Hi guys so I've got with me here the Chuwi Lapbook 12.3 it's their latest
laptop that's still based on the Intel Celeron and 3450 so it's six gigabytes
of RAM 64 gigabytes of internal storage and it runs Windows 10 home however you
can expand upon the storage and put your own faster SSD in here you'll see that
there's sorry on this side the a slot here which is easy access to install the
SSD this is the first model of scene that had done this which is really good
Fullmetal build on it and you'll notice that something is a little bit different
here and that's because the screen has a three by two aspect ratio it's in fact
the same panel used in the Microsoft Surface pro 4 or the new 2017 surface
pro but it does mean it's a little taller and a little more narrow as
you'll see compared to a 16 by 9 laptop which is my Xiaomi Mi notebook err 12
you see that it is quite a bit higher there and the keyboards not as wide so
let's have a look at this one here in greater detail and just go through all
the pros and cons that I had discovered in my couple of weeks using this
notebook here this is the maximum angle that the screen will go back so it's I
feel decent as you know the laptops that stuff about there which were horrible by
that's farthest now that it can't be open to one-handed and pressing down on
the top of the lid the design of it and the build is quite strong there that I
feel that the screen shouldn't be pressing up against the keyboard so not
really that much flex there starting with the ports on the left side we have
a status LED DC insert charging USB 3 port mini HDMI out and what looks like a
hole for a microphone turns out to be just nothing there it's not used on the
right side you will find our micro SD card slot which fits in almost 100%
flush there so that shouldn't pop out when in transit a 3.5 maybe the
headphone jack that supports microphones quality's good out of this jack it
doesn't have any farrance or static a USB 2 port and then
a Kensington lock hole now one thing to point out with the USB port I've seen on
other Apollo Lake laptops is that they're not really that well spaced out
and I'll show you what I mean so if I wanted to put this micro SD card an SD
card reader in like that in or by the way the ports are upside down you can
see that it's now blocking the 3.5 millimeter headphone jack I just wish
that space things out a little bit more there now this of course is extra wide
if I put a standard USB pendrive in then I will be able to use the port you see
but it's still quite close there so the keyboard is really good Chuwi's done a
good job of this keyboard is one of the best ones I've used on a Polock laptop
hardly any flex and good treble of the keys are measured it to be one point two
seven millimeters and overall very happy with this keyboard however it is missing
a shortcut to control the screen brightness that's probably about it
we've got a print screen button and we have our page up and down end in home
keys at least so the touchpad isn't too bad it's one of the better ones better
than the easy book 3 Pro that I recently reviewed it doesn't have a gesture
control I mean you can't go in and disable them in the windows setting
which is a little bit unfortunate but it does support all those windows 10
gestures it's made out of plastic and it does have incorporated left and right
mouse buttons so by far the best feature of this notebook and better than any
other that I've looked at is its screen I've got a really nice 3 by 2 aspect
ratio 12.3 inch screen the same panel used in the surface pro 4 or the
Microsoft Surface pro there 2017 model so it's made by Samsung it's a PLS panel
I think it is now there is a little bit of a problem with the brightness control
as I pointed out in my unboxing so zero percent is what I would say a little too
bright for nighttime use 25% so be percent now 50 to 75 see if you can
see any change little hard to pick up on camera but there is a slight change it
goes up about 20 lux and then 100% brightness no change from 75 to 100 cent
maximum brightness is 300 lux now this panel can go right up to 450 so sure we
have toned that down a little bit probably to save on the battery but I do
hope that soon they'll have a bias update to fix things so very good blacks
on here good color representation really nice panel very happy with it it is
without a doubt doubt the best you will find in any of these cheaper Apollo Lake
notebooks it is a stunning panel matte-coated well so we don't have any
problems with reflections no and yes how could I not mention those massive bezels
that make it look like a macbook air from 2010 they're around 17 to 18
millimeters those bezels so really big and it's a real shame that should we
have done this because if you look at the lap book 14.1 they're quite slim
those bezels and they really do make the laptop look great so this brings down
