hi guys Chris here and I have with me the last budget laptop that I will be
checking out this year now there's another Gemini Lake it's the same N
4100 but what sets this model apart from all those other models like the
Chuwi lapbook SE I've looked at is that this one here has 8 gigabytes of RAM yes
finally now there are a few other models but they're a lot more expensive even
one with upgradeable RAM that I just recently looked at but this model here
from jumpa hopefully lives up to the same kind of standard that we had with
the jumper easy book 3 pro but this apparently has a full plastic build and
might have alloy a metal used on the lid so we have the laptop wrapped in plastic
we have a user guide that is in Chinese and English we get a power plug adapter
that's from banggood and then our power supply with a rather short cable on it
this one here is rated to 12 volts 3 amps and it's exactly the same as the
power supplies used in other easy book laptops so the laptop weighs a light
1.21 kilos and that is because it has an all plastic build which is kind of
unfortunate compared to say DZ book 3 pro which had a premium finish so this
one's definitely a lot chunkier than the other laptops I've looked at you can see
that it's 22 millimeters that's without the rubber feet included so if I include
that foot there now that brings it up to then 25 millimeters so that means the
lead plastic as well and there is a little bit of flex to it on the right of
the easy book s4 we've got a USB 2 port 3.5 millimeter headphone jack and then a
micro SD card reader now that's only on USB 2 spec 1 so reads and writes will
max out and only 23 megabytes per second and then on the Left we have a mini HDMI
out I will check if this supports HDMI too I believe it does which is a
positive there and then a USB 3 port DC in for charging and a status LED so it
just powered it up to confirm that yes we do have an IPS screen I was a little
bit worried because a couple of times in the past they've had notebooks that they
said have IPS screens and the advertising impressed material and you
find out it is a TN panel with very poor vertical viewing angles but as you can
see that those are fine that it's not shifting out
definitely not a TN panel that is an IPS panel we have a 720p webcam right up
here at the top there's some little rubber feet here and as bezel is also
met as well this is an anti-glare 1080p screen which is a different a positive
over other models like the lap bug SC which has a glossy display which is very
susceptible to reflections now also notice too that this bezel around the
screen that the lid itself is a little bit thicker than normal now the hinge
that is nice and stiff I don't see any problems with that and then our keyboard
here so silver keyboard and that's about 1.5 1.4 millimeters of travel and I'm
pressing down really hard you can see there is some flex here that's been an
all-plastic laptop you're going to notice this now it probably does have
metal behind it to help reinforce it but even so there is a little bit flex with
that so if you're quite a heavy type ER and you will notice a little bit of
Bounce there now a power key that isn't separated away from the keyboard either
so there could be accidental touches it has the same resistance as the rest of
the keys here and we do have function keys via this function in an hour if one
to twelve keys they're very hard to actually see that because I've used it
like a light blue color there so we do have three status LEDs ones for power
one and sleep this will be flashing then we've got a number lock and then our
caps lock and then that little tawny dot next to it that's a microphone so we've
got jewelry mics there's one to the right of this one right here now
normally I don't particularly like this location for microphones because what
happens when you're typing away on the keyboard you're gonna get a lot of
feedback and even more so this having a plastic body first impressions of this
touchpad there okay now the surface of it is just a silver matte paint job it's
not a glass covered one or anything like this this is a budget laptop but the
good news is it is a Windows precision driver controlled touchpad so you do
have your gestures and it does overall seem accurate and it seems so far to be
a decent enough touchpad which is good so the screen so far looks okay did a
measurement of the brightness so that's maximum like so it's outputting at 100%
is only about a hundred and eighty lux so that's on the low side as always
mentioned his videos I'd like to see it least over 250 it is a matte screen so
indoors that's looking perfectly fine and you will still be able to make out
what's on the screen even in really bright environments so I don't think
that's going to be too much of an issue but if you wanted one of those really
super bright screens they're gonna be out of luck now the keyboard I
discovered that there is no shortcut on this keyboard for the screen brightness
you're always going to have to go through the settings menu here when you
click on the battery icon another good positive thing about this screen too is
when you put it on to zero percent you can see that as super dim very dim now
you can see this flickering happening right now now that is only on camera
that's some pulse width modulation that's used to control the brightness on
here and you can see it 25% now and at 50 it's almost gone 75 and then one
hunter sent there but again this is only happening on camera that flicker if
you'd like to know more about the screen here it is this is the manufacturer so
it is from BOE that's the model so Google that one so just running Windows
10 home it is version 1803 the latest is 1809 so you will need to run a few
updates on that it was already set up so I just went straight into the desktop so
you can prolly do a factory reset and then your key in whatever username you
want and things like that if you're little bit worried about that now you
probably had to do a fresh clean install and there's no problems with the drivers
I will be creating a driver backup for this and also upload that onto my
website so for the C drive where Windows is installed there we've only got 98
gigabytes free on that 128 gigabytes drive
now I've just been benchmarking it and you can see here that it's not actually
an SSD drive so that person that pointed out on my forum that they got an emmc it
seems that all models or lists the first batch are using e MMC drives and not is
