- This tiny gaming PC is absolutely wild.
It's got a built in controller.
It's playing Doom Eternal at HD resolution,
medium details anywhere from 65 to 80 frames per second.
And not only that, but it's so powerful
that I can actually stream to Twitch TV
without a separate streaming box.
It's got eight cores, 16 threads,
onboard RDNA2 graphics and not one
but two M.2 storage slots.
We're gonna have to crack this baby open
and see what makes it tick.
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(upbeat music)
Meet the GPD WIN Max 2.
It's what you would get if an Alienware gaming laptop
and the Netbook had a baby.
Everything about this is better than the last gen.
And I have been so excited to get my hands on this,
starting with the screen,
it's touchscreen with stylist support
for the artists out there
and is just over 10 inches with a 16 by 10 aspect ratio
and a native resolution of 2560 by 1600.
That is 299 pixels per inch, making it shockingly sharp.
And the best part, since this is basically a mini laptop,
is that unlike other handhelds,
the screen is actually a natively landscape display
rather than a portrait one
that is constantly running 90 degrees out of sync.
We've actually got another video coming out
about the Aya Neo Air
and one of the problems we run into
is when trying to emulate games,
but since the screen is portrait,
you need some fixes to get older
or poorly coded games to display properly.
Speaking of games, the high resolution
should also help make lower resolutions
not as interpolated and crappy looking
since we've got so many pixels crammed into a small display
like this, playing at 720P
or 800P isn't gonna be a stretchy mess
where the software and the display
fight over which pixels should go where.
Integer scaling should also behave more appropriately.
Since the screen is simply double an 800P image.
Let's talk IO, over on the right,
we've got two USB3 ports,
at the front, power button with included fingerprint sensor.
Do like to see that.
On the left, this is cool,
the GPD WIN Max 2 stands head and shoulders above the rest
when it comes to storage expansion.
Steam Deck, micro SD with a single 2230 SSD.
Aya Neo Next, 2280 SSD
and I don't believe it has any micro SD expansion.
Aya Neo air, 2280 but you won't be using a double-sided one
and micro SD.
Here, we get a 2280, that's your boot drive.
We get two SD slots, full size and micro.
So you can put two terabytes there
and an additional 2230 SSD slot, gen four, in case you want,
you know, maximum performance,
that is easily accessible at the back with just one screw.
You could conceivably load this thing up
with like eight terabytes of storage
without buying any wild, exotic, you know,
eight terabyte double-sided SSDs.
And that ignores that we could use external storage,
at the back, alongside our headset jack and HDMI 2.1 port,
we have another USB type A and a USB3 type C
along with a USB4 type C,
which means that we could actually hook this bad boy,
potential, theoretically,
up to a Thunderbolt enclosure or Thunderbolt storage
or even an external GPU.
Not that we thought of that before.
(coughing)
We're definitely gonna try that after.
Speaking of games,
you might think that that high resolution
means that you're going to have a pretty crummy,
low FPS experience, but that's not actually the case
because we've got so many pixels
crammed into such a small area,
we can run this display at non-native resolutions
without nearly the same kind of awful interpolation
that we might have expected from older LCDs.
Also, because this resolution is a multiple of 800P,
which is the resolution that the Steam Deck
and other handhelds use,
you can actually use integer scaling
to get no interpolation whatsoever.
It just takes whatever value
was supposed to be for one pixel
and makes it a two by two grid.
Nice and clean.
Check this out, because of the way that GPD optimized
the spacing between the keys on the keyboard,
it is shockingly usable in spite of its tiny size.
So this isn't just a portable gaming machine.
It's actually a usable laptop.
The touchscreen being up on the top of the keyboard.
Yeah, it's not the most amazing experience ergonomically
but quite frankly,
I very rarely found myself using it anyway because ah, yes,
making a return is GPD's classic little switch
that takes our integrated game pad
and switches it over from game pad mode to...
(mimicking trumpet)
Mouse mode.
Is that awesome or what?
