- I sent 385 US dollars to the NWNLAP Factoey Outlet
on AliExpress, and in return, I received this.
It's got a 16 inch, 2560 by 1600 type screen,
a fully mechanical keyboard, 16 gigs of RAM,
five free included accessories,
including this sleeve,
and an aluminum shell.
This might be the best value gaming laptop
that I have ever seen unless they skimped out on this.
That is so cool.
And on this.
Oh no.
And if they screwed this up.
(laughs)
The closer we look at this thing,
the more questions we have.
But spoiler alert, I can't even begin
to guess what the designers were thinking
when they built the NWNLAP H16.
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Right out of the gate, the product page
for the NWNLAP Notebook 16.0 inch is about four miles
of laughably inaccurate information,
starting with the price.
We paid 385 US dollars for this thing,
but we have no idea what the real price is.
Somewhere in the week between it arriving in our office
and us writing this script,
the price almost doubled to $660.
Then a day later, it dropped below what we paid to 375.
Then, there's the fact that I have never heard of NWNLAP.
It seems like what they've done is put their sticker
on the bottom of a machine that is actually from DEEQ,
which explains everything.
No, actually, that explains nothing.
Who the heck is DEEQ?
I've never heard of them either.
The only information I could find on Google
is this company profile on EC21 that introduces DEEQ
as a laptop OEM/ODM with the most excellent circuit design.
According to this page, they have between
50 and 100 employees in Shenzhen, China,
and they were established in 2011.
But then according to this same page,
the last time they logged in was 10 years ago,
so this information could be out of date.
No worries, I'll just click through to their website and...
Oh.
Let's take a closer look at the included sleeve
and the other free gifts.
That's pretty sleevey.
Oh, you know what's funny?
It's mouse pad material.
It's just sewn together.
I have to know now, though.
Is there, like, a rubberized backing on the inside of this?
Oh, you know what?
No, I don't need to bring out my keys
because I have my JerryRig Everything knife available,
lttstore.com.
I think it is.
Nope, nope.
The sleeve is a denser foam
and it has a different backing on it.
Ooh.
It includes a gaming mouse, 3D gaming mouse.
This is no two-dimensional mouse.
We also get a USB 2.0 ethernet adapter,
but don't expect it to be a very impressive one.
This is...
Wait, what?
Does this thing work?
Really?
- [Harrison] We found drivers and tested them.
- Half of the contacts in the RJ45 port are missing.
It's only fast ethernet,
which by today's standards, is not fast.
(beep) megabytes per second is what you're gonna get
from one of these.
And then, your final free gift is some orange key caps
for your gaming keys.
On the left, we've got a whole lot of nothing.
On the rear, we've got USB-C, mini HDMI,
an AC in barrel jack, and a USB-A.
There's another USB-A over on the right
along with a MicroSD slot.
It's nice. I like to see that.
A headphone jack and a webcam storage slot.
Now, hold on a minute.
That's right.
This is an idea that I actually pitched ages ago
back when ASUS was dumping webcams
from all their gaming laptops.
It's a magnetic webcam,
and it actually uses magnets and these pogo pins
to attach to the top of the display.
No need for a notch, no need for a cutout
or a big, tall upper bezel.
Ah? These guys must watch LTT.
And what's really cool is if you weren't NWNLAP,
and you were able to build out an ecosystem
of accessories here,
you could put other stuff there,
like a better microphone or...
Okay, I don't have too many ideas,
but definitely a webcam.
You gotta give them credit,
the aesthetics aren't really any worse
than any other gaming laptop these days.
I've seen laptops that cost twice this much
with more chassis flex than this has.
It's pretty rigid.
Let's go ahead and turn the...
I really hope this display gets a little bright...
Hey, yeah.
Not bad.
And the display is one of the highlight features
of this machine.
It's advertised as a golden ratio display,
and what that means is that it uses a 16 by 10 aspect ratio.
And you know what, and this is one of the things
that I feel is absolutely a fair marketing point
for this product.
16 by 10 is so much better for anyone who can make use
of a little bit of extra vertical space.
Be you a writer, an avid reader, a video editor.
It's like that many more tracks,
that many more lines of text.
It's freaking awesome.
It's also an IPS type matte panel with good...
If decidedly last gen viewing angles and brightness.
Like man, if all I wanted was a big, fat 16 by 10...
I mean it's 60 hertz, but like, for under 400 bucks
for the whole machine?
Wait, what do you mean you can't find my camera?
Come on.
Oh my God, this mouse is...
Can you hear the sound it makes?
(laughs)
- [Harrison] Best advice I have,
off on, off on as many times as it takes to get it working.
- Oh, just do it a bunch of times?
- Yeah. - Well, that's unfortunate.
I guess my idea is not as good as I thought.
