I've got with me today Chuwi's new laptop this is their 13.5 inch convertible laptop
it is called the chuwi free book so it is powered by the 11th gen Celeron 5100 that's
a quad core a 6 watt part that's paired up with eight gigabytes of ram that is in dual channel
it does have a 256 gigabyte to pcie that's an mvme drive that you can upgrade but also inside when i
took a look at the motherboard you can install an additional m.2 sata 3 drive the screen on it
is the highlight that it is a touch screen and the 13.5 inches and 3 by 2 aspect ratio
is good to have in a laptop like this and also does support a stylus which is the chewy HiPen
H7 that i'll be covering in this review so the lid here made out of alloy it's a 6000 series one so
slightly harder not as soft as some of the alloys we've seen before used by them
it has this matte gray paint job i think it looks really good the chuwi logo here this
is not a sticker so you can't unfortunately remove it it's actually recessed it's set
into the alloy on the top so you can't just remove it pick it and take it right out unfortunately
not so the hinge does feel very good on this it's a new design hinge from them and of course 360
degrees so you're able to flip it around you can use it in a presentation mode as you can see now
the tent mode use it as a tablet a rather bulky heavy 13.5 inch tablet by the way which would
weigh almost 1.4 kilos and then of course as a normal laptop our keyboard and our touchpad so
touchpad plastic service palm rest plastic surface 2 we do have just above the keyboard two little
speakers there are four in total this keyboard is great to type on so it's a full size keyboard
we've got function for all of our media controls brightness volume we do have insert delete home
page up and down end keys are all there print screen is there full size arrow keys
it is a typical chewy backlit keyboard and that means that it's a good keyboard they're quite good
with their keyboards i find it's great to type on there is no flex pressing down here in the
middle because there is a metal backing behind the keyboard so it's about 1.5 millimeters of travel
pretty standard about 1.6 and then the touchpad very large i find gestures work well accuracy
is good overall a great touchpad a good keyboard and the keyboard is backlit so here is the
first level which is the lower level and now the maximum brightness on the backlit keyboard evenly
distributed no problems there so great combination of keyboard touch pad so the thickness of this
laptop is approximately 17 18 millimeters here so it's not super thin but not bad for a convertible
we have a status led now this first type c port here is usb data so that's usb 3.0 spec
and then it does support charging which is chuwi's ohm charger not power delivery but this port is
okay so the second one here is the full spec type-c port this supports video so 4k 60 usb
3.0 data and then power delivery 2.0 we have our power button which is made out of plastic so this
side here is plastic at the bottom is metal and a status led right here there is a speaker built in
here which is one of four in total on the left side we've got which looks like a vent out if
this did have a fan in it and was actively cooled that's where the air would be pushed out so i do
hope that chewy releases this or a pro model of this that they could call it for example the free
book pro with the core i5 that would be good and it could have a fan and a lot more power so a 3.5
millimeter headphone jack with mic support and a type c usb 3 port right here so there's no
full size type a ports which is unfortunate they should have at least one on here and it is missing
a micro sd card slot that we see on other models from them once you remove all of those screws on
the outside not forgetting the two here that are located under those rear rubber feet this lid
just lifts off with ease the internals a couple of good things in a couple of bad so right here
there is an m.2 sata 3 slot you can see the screw here so it takes the 2280 size the large ones and
here is our boot drive which is a pcie 3.0 spec one mvme that's a kingston drive 256 gigabyte so
you could upgrade this but what i would do on the cheaper side of things is simply just get myself
a larger capacity sata 3m.2 and use this one as a windows 11 boot drive so that'll be good battery
here could have been larger there's a lot of free space as you see here this one is 39 watt hours we
have the two front speakers which are the big ones that sound the best here you can see they've got
large chambers to them so this is why they have a bit of bass and sound better than normal another
two little speakers there at the top which do add to it middle hinges there's a metal backing plate
across the whole bottom of the keyboard that's why the keyboard feels so good it's got metal behind
it a wireless card which is the intel wireless ac3165 is located just here with two antennas
so two two by two setup one antenna here on the plastic of the palm rest and the keyboard
and just up here too so that aids in the reception so really there's not a lot we can do with this if
you wanted to do maybe a thermal mod to increase the power limits you could put right here over
this large copper heatsink which is very large it's all this part right here copper i simply put
a thermal pad here that has contact with the back of the plate about here that would then turn this
into an even larger passive heat sink it does transfer a little bit of heat already onto the
back of it but that could transfer even more so the build quality the internals here it does look
quite good it's a step up from previous models and the hinge so far feels very good on this
very quickly just wanted to show you that the bios is completely unlocked all of the advanced
settings are available to us including power limits so you can't get yourself into a bit of
trouble i recommend you do not mess about with any of the bios settings unless you know what you are
doing i now have it set up in the tablet mode so i've flipped the screen right around and you can
do it with this the hinge does feel very good and chewy are known for going with quite decent panels
a lot of other companies that have affordable tech will use terrible tn panels this is an ips screen
it's 13x5 resolution and if i go in here and take a look at the resolution you will see