Okay, it's a little slow and it can be a little bit clunky
but it was and remains one of the best implementations
of joy to mouse that I have yet used.
The shoulder buttons handle your left and your right click.
And as soon as you're done,
you flip it back over into game pad mode
and you're ready to start playing.
Now, I'm not gonna lie,
it's a little on the heavy side
at just over a kilogram and it doesn't have the world's
greatest integrated game pad
but especially when you factor in the benefit
of the screen size, it is shockingly usable.
For scale, here's a Steam Deck.
Yes, this is a substantially larger device
but this is also a substantially larger screen.
And while it might not be the best game pad in the world,
it's surprisingly not bad.
Holding onto it like this,
you've got a little bit of grip on the back of the device
and it manages to not get too hot in the areas
that you need to touch it and these joysticks,
while they're a recessed style joystick,
like you might find on a mobile console,
they're actually hall effect joysticks,
meaning that you're concern about them wearing out
should be much lower than a potentiometer based joystick.
Like you would find on an Xbox or a PlayStation controller.
Ooh, I really like the D-pad.
Really clicky, that is one of the best D-pads
I think I've felt in quite some time.
- [David] That's a, yeah, that's very vita-esque.
- It's really nice.
There are integrated covers for the joysticks
if you prefer not to look at them.
They sit like that.
And when you're not using them, they go back here.
Personally, I think that's the kind of thing
that I would probably leave tucked away
100% of the time but...
(stammering)
Why?
- [Plouffe] Productivity, it looks like a laptop.
You can it into the office.
- [Linus] Productivity. - [Plouffe] Yeah.
- Makes it look more professional.
Ah, yes, well sure.
At my job, it's no problem to be carrying around
a gaming device so.
That really raises the question,
what kinds of other fun goodies
are we gonna find inside this thing.
Man, this is a really cool device.
GPD just makes such cool stuff, man.
And these screws are, ooh, not all the same.
Well, that's good to know.
Ours is a kitted out model.
Okay, there's our one terabyte SSD complete with DRAM cache.
Then we've got our heat sink fan assembly here
that is actually larger than I would expect
to find in a PC like this.
We've got two heat pipes and then you can see here,
it looks like the heat sink fins are quite short
but they actually get a lot taller towards the back
which probably contributes to how quiet this thing is,
even while gaming.
So under that, we've got the eight core, 16 thread,
as I mentioned before, AMD Ryzen in 6,800 U APU.
That is how we are getting the absolutely wild performance
we're seeing out of this machine.
Also it contributes to the excellent battery life
you can expect from the WIN Max 2.
GPD specs a 67 watt hour battery, but opening it up,
we can see, clearly this is a 72 watt hour battery.
They say to expect three hours of heavy use,
six to eight hours of moderate use,
which is where most people will likely fall.
And 14 hours of light use,
depending on the specific applications.
There's not really much else for us to see in here.
We've got our hall effect joysticks,
which look very user repairable, memory is soldered.
Of course, if you wanna get battery life anywhere near that,
you're not gonna be able to have it sucking back 30 watts
playing AAA games like Halo Infinite.
Though, it's certainly nice to have the option.
I mean, look how smoothly this is running.
It's at 1280 by 800, low details, but darn it, it's running.
I got him.
Oh, hey, look at that, we gotta talk about the merch.
We just launched the RGB hoodie.
It's comfortable, stretchy
and it has these little colorful bits woven into it
for a fun, little splash of color without being,
you know, too fun, you know, it's gray, right?
Oh, on the subject of fun, I didn't mention these before
but there are actually Z3 buttons on the bottom.
So you can bind additional functions to those
if shoulders and triggers aren't enough for you
and the triggers themselves, analog triggers.
So racing efficient autos rejoice.
(gun shooting)
One thing I will say though, is the haptics are not great.
The whole device vibrates, so it actually kind of reminds me
of the way that Valve did it on the Steam Deck.
Can you hear that?
