- It has no flashy plastic design, no RGB lighting,
no overclocking and the performance isn't even very good.
But make no mistake, the GPD Win Max,
arguably packs more PC gaming punch per liter
than anything that's ever come before it,
and I was lucky enough to be sent a pre-production unit.
So, let's have a look at it together.
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(upbeat music)
The first thing my wife said is that
it reminds her of the Aspire One.
Given the thickness of the GPD Max,
and the cramped keyboard,
that's not entirely an unfair comparison.
But a lot was learned from the early netbooks
and performance has come a long way since Intel Atom.
GPD ended up taking a shockingly zero compromises approach
to the Win Max,
and the highlights of its specifications include,
16 Gigs of LPDDR4X memory,
512 Gigs of NVME storage,
and eight inch 500nit display,
lightening fast Wi-Fi six,
and enough IO to embarrass some laptops
that are twice its size.
But the star of the show,
is the 10 nanometer Intel Quad Core processor,
that manages to turbo all the way up
to three to 3.3 gigahertz,
under light real world all core loads.
Guys, that is just about the same base frequency,
as a 4770 desktop chip.
And, it comes loaded with Iris plus graphics 940.
Yeah, we were gonna have to get to that eventually.
It uses onboard graphics,
but as we've seen so many times before,
a complete product can be more than the sum of its parts.
Yes my friends, that is GTA 5 running on the Win Max.
But hold on, it's worth talking about
some of the set up first.
One of the first things I did was pop into the BIOS
and toggle the CPU's TDP to the maximum, 25 watts.
It's pretty typical these days
for Intel to have configurable thermal envelopes
for their mobile chips,
but usual the device manufacturer will pick one for you
and design a thermal solution that allows the chip
to go as fast as it can, within that limit, not here.
Now it's a little klugdy and requires a reboot every time,
but leaving this to the user,
allows those folks who are mostly interested
in retro-game emulation,
to extend their battery life considerably,
by tuning power consumption down or by disabling cores,
while offering maximum performance,
to those who are looking to play older Triple A PC games
or emulated games from much newer consoles.
When it comes to real-world performance,
other than a couple of misleading bits in the marketing,
I'm thrilled, in truly heavy workloads,
the 1035 G7 falls well behind a 4790K, let's be honest,
but PlayStation 1 emulation was flawless,
PlayStation 2 was super fluid,
in fact, almost anything that's normally CPU-bound,
even Dolphin which is notoriously CPU heavy,
due to the GameCube and whiz IBM processor,
ran more like I would expect it to run on something
that would fit in my lap,
not something that would fit in my hand.
Even GPE's representation
of the PC gaming experience, is pretty upfront.
Modern demanding Triple-A games will run,
as long as you don't mind
cranking down the graphical settings,
and living with a 30-ish FPS experience.
As for older Triple-A games, these run, oh it crashed.
Yeah, it's an early unit and the firmware
and the hardware are both not final.
So, I did run into some issues here,
but until it crashed it was running great.
I mean, it's crazy because I remember
when you needed a top-tier gaming PC
to run Batman Arkham Asylum.
This thing though, you can basically max it out,
running at 60 FPS, with only very occasional stutters,
and that's at native resolution,
and therein lies some of the magic.
Built into the Win Max, is an HIPS panel
that's rated for 500 nits max brightness,
and runs at 1280 by 800 resolution.
That is pretty low for a modern display,
and if you have sharp eyesight the experience is not
as good as they seem to make it out to be.
In the Indiegogo pitch, GPD points out, how the pixel pitch,
the pixel density of their display compares to common laptop
and desktop display sizes in pixel counts.
The problem, is that,
the way that you would typically hold the GPD max,
puts it much closer to your face than those other displays.
So you need more pixel density,
in order for it to reach Retina levels,
where you can't make out the individual pixels.
I do understand the design limitations at play here though,
it's not like the Iris Pro graphics.
We're gonna be able to drive anything higher
than an HD panel anyway,
and playing at a lower but still native resolution,
is definitely better the alternative,
truthfully, I'd have done it exactly the same way.
I just felt that it was a little disingenuous
to make the comparisons that they did.
Some more good news though, is that,
I absolutely love the built-in controller.