the overall appearance of the slap book making it look dated and old so the
performance overall getting in around Windows does not seem to be affected by
the higher resolution screen here if you see that when I click on the Start menu
that pops in really quick just going around everywhere in general is quite
fast and just as fast as any other Apollo Lake I can't see any difference
really that still does all of them do this all the Apollo Lakes do that little
animation stutter or lag you can see there see that with edge opening up here
so I wanted to run through some benchmarks so here we have Geekbench 4
which is more or less the same speed as other politics perhaps slightly on the
single core performance there and the wireless so this is our wireless AC
which is the Intel wireless AC dual band 3 165 chipset decent speeds there I have
seen faster but it could have just been at the time with any network
and things like that I with my fiber line that I have the etemon C speeds
here not good you can see that right speeds of 22 megabytes per second that
really is not good at all I don't know what they're doing but this is not an
EMC 5 spec or if it is why is it running so slow so not good to see there that
the performance is cut down it's supposed to be even C 5 the 4k is also
very low and I noticed that it would make Windows feel just a little bit
slower especially when moving and copying files on to desktop but those
write rates just wasn't acceptable so I highly recommend putting in an SSD which
I'll show you where that is in just a second so a few other things also to
point out that the antutu score more or less like other machines you see there
now most other machines get around 120 thousands is 116 thousands so all in all
not a bad score there and to point it out as well the micro SD card slot is
unfortunately only running at USB 2 speeds so you will not get any faster
than 23 24 megabytes per second which is a bit of a shame so you're going to have
to use a USB 3 reader for that now temperatures I'm going to cover those
now ads or towards the beginning of this video here these are my maximum
temperatures after 2 hours of each and chrome use so it got up to 74 which is
perfectly acceptable fine no problems with that now when you start to game and
charge at the same time things change it gets up to 90 degrees 91 and maximum
there you can see but it does not trigger any thermal throttling now
better life also get into that now you're looking don't look at the full
runtime that's wrong here I did four hours and it was down to 36% you're
looking around 6 to 6 and a half hours of edge and chrome use gaming that is
going to drop down to about two and a half three hours so we're taking a hit
because of the high resolution screen so that battery figure was with the
brightness at 50% you lower that down to 25 you'll squeeze out maybe an X
half an hour at the moment you can see battery bar down in the corner here I've
got almost five hours and 22% left but I have been running some games and also
had the brightness at 100% so that's affecting a performance there but better
life should be better which is a pity that it's not so on the bottom you will
find the m2 SATA SSD slot and it's very easy to get into so just pull up this
plastic flap you don't even need a screwdriver for that but you all of
course need to undo the screw I have a transcend Drive in here which is 256
gigabytes I recommend running with an SSD if you want maximum performance out
of this laptop and you can see one of the speaker grilles are two downward
firing speakers for solid rubber feet too as well so it's very sturdy on a
table so down with firing speakers they're actually quite loud they peak
about 88 decibels let's have a listen to them
and as you can hear from that there's a little bit of distortion coming from
them at 100% volume but they are better than most of the cheaper laptops I've
heard the Apollo League can Hardware decode vp9 codecs and AG VC as well
without any problems and this is a hundred and forty megabits per second 4k
file that starts out with a few stutters and then plays it quite smooth there
I'll just skip ahead see that it is very smooth and handling that kind of
demanding video format really quite well bias advanced settings are completely
locked out to us but we can at least go along and change the boot order which we
need to if you install an M.2 SATA 3 SSD right here I'm going to set my Linux
manjaro USB pendrive to boot so Linux Manjaro boot up fine it runs off my
pendrive here so I'm running it just off that I haven't installed it touch pad
works wireless sound everything I can see so far is working at least for Linux
now on to gaming performance I think I did not see me there Counter Strike
global Offensive this is the dust2 map and we're not getting kind of frame