his DS so that's a little bit of false advertising there because I'm pretty
sure on the website it says that it's an SSD so we'll open this up and see if we
do at least have that MDOT - is this t-slot in there for upgrades of adding a
set of three Drive and here is our RAM so it is running in dual channel HW info
also confirms us so we're getting a little bit of extra bandwidth versus say
the single channel laptops out there with the same sauron in 4,100
the RAM speed is 2133 megahertz and then lastly with our devices here we've got
Intel's wireless AC 3165 of course we do it wouldn't be another wireless AC
chipset sole is it as well as AC but this one's not the fastest out there so
it's gonna max out around about 380 megabits per second throughput give you
a short preview now of the speakers so they're on the bottom downwards firing
and they've got really no base to them the volume is average it's okay not
quality speakers they could definitely be louder but here's that sample
they can look at the insights now so we have the wireless antennas on the palm
rest so just above the palm wrist that's not really in the optimal location
really it should be around the lid and the lid being plastic and having that
when you're up means you get normally a little bit better coverage there but it
doesn't seem to be too much of a problem the fact that they have it down here
we've got two separate antennas of course now the battery you can see here
it is 35 watt hours so a little bit less than other models by about two watt
hours the likes of the easy book sorry the laptop is see that one has 37 watt
hours so we're missing out on about half an hour run time so this can get around
seven hours this laptop here which isn't too bad you can see the two speakers
either side that's why they don't have a lot of base they don't sound
particularly good they're not wonderful they're only small cheap speakers and
then when you take a look at the motherboard so right here of course
without a very nice large copper heatsink and so far this does seem to do
the job in my testing I've been running a few stress tests and a couple of games
and things it doesn't tend to go over about 83 degrees so it's holding up
which is fine that's what you want but we don't have a course on the back of
the lid metal as well so you can't really put a thermal pad on here and
then have that transferring the heat over to the back because the the plastic
course acts as an insulator it's not going to be transmitting any heat
through to that so HDMI this is the mini HDMI port right there yes it is
HDMI to that 60 Hertz in fact no not 60 Hertz it runs at 57 Hertz for some
reason I don't know why that is and here is yes our SD card slot so this is where
we'd put in a 22 by 80 there's no screw unfortunately included so that's where
you put in your set of three SSD so in terms of upgrades that's kind of good if
you're not happy with the speeds of 120 eight gigabyte Drive that's on there add
another one another hundred twenty-eight gigabyte SSD or add 256 gigabytes and
that because you plan your storage option so you can see one of the
microphones here and there is the other one right on the other side over there
now there is a middle backing plate so this is behind the keyboard so we still
have a bit of flex there and that's probably caused by the fact that it's a
little bit Hollow around here so it will still have a little bit of area you can
see there that it will flex in a little bit so this is why this design is not
as premium as their other notebooks it's just not as firm not as solid feeling
they're obviously they're going for cost reduction they're going for weight
reduction and certainly this is what you get and you get a little bit of plastic
mostly plastic around here now there is of course metal around here the hinge
itself the hinge mechanism you can see there that's screwed in place and it has
a bolt on that and that of course is metal so that Elise is going to hold up
that's overall the mean the book quality is decent it's just not the best I've
seen so I didn't store one of my own set of three SSDs and it detected it just
fine it is working at set of three speeds which is great just to point out
- and the BIOS here that everything is unlocked to us completely open so all
the settings you can imagine they are all there accessible to you and a lot of
them you can actually get yourself in a lot of trouble but the one we want here
is the CPU configuration and this is the CPU power management so they have set
and also power limit here so that's going to be I think six watts or nine
watts or whatever they're going to select for this but you can go and
manually override this of course to set your own power limit in there that's the
maximum power it will use and that will boost in performance but also increase
the heat so this is the reason why it is not getting too hot because they've only
set as six watt power limit that's the Otto sitting it goes with Intel's
default so if you override that and the bias where I showed you before sits
something like nine watts and you get up to about 89 degrees there 90 it climbs
up but it will increase the performance because then it can hold 2.3 gigahertz
on all four of the cause without any problems and testing out the latest
Linux Mint build here this one's running fine everything seems to work I won't go
as far as installing it but the wireless is working the touchpad is working and
the audio - so that is good to see now to comment on the performance it's as
expected it's no faster than my chewy lap book SC mean we've got double the
RAM but the RAM is running at the same speeds it just means that we can
multitask a little bit more freely it's not gonna
be swapping to that SSD or the emmc as much and you're really just gaining that
so the tabs won't have to reload for example in chrome if you're gonna start
to really fill it up you can multitask a little bit light use it's gonna be
perfectly fine you can watch 4k videos and it'll be natively decoding those as
well with the vp9 support HEV C files no problems there
spreadsheets and all that is this going to be working fine so performance wise I
mean this is quite good for light computing I've had eight afternoon of
solid typing on this keyboard and it's average it's good I think most people
gonna be happy with this keyboard as I pointed out there as does a little bit
of flex there's this bounce on here but were your normal typing pressure it's
not really that much of an issue I think the topping and the feedback you get