As we've seen on previous GPD products,
there's a rocker on the side that toggles the controller
between mouse mode with the shoulder buttons acting
as left and right click, and game pad mode,
which is a standard XInput,
meaning that it usually requires
no configuration to "just work."
This is far and away their best effort so far,
the A, B, X, Y buttons are delightfully clicky but not loud.
The D-pad is the best I've seen on anything
that isn't a dedicated game controller,
and the analog sticks,
they might take up a ton of space internally
that might have been great to use for battery,
but they were totally worth it.
The tension on them is just right,
the plastic ribbing on the top
is the perfect balance of control and durability,
and I got no annoying dead zones,
putting me in perfect control all the time.
If I had to complain about the game pad,
I would say the shoulder buttons
are a little light for my taste.
The intake factor on the bottom actually
makes my fingers cold when I'm playing,
if I'm not wearing a warm hoodie from lttstore.com, that is.
The Win Max itself is heavy enough,
that you pretty much have to rest it on something,
if you're playing for more than about 15 minutes.
Back to the marketing though, my final beef is this,
while it is true that PlayStation 3 emulation is possible
with the Win Max, you're gonna be limited
to the much lighter games from that console
and the Xbox 360 for that matter,
if you want frame rates of 30 FPS or more.
Now I did technically run some heavier games.
This is BioShock 2 for example,
but as you can see the experience was not great.
One way around this,
would be to use the Thunderbolt 3 port on the back,
to hook up an external GPU, that is super cool.
Like Thunderbolt 3 in this thing, dang!
I have long been a Thunderbolt 3 graphics card enthusiast,
but all the compact Thunderbolt 3 graphics cards
that I'm aware of, either never made it to market,
or have gone extinct, meaning that, if you want to do that,
you're stuck tethered to a big old brick
that's plugged into the wall.
At that point, I mean,
why wouldn't I just use a normal controller,
and play on the larger display of my real laptop
or TV or something, but Linus you might say.
Maybe the Win Max is your only computer.
You use it as a handheld on the go, and you dock it at home.
You simply must have a solution to this problem.
Given the luxury pricing of both the Win Max and eGPU,
I find that scenario pretty hard to swallow,
but at least hey, the option is there if you're into it,
and performance is shockingly good.
The Win Max's open airflow bottom,
might give it a bit more flex than I'd like,
and it can get pretty loud,
but it allows the dual fan cooler
to breathe extremely well and kept the CPU
in the high 60s to low 70s, throughout my testing.
All of which was done again, at max TDP.
I bet a MacBook Air would need water cooling for that.
We should test that, get subscribed to see it.
Just make sure to though, that a webcam,
yeah it took me a while to realize it's missing one,
and a separate keyboard is part of your docking solution,
if you wanna go that route.
I really wanted to like the keyboard
and the touch pad, they include a dedicated F keys,
which I appreciated and it's pretty neat,
how in controller mode,
you can kind of thumb the track pad around,
but the arrow keys are terrible.
This Caps Lock, should absolutely be Tab
and it's just too cramped to really game comfortably on.
Not to mention that I can type faster on my phone,
than I can type on this thing.
That's really the final nail in the,
"I'm gonna make this my only computer pipe dream for me."
I see the Win Max as a second or maybe even a third PC,
but that does not mean that I don't like it.
This is a really cool device.
Once they sort out those stability issues,
that prevented me from even testing battery life,
I'd expect 10 hours
or maybe more in our light office benchmark,
which is pretty done good,
considering the 57 watt hour battery,
that's 10 nanometer for you.
Like anything though, it's full of sacrifices
and it lacks the kind of polish
that you might expect from the likes of Dell,
if that weird Alienware Nintendo Switch thing
ever comes to market, but bottom line,
if you're the kind of person who was already salivating
over the prospect of a handheld emulation monster,
and you were just waiting for me to say, yep,
they pretty much does what they said it would do,
then go now, just buy it.
This is without a doubt one of the coolest PC's
on the market and it may be a long time,
before something this unique comes along again.
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If you guys enjoyed this video, maybe check out our preview
of Alienware similarly equipped switch clone thing
from CES this year.
Wow, remember trade shows?
That feels like a lifetime ago alright.