rates I saw on the civil top here that's been to fastest ever tested we're
getting around 20 30 frames per second that laptop managed to get around 50 up
to sometimes around 60 which is really good oh and I'm dead again
that's on the lowest settings this is 800 x 600 resolution and I think there's
quite a few people on the server as well I've got about 20 people I think
yeah I'm useless it does oh do it again
okay so let's move on now to League of Legends that's enough of my bad game
play League of Legends have got it on low settings it's a very low graphics
settings in 1080p and it's getting around 40 frames per second just under
here so it is playable but again not the fastest performance I've seen from the
Apolo lake in 3450 moving around the map at least that is fast - this is a game
with two BOTS and one on my side so not an online game which may be a little bit
faster because then it's not calculating the bots and less their server side of
course and the only store game I will check out this one's a SWOT extreme
which is very choppy running in the native screen resolution you can see
it's too slow I won't show you gameplay because it's extremely choppy not
playable but I will show you now - in a 1080p gameplay. Performance now a lot better
smooth playable not perfect however you will see some stutters and of course
we're going to have those borders top and bottom any sixteen by nine content
that you play like movies is going to have those borders because of the three
by two aspect ratio now we have a look and see just how hot it got after some
gaming that I did quite warm to the touch the top there then we'll probe all
check out and see we're getting around 38 degrees palm rest around 34 almost
but the underside is where it gets the hottest which is about 37 there and
almost 38 degrees so it does get quite warm and hot to the touch after
something demanding like gaming here's a sample from the front facing webcam it's
2 megapixels but the maximum resolution unknown reason it's only 800 x 600
resolution and it's 15 frames per second so it does not really look good at all
it's quite choppy it's utter II so any fast movements you can see are going to
be all blurry because it just doesn't have that
the quality from the microphones as well is average so not really that great I'd
be wanting to use external logitech car in HD webcam and not the built-in one
all right so to quickly recap the build quality is excellent all made out of
metal apart from of course the bezel around here large bezels not going to be
everyone's cup of tea I know for me when I looked at that I thought well that
looks so 2010 MacBook Air style real shame they've done that but once you can
get past that you've got this stunning matte coated surface pro and surface pro
full screen it really is the best you will find in one of these cheaper Apollo
Lake notebooks so you've got to bear that in mind however it does come at the
cost of our battery life so battery life instead of being around seven to eight
hours on other Apollo 8 net laptops out there you're only getting around 6 to 6
and a half so we're losing quite a bit of battery there and the other thing is
too that the webcam quality not really that good at all I mean 15 frames per
second come on and the resolution of 800 x 600 that is also feeling like 2010
kind of quality there but the keyboard very good keyboard perhaps one of the
best keyboards I have used on these cheaper Chinese Apollo Lake laptops
touchpad as well I would rate as better than the easy book three pros just a
little more accurate a little more better there and overall solid machine
another pro is the fact that the SSD can be answered quite easily so you just got
to remove that panel in there remove the screw put your SSD in there put the
screw back set that to boot and of course clone windows over on there and
you can get past that 64 gigabytes of restricted storage we've have and the
low speeds on their foot for some reason the emmc
is quite slow it's not eMMC 5 spec or it doesn't seem to be running it it's a
full speed there which is a real shame so overall great notebook I believe that
if you want the best screen and matte-coated one in one of these cheaper
laptops then this is the model to go for but bear in mind those concepts and of
course when you game on it around this area and even a bit of the palm rest
does get quite warm so it's another thing to consider there
otherwise there's other good options out there like the easy book 3 Pro which I
happen to like in seals one of the better ones and then of course the chewy
lat book 14.1 which has a very nice matte coat of 1080p displaying it better
battery life around seven to seven and a half hours and it is also about 70 to 60
us cheaper so thank you so much for watching this review here and I do have
to see you back and the channel soon with more upcoming reviews bye for now