that it's 2256 by 1504 now why is it that unusual resolution is because it is a three by two aspect
ratio screen it supports a stylus which i'll get on to soon later on in the video it's the high pin
h7 has 4096 pressure points and i'll do a few little tests of that one later on but i do find
that the accuracy of the stylus and touch is very good and it responds to that touch really well i
really have not had any problems with it now with the screen when we take a look at what my spider
x pro has got here with the stats with the color coverage we're looking at 79 p3 adobe rgb is 77
ntsc is 72 and srgb 99 so basically 100 coverage which they do claim the brightness again according
to this sensor that i've measured with it is 342 nits maximum brightness that is white of course
and it's still good it's decent now the screen itself covered with glass it's a scratch resistant
glass hopefully but it's probably not actually it's probably just more like soda lime glass
it doesn't come with a pre-applied screen protector on it and when i look at it very closely
especially at the corners i think it might not actually be a fully laminated screen there is a
very small gap that i can see but it's super minimal it always looks to me like the glass is
touching the screen and the screen when you look at it very close it has a bit of a grain to it as
if the panel that they've used to show some demo images here could actually be anti-glare behind it
but then of course we have the glia glass over the top of it so again the touch response is excellent
the accuracy does seem to be very good it is a screen that is really punching above this class of
laptop what it is paired up with the weaker jazz black chip it really does need something like a
core i5 i believe in this but i'll get on to the performance now of it so when you take a look at
geekbench scores it does have dual channel ram but the ram is only at 2.4 gigahertz which means right
here that this score could actually be a little bit faster if it ran in the maximum speed of 2.9
gigahertz that the jasper lake supports so these are low-end scores it's not a powerful laptop and
it's a true weakness of this as it's a six watt part not really super powerful ssd speed so we
can change that ssd and upgrade it if you wanted to do so but you have to open it as i showed you
the insides there you're able to replace that so that comes with a kingston it's 256 gigabytes
and the speeds of this for an nvme drive are okay but certainly not the fastest you will see
if you do want faster you can get something like a samsung 970 evo or the evo plus which would go
quite well in this but again the bottleneck is really the cpu so i would not bother and you
only get 256 gigabytes which is well probably not a lot for many people out there and there's
no micro sd card support with this so you can't just go along and expand upon that storage under
the device manager you'll see that wireless this is one of my minor little nitpicks here that it is
the intel dual band wireless ac 3165 super common in all of the gemini lake tech and unfortunately
we don't have intel's wireless ax 200 or the 201 card with bluetooth 5. this has bluetooth 4.2
and the wireless speeds transfers will max out at about 340 megabits per second
so it's not super quick i have had no problems with the range of it and it does seem to work
well the wireless at least but i wish it was just a little bit faster you see with sensors we have a
accelerometer that one in the keyboard one on the screen because it will of course rotate around
depending on how you're using this convertible sample of the webcam now so it's an hd webcam
and it has a microphone on the underside of this laptop so when you type on the keyboard
as you can hear unfortunately we do get a lot of feedback coming through so you probably want to
use an external cam this camera quality is okay the frame rate but it does look quite grainy it's
still a lot better than what i saw on the vmax y11 plus however then our stylus you can use
this and it's an optional extra that you do have to pay for of course so the stylus does have two
buttons it's wacom power the tech that's in this and you can see that i'm just triggering
a few things off here in the background i've accidentally touched the screen so that's normal
with the pen but just how does it work so pressure sensitive levels on this one are 4096 and you can
draw right up to the edges in certain areas where it will actually let you the application
and straight lines here you can see there is a tiny bit of lag but it isn't too bad now pressure
sensitivity i'll start out here just very lightly drawing and then press slightly harder you can
see that the line is getting thicker now the nib on the end of it is rubber or rubberish plastic
material and they do give you an additional spare tip that you can remove there's a tool to include
it the status takes a quadruple a battery which will eventually wear out get flat you need to
replace that now what about notes palm rejection as soon as it is detected the stylus will then
have a hover you can see which is approximately one centimeter here now just right a little bit
i find that the stylus is not actually that bad and the palm rejections working quite well so in
an app like this one bamboo it is very quick i've got my messy handwriting there so it could be used
for jotting down notes now i wouldn't call this exceptional stylus performance but i think it is
adequate and you do have those pressure levels the palm rejection the hover and it works right up to
the edges well there i come because it thinks i want to select one of those tools right here so
using the button i can press the first button there and go along and just erase everything
with this app so app support for it and it is great that is using why com tech so wacom they've
been around for a very long time when it comes to stylus tech and i do think this has to be an above
average pen from what i've been testing on a lot of these more affordable laptops and tablets and
things this one is certainly one of the better ones for these lighter applications like this
now my chrome tester i'm going to be using touch and i've already just searched this this is cats
and i'm going to now just to proceed to open up a lot of different tabs including some videos