(computer vibrating) - [David] Yeah.
- The speakers though,
probably the best praise that I can give them
is that I didn't notice them being, you know,
little crappy laptop speakers.
They've got two on the sides, two on the front
and they actually get reasonably loud and are pretty clear.
Let's crank 'em up, there we go.
Maybe then I won't have to listen
to the vibrating haptic motors.
- [Computer] 30 feet from the hill.
- For some really good tips on optimizing
your performance and battery life,
I'd actually recommend checking out the Fox's channel.
He has put this thing absolutely through the ringer
and found that while the Steam Deck crushes it
for performance at much lower TDPs
in the eight to nine watt range,
once you get into the 15 watt range,
the Steam Deck's max TDP,
the WIN Max 2 leaves it in the dust
and you can eek out a bit more performance
going up to its maximum of 28 watts.
However, one of my kind of bummers
with the WIN Max 2 is that in order
to change those performance profiles,
you have to reboot, go into the bios,
tune them and then boot up into Windows.
For comparison Aya, one of their competitors,
has this cool little overlay that you can adjust your fan
and performance profiles through on the fly.
But enough about that,
let's pivot to what I think is one of the coolest use cases
for a device like this.
I'm gonna connect it to an external RTX 3080
and see what kind of performance we can pull off.
This is exciting.
It required a reboot for some reason
but it looks like our RTX 3080 GPU is showing up.
Is this Thunderbolt on AMD?
Well, yeah, okay, It's not technically Thunderbolt
but it's functionally the same.
Is it 40 gigabit per second?
Can I run a GPU?
- [Plouffe] Yes. - All right then.
- [Plouffe] Well you don't like when I call things
by the slightly wrong name are you correct me.
So yeah, if you call it Thunderbolt,
I'm gonna tell you it's USB4.
- 'Cause now with our external GPU,
I am fully expecting to be able to run this display
at native resolution.
Initially, I wasn't that impressed by the performance.
We're getting anywhere from 65 to 75 frames per second,
which to be clear, is fine for our 60 Hertz display
but I kind of expected more.
That is until I dropped into the settings menu here
and realized that oops,
once it realized I have a 3080 in here,
it defaulted me to ultra nightmare,
totally unnecessary to have everything cranked like that
on such a tiny display.
But hey, at least we know that we can do it, freaking cool.
Oh wow, you know what's wild?
This is loud fan mode.
I mean, compared to the Steam Deck,
I was already really impressed by how quiet it was.
It has a silent mode.
Hold on, here we go, function shift.
Silent mode
Around 85 degrees, yeah. - [Plouffe] That's fine.
For the fans off too. - Wow, yeah, no kidding.
Remember, we're not using the onboard GPU right now, though,
so that's an advantage.
Don't get me wrong, this thing is not perfect
and it's not for everyone.
We ran into some weird issues with delays and touchpad input
that seem to be caused by algorithmic palm rejection
and unlike the last generation model,
it no longer has an RJ45 network port,
which was a bit of a bummer to me.
But what it is is utterly unique.
It's not gonna compete with the gaming focused design
of something like a Steam Deck or an Aya Neo.
And frankly, it's a worse laptop
than pretty much any other dedicated laptop
at this price point.
But if what you want is the one device that does it all,
there's nothing else that does it quite like this.
There are people out there that are using their Steam Decks
as their only computer and power to you,
but for most people,
that's gonna be pretty frustrating when you're on the go
and in the same way, there's a lot of folks out there
that use their laptop keyboard
and track pad pretty sparingly,
but actually do a fair bit of gaming.
Well guess what?
With something like this,
you don't have to carry a game pad.
So are there many of those people?
Probably not, but there are certainly enough for GPD
to keep existing and keep pumping out these devices.
And I'm glad 'cause this thing is super cool.
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- If you guys enjoyed this,
go check out our video on the ultimate Steam Deck.
We actually cut a hole in the back of it
and put like a hot rod style cooler
sticking out of it, legitimately made it way faster.