This is Chuwi's Lapbook Air and it is the best Apollo Lake laptop that I have
reviewed so far at all the models I have looked at. So this particular one is also
the first of the Apollo Lake laptops to have eight gigabytes of RAM only the
mini pcs have been using eight gigabytes which is really good to see and has a
backlit keyboard the screen is an IPS 14 point one inches 1080p deep blacks good
colors and it has glass over the front of it scratch resistant fully laminated
so it does look really good but because of that glass it is really quite
reflective to which you'll notice if you try and use this in bright environments
then those reflections could be a little bit annoying to some people um I don't
find it too much of an issue because I only use laptops indoors normally so it
doesn't worry me there but if it's going to be a problem then go for course
something that's got an anti-glare screen so on the back of it you'll
notice that we've got a Chui backlit logo so they put some clear plastic on
the lid but the whole bold of it is made out of metal and it's quite light - it
weighs 1.34 kilos which is a really good weight for a fourteen point one inch
laptop and it is 17 millimeters thin that is at the thickest part on this end
right here with a rubber feet are so along the bottom you'll notice that
there's a little easy access flap on there so if you open that up just with
one screw you can install an SSD but sadly only the 22 millimeter by 42
millimeter SSDs will fit on there but it's great to have this option and there
are two downloads firing speakers I'll give you a sample of those later on in
this video now the keyboard it's backlit we've got approximately 1.5 millimeters
of travel a very nice keyboard to type on I really do like it it's very similar
to the lat book fourteen point one's keyboard and it is backlit that's
probably why this is the most expensive of the Apollo Lake laptops I have looked
at because of that screen and the back look keyboard now the backlighting on it
isn't perfect if you have a look here the function the f10 key is slightly
brighter than the rest of the keys and you notice that some del patches and
other areas are slightly brighter so it's not perfect in regards to the the
lighting on this and at a certain angles when you look at the keyboard you can
see the actual LEDs underneath those keys because the keys are quite high due
to their greater travel they have on them but a good keyboard overall and in
the touchpad it is a precision touchpad so it works
with Windows position drivers really good to use and it has advanced controls
over gestures using those settings there so you can disable tweak the gestures
you can also disable the touchpad automatically when you plug in an
external mouse which is another little bonus there it's good to have full
control over it now linux users you will have issues with this touchpad I
couldn't find the drivers for this and I didn't honestly spend a lot of time on
there so you have to hunt around for drivers but otherwise Linux does work on
this machine quite well check out my unboxing video for that now for ports on
the right side we have two USB 3 ports they will power external hard drives and
a 3.5 if I'm going to meet a headphone jack now I did notice that the headphone
jack is most of the time clear there is no static no bars however when you plug
in power to charge you get a tiny tiny hint of interference through that line
and that is typical but it's really a slight issue there I feel that it seems
to be unavoidable what happens on a lot of these cheaper laptops and then on the
left hand side - you will find a micro SD card slot now the micro SD s it in
flush there so you shouldn't have them going missing or being broken off or
anything when putting this in a backpack or into a sleeve and then we have D C in
there for charging and the mini HDMI out which works up to 4k 30 Hertz now along
the top there is a 2 megapixel 720p webcam 30 frames per second and two
microphones either side so it's supporting dual ray microphones
just to point out to that one minor complaint is this screen will only
recline back this far so that's the furthest it will go which should be a
little bit more if you ask me now the easy Book Pro here you can see
reclines back a fraction more and even that is not enough for me personally I
would like them to go back a little more because if you lose using this on your
lap as you would probably a laptop it I feel needs to go back a bit more doesn't
it really so the eight gigabytes of RAM it has it's running at 1333 megahertz
which isn't the fastest supported speed ideally there should be 1600
however due to RAM timings it's not really affecting the performance of this
laptop it comes with Windows 10 home it fully activates no problems with that
and chewy has partitioned the Samsung MMC 128 gigabyte one its
MMC 5 spec 40 gigabytes has assigned to Windows and then 75.8 data which you can
put some files on there ideally I would have liked them just have made it all