and we'll see just how long it's going to take for all this to cache and load in because i do believe
it is one of the quicker jasper-like laptops that i have been testing out recently here in
the channel so that's a lot of tabs open you can see still things are loading in all right and if
i do look at my cpu use you'll see that yes the cpu has hit 100 percent there it's under full load
things are loading in a little bit so you could say it's choking a bit but it's not bad okay a
little bit of slow down there let's go through these other tabs so some of those are still
loading reasonably quick swapping between all of these tabs now look at how fast and fluid this
is it's not bogging down it's not looking laggy we've got a video going here in the background
but i do want to test out 4k 60 demo and this will probably end up dropping a few frames so
let's take a look there's an lg one here okay it's already in 4k i shall enable these stats
okay there we go stats are on full screenness and you can see it's dropped 23 frames per second 36
now and it has now stabilized so that is good no additional drop frames okay just one there
but looking very good considering that it's 4k 60 streaming in chrome youtube i will get out of this
and we'll take a look at just a normal 4k so 4k 30 demo and it shouldn't drop any frames at all
so i have found that the i think because of the 24 executional cores that this does have with the
jasper lake is why it's not dropping any frames here the performance seems very good at streaming
so this now is 4k 30 frames per second drop for three frames there at the start and it's
it's stable look at that so good performance this is what it's good at these kind of light
tasks so it'll play back all your videos chrome documents spreadsheets all of that is what this
spec is good at anything more demanding than this it will get a little bit laggy
gaming performance now is a lot better than what i saw on the jasper lake b-max y 11 plus which
had only 10 frames per second on average we are looking at here in the 30s but it sometimes gets
down to 10 frames per second as well it's not exactly what i would call perfect and yeah of
course i'm dead already but we're looking about three times the frame rate so three times better
performance possibly because of the dual channel ram but it's really to do with the configuration
here from chewy with the buyer's settings it seems to run a lot better than other jasper lakes so
this is gaming on the lowest possible settings here with counter strike at a resolution of 768p
thermals on the free book are good it gets up to 81 degrees maximum for a passively
cooled laptop that's not too bad now the underside will get quite hot up to almost
50 degrees celsius transferring and passing some of that heat from that copper heatsink
to the rear metal underside of this laptop now you might notice here that power limit one and
power limit two i did increase these to 15 watts and then 20 trying to boost the performance but
it seemed to have made absolutely no difference and it would not go the temperatures any higher
and even stock it would use about 7.5 7.8 watts it was what it would cap out at often it's around
six but if you do benchmarks or your game it does increase in pool and peak here at
7.8 which is not a lot so it could actually do a little bit better i think this chipset
and it does tell me it got up to 81 degrees c but it did trigger this
which is thermal throttling battery life now so it has a 39 watt hour battery and you will be able to
achieve just over five hours chrome use was my test light use and around about approximately 30
with the screen brightness so it's not a an impressive battery life at all they do have
room Chuwi inside the free book here to actually put a bigger battery in or another cell and i
hope they can do that if they're going to revise this model at least give it a bigger battery so
it would last within seven or eight hours it does look from looking at the internals that they may
possibly have a more powerful version that they could install a fan in there because it's got
all the space for a fan and even the vent on the side where the hot air would be pushed out so the
screen when you look at it it does have a minor graininess to it it's not a deal break or anything
like that it's only when you look really close at the screen you'll notice that it seems to be to me
at least my eyes an anti-glare screen and chewy has put the touch digitizer glass over the top
touch accuracy response is very quick the high pen which is the high pin h7 with wacom tech
works really well on the screen and i do like to see that it's one of the better styluses that i
have tested out the overall performance for light computing is quick and snappy but as soon as you
do anything demanding like opening up really large spreadsheets or you want to try and video editing
a bit of that at 1080p even or even 720p it starts to bog down and show its six watt power limit
and you saw from gaming performance that wallet is better out of the jazz blacks i've been testing
out it's still not great and not really a powerful unit good keyboard it's backlit very good touchpad
it's nice and large and overall i like the design it's a little on this heavy side if you use it
as a tablet of course you flip the screen around and we've got that option to use it as a tablet a
windows 11 tablet as a convertible there which is good pricing is where the cons start to creep in i
think it's just overpriced for what it really is for especially for the specker cpu now if it had
a core i5 in here i would say that over 500 us price tag is then acceptable but just having the
jasper lake in this the n5100 i don't think it is priced well okay just a little bit too
expensive for what it is even though the build quality has improved it's a very good build we
are also missing a type a usb port on this there is no micro sd card unfortunately slot on this but
i do like the fact that we can add a sata 3 ssd if you wanted to do so there is that option so we
can add additional storage and it does have pcie support the boot drive so you could keep that boot
drive and just add a sata 3 later on so there we go that is the full story out of Chuwi's free book
here thank you so much for watching my review and i do hope to see you in the next one bye for now