One idea we have is to try to pull out the pins a bit.
Yes.
- [Harrison] I don't see any flaws with this setup.
- No, this seems pretty good to me too.
Hi, just checking out the...
Oh, crap.
Well, not every one I'm one of my ideas is good in practice.
That says staying in there as it is?
Oh boy.
I mean, I guess it kind of stays.
The screen looks great.
Cannot emphasize that enough.
Wait a minute.
These aren't speakers at all. - No.
- They are purely decorative.
Oh no.
Okay, where's the sound actually coming from?
They're coming from the bottom.
At least they're stereo,
and they do not sound very good.
However, they get loud enough and are clear enough
that I don't think that watching just random content
is gonna be a huge problem.
What about the keyboard?
It's a green axis mechanical keyboard
with what they're calling "multi gear backlighting"
to let your fingers dance.
They appear to be using a replica
of the (indistinct) Kailh's low profile line.
I mean, remember when Kailh was the ripoff
switch company? - Yeah.
- How the turntables have turned.
The field got a pretty mixed reaction around the office,
but most people had their expectations happily exceeded
once they heard the price.
As for me...
They're a little mushier than they could be.
I'm definitely detecting some inconsistency
between the keys.
This has, hands down, the best keyboard I've ever seen
on a laptop under $500.
Not even (beep) close.
New standard of entry level laptop keyboard.
If all you need to do is type,
this thing might actually come away
from this with a recommendation.
There are some quirks.
For some reason, three of the function keys
all have exactly the same function.
See this brightness down one? It doesn't go down.
It just cycles through all the brightness levels.
But there are some things the keyboard does right,
even when it comes to functionality.
For example, it has function keys to turn off the backlight
of the display and to disable the touch pad.
The track pad is not big by modern keyboard standards,
especially for a 16 inch device,
but it is surprisingly usable two-handed,
which a lot of the time can have issues
with lower end laptops where the palm rejection
will kick in and it won't work.
And it's perfectly responsive.
I... Man, I was expecting to just dunk on this thing
and I actually kinda like it.
Whoa, shut up.
It has fingerprint login, and it works?
And who are we sending our fingerprints to?
Actually, on that subject,
it is time to explore our Windows installation,
and things are about to get a lot weirder.
The writer for this video has a list
of four strange changes that have been made
to the stock Windows install,
and I'm supposed to see how many of them I catch here.
Oh, that poor CPU at 100%.
Opening up task manager (Harrison laughing)
is a little rough.
Celeron.
Now, that's a name I've not heard in a long time.
But we've got 16 gigs of RAM.
2,400 megahertz.
Is this DDR3?
It is DDR4.
It's just really slow DDR4.
Who even still makes 24...
And wait, am I out of touch here?
Is 2,400 DDR4 slow?
- [Harrison] Yes.
- It's slow, right?
Like, that's really slow, right?
- [Harrison] Oh yeah.
- This is a 10 nanometer chip?
This is not old.
Launched in Q1 of 2021.
This is a 10 watt chip.
Should it be obvious?
- [Harrison] One of them is pretty obvious on the desktop.
Think the others will be a little more obvious
if you're poking around.
- Okay, I give up.
What is it that's not default about the desktop here?
- [Harrison] It's the icons.
They've enabled the snap feature
so that you can't move an icon where you want it to.
It always goes to the end of the list.
- Interesting.
Now this isn't like, "Oh, phone home,"
you know, weird hackery nonsense or anything.
- [Harrison] We'll get to that.
- But it does indicate that they have absolutely
made changes to Windows before shipping it
with this machine.
Now, this is something I should have checked right away.
How on Earth is this licensed?
It just doesn't say.
(Harrison laughing)
That's not how...
Wait, hold now. Hold on just a gosh darn minute here.
- [Harrison] Do you want a laptop that's already on?
- No, no, I've got the best laptop.
(humming)
Everything about this appears to be completely normal.
This is activated using
my organization's activation service.
Okay. Can I get updates?
These lights here, which I assumed were for, like,
num lock and caps lock and stuff,
appear to be purely decorative.
I can get updates.
I'm afraid I'm not gonna find the weird stuff
about this thing.
Hit me with it. What's weird?
I can't figure it out.
- [Harrison] View hidden files was enabled by default.
- Oh, okay.
Okay, what else is there?
- [Harrison] You missed the batch file.
- Which one? This one?
Oh wait, okay.
Hold on just a gosh darn minute here. Okay.
There's a Win10jh batch file here
that I accidentally started for a second there.
We're gonna go ahead and open this in Notepad.
I see a lot of product keys.
Oh, okay.
Do we know what this is doing?
- [Harrison] As far as I can tell,
this is how they're doing their Windows activation.