just one complete Drive but I guess they've done this for various reasons
that you can store your data on that and in theory you might be able to do a
factory reset without losing those files but it all depends on whether when you
do the recovery of course on this machine whether it will end up
repartition and wiping everything personally I wouldn't risk it now when
we have a look at the drive speeds of that Samsung emmc 5.1 spec you'll see on
the right here that very fast 283 sequential and 125 sequential write
speeds really good and the 4k is aren't bad either
and my SSD which is a transcend 256 gigabyte set a 3-1 that is running at
its full speeds there so there's no issues with that slot running slower
than it should which happened on some of the first Apollo 8 laptops I looked at
so the wireless is an Intel 31 65 it's wireless AC and these speeds I've been
getting out of it and the range seemed really good
perfectly fine just like the other note ports were this I haven't noticed any
range problems either I can go over to the other side of the apartment here and
it performs just as well as even my xiaomi me notebook here so that is good
and then when it comes to synthetic benchmarks yes they are slightly slower
than say the jumper easy books repro these are of course are just numbers
here it's only marginally slower so it is quite hard in these videos to get
across just how these devices perform and this is the
fastest polar lake in 3450 I have seen thanks to the eight gigabytes of RAM it
Scott so here in chrome I have many tabs open as you can see and I can switch
between them and just look how well this is performing really good scrolling
speed is still fast and I'm also running Photoshop here in the background now you
can do some minor Photoshop edits but really massive edits with huge amounts
of layers and things it's going to get slow it will definitely slow down quite
a bit there now I've even have here a 4k video which I will just restart here
refresh this I will not edit this out so you can see how long it takes to load in
okay so that's still in 4k there bring up the stats again I had them just in
the background before and you can see now it's only dropped one frame and this
also give you an idea of how good this 1080p screen looks now tried to
calibrate the colors on this video to look like real life here so it should
pretty much exactly what you're seeing is what I'm seeing right now and just
swapping between the tabs I mean look at this for me this performance is
excellent for an Apollo Lake it really is good whatever Chuy's down here to
tweak this up I just think it's the RAM eight gigabytes around with the CPU and
it has really come alive it's so much better than four gigabytes or running
the six gigabytes even on the likes of the jump easy book three pro so when it
comes to video playback the Apollo Lake support vp9 codec and also a Qi VC
codecs natively so that means it's a lot faster than the old atom chipsets and
here I have a sampled at a hundred and forty megabits per second this is ten
bit and you see there were a few stutters when it started up skipping
ahead takes just a second and very smooth playback of this very demanding
video file so battery life is very important of course in a laptop and a
notebook and the Apollo Lakes generally do quite well and this is getting on par
with other laptops I've tested out so we're looking at about seven to eight
hours in my test here multiple tabs open in chrome 30%
brightness which was adequate and perfectly fine for indoor use it's
neither too bright nor too dull there with the wireless tone of course and I
was using Amazon Prime video so overall I feel a good result here now this is
all going to depend on your brightness setting and use if you're doing
something demanding like gaming then it's only going to be about three hours
now to fully charge this laptop here from 0% or 7% my battery was that took
approximately 4 hours and 12 minutes so it's not super fast to charge so during
my battery test I also kept an eye on the thermals and the maximum power use
here so you can see it got up to peaked at 10 watts and we got up to 61 degrees
which is excellent but this wasn't gaming so the GPU has not been pushed
here yet but later on after my gaming test I'll come back and I'll revisit the
thermals so the speakers on the laptop here they aren't impressive they are
quite flat they're lacking bass lacking a little bit of volume and overall they
are a little bit disappointing they are very similar to the easy put 3 pro
speakers which as well aren't great but let's have a quick listen to them
so another positive here is Chewie has enabled all the options and the bias
normally they lock it out to us but here we have a completely unlocked bias all
the settings are open including the one that is most interesting which is the
power limit by default it's enabled but if we go into the BIOS which I'm doing
