for the spec of 8th gen cpu
now on to the fun part so they claim that it can be a bit of a gamer right a gaming machine well
not really i mean this is the witcher 3 on the lowest possible settings 720p and it's struggling
we're getting around 30 frames per second but there are some noticeable lags and dips
now here in the town is where i always test because there's a lot of npcs around there's
a lot to render out in the countryside with this game the frame rate does improve
but really it's a little too choppy here for my own liking i would like to see well
ideally of course around 60 frames per second which we're just not going to be able to get
out of a demanding game like this look at that just down to 19 frames per second so not ideal
but i'll try something a little lighter which is counter strike not as heavy as the witcher 3 here
so this one i set to 1080p on the lowest possible settings and we're getting around 80 frames per
second which yeah it's okay but we can't really take full advantage of the 144 hertz screen
with this kind of hardware ideally we need a dedicated gpu with this don't we needed like an
rtx i don't know like a 3050 ti or something would be perfect with this screen which we simply don't
have so i'm just going to run out here and see if i can get any shots get lucky i think someone's
shooting at me right then probably won't last long at all oh bad time to reload anyway you can
see that it's not really an ideal gamer at all not with this kind of spec even though the iris
655 graphics was good about three years ago for integrated it's now a little bit dated
and finally linux this is working well so the brightness the volume
everything bluetooth wireless all working now battery life i've got some good news in that area
because of the 70 watt hour battery which is chuwi's largest ever that i've come across in
one of their laptops normally there are only like 39 watt hours and a lot of the tech they
have especially with the old gemini lake and the apollo lake and everything like that this one's
big so if you put the screen onto 60 hertz if you don't need 144 hertz for the desktop for your
web browsing and things like that it's well worth it because then you can get around eight
hours of light use now i'm talking about just like streaming youtube okay very very light there
that's not bad it's not bad okay but when you have it on 144 hertz you're doing again light work that
brings it down to about six hours five and a half really able to squeeze out of it so it does take
a toll on that battery life now it's a really odd combination for me this kind of spec to have 144
hertz screen doesn't really make any sense at all because if it had an rtx 3050 in it or a 360 and
then okay yeah fair enough you're gonna be playing your games high frame rate high refresh rate right
but the rx 650 graphics on this as you saw the witcher 3 it's an old title now but it's still
very demanding but hey 30 frames per second and even counter-strike it's not going to be
at 144 frames per second to take advantage of the screen the screen is my biggest complaint
i mean the brightness i measured it again it did get a little brighter around 230 nits
but that's it that's the peak brightness for whites not exactly amazing the color
coverage there terrible 50 adobe rgb not good so anyone who wants to edit video or color grade
or photos not the screen for that not for professionals not for professional use no
the average joe the daily computing however performance is great from the core i5 it is very
good it's quick it's snappy we have an nvme ssd it's not sata3 easy to add another eight gigabytes
of ram which i highly recommend recommend doing you can easily add another ssd say to three
22 by 80. that's good but then there's a few other things speaker support webcam is
poor and the thermals it gets up to 91 degrees celsius it also does trigger thermal throttling
okay and then the wireless card that's a big one for me if i could upgrade the wireless card
it wouldn't be so much of an issue but i'm stuck on wireless ac old tech okay i want wi-fi six spec
and we should have the intel ax200 in this but we simply don't and you cannot swap it
out which is a real shame there so this could have been a really good laptop i think from Chuwi
if we had a better screen if we had maybe 10th gen or 11th gen cpu in this
and priced a little bit better with the wireless ac so pricing wise it's just under 500 euros which
i find is a bit of an ask considering the overall spec other positives though build
quality does seem to be pretty good the hinge seems fine it is lightweight it's thin i do
like it it's like an old acer laptop to me or maybe an msi very very similar there so there
we go now you know the full story of the Chuwi corebook x pro thank you so much for watching
this review i do hope to see you with more up and coming videos in the channel bye for now