back from those keys is alright but it's still nothing near as good as the likes
of the lap book essays now this keyboard is backlit it has slightly larger keys
better spacing and overall it's just a lot more comfortable to use the same
goes for the trackpad on this so they're not going to beat easy book jumper the
likes of this keyboard and trackpad combination which is still the current
best that I have seen on a budget laptop there one thing the easy book is for
does have that I believe is better it's more practical more useful as course the
screen having the matte coating on this one means it's just a lot easier on the
eyes you don't get all the reflections like you do with the fully laminated
glass on this one is maybe not as punchy at the screen because of that as a
result so it's not as bright either as the to Alette book is he's screen but
then too we have that double the RAM so it really it depends on what you want
here between these two laptops if you need the eight gigabytes then by all
means that's probably the one to go for but if you can live with the four then
yes as a pointed out meaning if you see my channel the lab book I see is is one
of the better ones and best ones out there that I've seen so far
so this is the webcam here and I thought in the beginning this was 720p but no
it's only 480 pieces it's a very full webcam you can see in the quality VGA
resolution and the audio well not the greatest even if you type in the
keyboard you know right now there's quite a bit of that sounds going to be
transmitting through to those microphones located just above the
keyboard alright so overall I think this is an
average led laptop okay it's got a lot of things that are good and then there's
a few things in an so great like massive deal breakers no it doesn't have it okay
start out with the screen so 1080p it's matte coated it's anti glare and the
brightness okay lacking a little however bright lights that I have on at the
moment you can see the screen I think it's it currently at about 75%
it's bright enough it's gonna be fine I don't think a lot of people gonna have
problems with us unless you decide to use this in direct sunlight then you
probably need a bit brighter but even then you're still going to make out what
is on the screen because of their anti glare the matte coating it has on this
so the keyboard to type on I've done now a bit of typing on this and I don't need
weeks with this laptop to know that the keyboard is fine it's good for most
things no shortcut for the brightness for some reason the function and then
the media controls and that you get from the function keys are the color of
Euston that makes it a little bit difficult to see at times depending on
that angle of that silver key caps not a big fan of that I prefer to have dark
ones but at least they did use the dark lettering on top of those keys which
makes it not a problem the likes of the backlit keyboards have that we've had
before with these with jumper - it's been see-through and it's been really
hard to see but not here plastic cameras plastic build means it's lighter but
it's not as strong and of course does not feel as premium so the wireless
range the signal even though the antennas as I showed you when we looked
at the internals are here the range is fine the speeds 380 360 max is are we
going to get through from this Wireless chip set for the throughput there I mean
it's alright it is a budget laptop after all so the eight gigabytes of RAM
doesn't make it faster than the lab book AC doesn't make it faster than the other
Gemini late models it actually doesn't know I mean if you do set the power
limit to something like nine Watts 10 watts even it's a little bit quicker
then feels a little bit more snappy but it feels pretty much exactly the same as
my let book AC but the more RAM on here means you can freely multitask you can
start multitasking without it swapping and you don't notice the slowdown then
when you start running lots of different applications it comes on a lot later so
it's only delaying that and having that extra room it's definitely well worth
that a lot of people to say no I won't get the other models because if I only
got four gigabytes of RAM then this is probably one you want to look at Linux
support thumbs up there took their took those boxes for Linux it's all working
wireless everything I couldn't see any problems with that I haven't done an
install on this yet I just don't have time but if I do I'll probably let you
know on Twitter I don't see there being a prominent you'll probably install it
on the emmc and then put it on to windows maybe on
the assist if you wants you could run a dual boot set up I've done it before
Linux Mint and it works out to be fine so the SSD that's what we
into a problem where is it we've got emmc spec drive so they're obviously
banking that a lot of people wouldn't recognize that and a lot of people
probably wouldn't they see 128 gigabyte Drive in there from same side and think
oh yeah there's I Drive so it's both a pro and a con that you
can put a faster SSD in here upgrade your storage without having to remove
that installation of Windows is a positive but the same thing all their
press material the websites selling this like for example banggood it says it's
an SSD but it's not so that's false advertising there so they could run into
problems with that and I know someone on my forum did comment that they got an
emmc so it seems like the first batch at least they aren't using SSD so that's
really disappointing to see there so overall I think yeah it's a little bit
more bulky yes it's plastic but it is lighter is it
the best Gemini Lake out there no, no one's going to take that crown off the
lap book SE of course which I have here that's my favorite that's the one I use
and when you hold both for these yeah this one does it does feel a lot heavier
it's a heavy one this is about 1.45 kilos and this being the 1.2 kilos a lot
lighter a lot a little bit more portable but of course it is thinner this one
here so that's my pic that's pulley the best one to go for it but if you need
the eight gigabytes of RAM take a look at this one here just bear in mind with
those cons that I said the speakers to very poor on this I think they're even
worse than the choice but that is kind of typical for these budget laptops they
never seem to have good speakers in them thank you so much for watching this
video and if you haven't checked out my review of the Lapbook SE that one's
right up here