right now is disabling this and what this will do is let the CP use as much
power as it wants that will let the GPU clock up very high higher than normal it
will of course use more power so you're going to have decreased battery life and
will also increase temperatures so you have to use this setting with caution it
means if you gain for extended periods it could end up running into thermal
throttling and no doubt probably will but the gains we get when gaming as I'll
show you in just a second really makes this worth it if of course it can handle
the temperatures so I'm going to show you a game first with the power limit
enabled by default and then disabled and we can have a look at the benefit so
with the default power limits you can see we're getting around 50 frames per
second here on the dust2 map lower settings and I'm about to die 800
x 600 resolution now we'll have a look with those power limits turned off and
now back on the same server you can see that the frame rate has improved quite a
lot we're getting around 60 frames per second here 62 so around about a 20-30
percent increase which is really good and of course I died
League of Legends here now with the power limits still disabled is getting a
very respectable close to 60 frames per second 1080p on the lowest settings here
you can see very low that is really good performance though for this type of
chipset install games like asphalt extreme running in 1080p on the default
settings very fluid super playable with that power limit disabled it'll still
run fine with the power limit on of course it just won't be so fluid like it
is now
so the trade-off of increasing the performance by disabling the power limit
you get this 92 degrees maximum on the CPU now this is after 30 minutes of
solid gaming which I feel is good it didn't run into thermal throttling but
it wouldn't be too far away from it now if you keep the power limit as stock
standard don't touch the sitting then you're only looking at about 83 to 84
degrees maximum after the same period of gaming
of course disabling in that you increase the power usage and that is why it's
getting a lot hotter now the laptop will be warm to the touch as well as another
con of disabling that power limit so sure we have a real winner here on their
hands this is a great little laptop I love the screen it's got deep blacks
very nice colors on it and it's bright too but it can also dim down nice and
dim for nighttime use the backlit keyboard also is a great bonus to have
on there well it's not perfectly evenly distributed the light on it and you can
see some of the light you see from this angle right now underneath those keys
it's a nice keyboard to type on the touchpad is also excellent we're getting
seven to eight hours of battery life and ok it is missing a type C port on there
and the price the price is the biggest con here it is expensive for an Apollo
Lake laptop even if it's got the eight gigabytes of RAM and 128 gigabytes of
storage and you can extend upon that storage adding your own SSD which I
highly recommend it's expensive we're getting up towards you add another
hundred u.s. or so you can buy yourself four core m3 laptop which will have
better performance than this about double the performance so there's a bit
to think on there if true we can lower the price then I would have no problem
at all recommending the saying this is the best it is so far in my testing
right now it's the fastest because of the eight gigabytes of RAM and the RAM
timings are quite good even if the speed is 1,300 and 33 megahertz it's really
good at multitasking you saw my little test there so I had all those tabs open
in Chrome I did some 4k streaming and also had
Photoshop there in the background you can push it a lot harder than the other
Apolo Lake laptops and you power the disable that power limit and then that
even boosts up the gaming for months to make it's quite decent
really you can get league of legends at 60 frames per second 1080p that is good
but of course is the carnet pushes the temperatures up to 92 degrees now
without that power limit being touched you keep that on the default setting
then it gets up to about eighty degrees and temperatures are really quite good
on this so overall a very decent laptop the only thing is that price really is
just what puts me off a little bit from saying yeah this is the best you've got
other options like the easy books free Pro which sells for a lot cheaper about
a hundred US cheaper offers similar performance but it doesn't have the
fully laminated screen the backlit keyboard and overall not as fast but it
is still very good so I recommend checking out that model if you are on a
budget thank you so much for watching this review this could be my last review
of an Apollo Lake laptop before I move on to the successor the new chipset
that's coming out hopefully at the end of the year the jiminy lake thanks a lot
for watching this video if you do have any questions let me know down in the
comments bye for now