They're actually pinging- - Got it.
- [Harrison] A couple of Chinese websites to double check
that it's working, I think?
- Oh my god, this is hilarious.
Look at this error handling.
"The defined key is not found?"
"Ha-ha, product activation successful."
Sorry, failure.
The last kind of quirky thing we noticed
is the way that they partitioned the boot drive.
We've got a 200 gig partition for Windows,
and then a 150, and then a 125.
Why they did this, I don't know,
because there hasn't been a real benefit
since the days of slow mechanical drives
when you could "short stroke" your drive
by creating your operating system partition
just using the area of the disc around the outside
where the sequential read speeds were higher.
On SSDs, everything's kind of stored
all over the NAND flash,
so it just doesn't matter.
The performance might not be as bad as you might think.
This CPU apparently has a reflex of 2.9 gigahertz.
Intel calls it the "burst frequency,"
not to be confused with boost frequency.
Let's see what kind of frequency it'll hit
when we're actually running a sustained load.
Four cores, 2.5 gigahertz.
I mean, I'd have been happy to have this
in a laptop five years ago.
That's four real cores.
I gotta say, I'm coming around on this thing.
Other than the sketchy operating system,
which I would absolutely remove and reformat
before I connect this to my home network, for example,
it's kind of an okay machine for the price.
Let's open it up and have a look at
what's inside this beast.
Please tell me that this is an M.2 upgrade slot.
That is so cool.
(laughs) The SSD's a little less awesome.
It's got an EPN Extension on it.
None...
Half of this SSD has no SSD on it.
You guys ready? - Yep.
- I have no idea what's in here,
but whatever it is is definitely interesting.
It's about 50% mechanical keyboard.
Machine's aluminum chassis.
That is a very small battery.
- [Harrison] It was also advertised
as having 5,000mAh.
- [Linus] Do we know what the voltage of this battery is?
Okay, hold on.
Andy. - What's up?
- What is the voltage of this battery?
- [Andy] 7.6.
- That is super weird.
It's probably fine for a 10 watt CPU,
but not the kind of capacity you'd expect
in a 16 inch chassis.
What else we got going on here?
Perfectly adequate heat pipe cooling solution.
Better than you'd find on many MacBooks
these days, actually.
They call this "hurricane cooling."
Is there Denzel Washington in here somewhere?
The motherboard is extremely small,
which makes sense given that this is
a classic processor that you would normally find
in, like, a netbook class product.
Uses an Intel Wifi chip set though.
Where's my weird off-brand wireless chips at?
Should we game on it?
- [David] Let's do it.
- The product marketing features a lot
of gaming imagery. (Dave laughing)
All right, let's open up with CS:GO.
More like CS:Slow.
- [David] Oh.
- Oh.
It defaulted to high.
Oh my god, 8X MSAA was enabled.
Ooh, not promising.
We're getting a stuttery 15 frames per second.
This is all low.
Technically, the game is running.
I did manage to get a kill there a second ago.
You know, it's smoothing out a little bit though.
- [David] Oh wow. Yeah, you're at 30.
- [Linus] Yeah, I'm running at 2560 by 1600.
Like, it looks great when the frames render.
If it was me in high school, I'd be like,
"Heck yeah, I can play the game."
What about Genshin though?
- [Harrison] Unskippable cutscenes, by the way.
- [David] No.
- They claim you get 50 FPS in this game?
- [Harrison] They sure do.
They don't give you any settings.
- [Linus] 'Cause this is not 50 FPS,
I can tell you that much.
It's also not as bad as I thought it was gonna be though.
Ooh, but our render resolution
is at 0.6. - Aw.
- So it's not that.
It's more like 1080p.
Everything but crowd density is minimum.
Yeah, this is not as fast as...
Ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, that's not good.
It's not at 50 FPS.
Certainly not when the action gets heavier,
but once again, it's playable.
And personally, I think I'd rather play
on something like this with a nice big screen
than on a little tiny mobile device.
I can't recommend this machine because
of some of the sketchy things that we observed,
particularly this installation of Windows.
But the reality of it is that brand new,
I have never seen anything that comes even close
to the value proposition of it
especially for certain use cases.
Like, if I was a writer for example.
It's kind of mind blowing.
There are some other options if you don't mind buying used.
We'll have a couple of them linked down below,
flashing a couple on screen right now.
But other than that,
I just have never seen this kind of value in a laptop.
So I guess good job DEEQ or NWNLAP or whoever you are.
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If you enjoyed this video, you might also enjoy our video
on the ONN laptop from Walmart.
It didn't fare quite as well.
Did this... Did the game just crash?
Is the game just like... - Looks like it did.
- Was that due to inactivity?
'Cause the launcher's still here.
That was pretty weird.
It's not a gaming machine, okay?