this laptop I'm looking at today is one of those punts that have taken one of
those risks I thought this looks like it could be interesting and there's many
things that are good about it it's got a very odd name it's called their Mai Ben
Ben Xiaomai 6 yes what a bad name it is a shocker so what we have here is a
Celeron N4100 laptop that comes with eight gigabytes of RAM and has a 256
gigabyte SSD and wireless AC 15.6 inch screen with a metal lid on the top and a
plastic palm race so it doesn't really seem that interesting and out of the
ordinary from the budget tech I reviewed but I wouldn't classify this one quite
as budget because it sells for about 599 so what sets it apart and why I was
interested in reviewing this one and why I got it is because it has upgrade
abilities so you've got two RAM slots so you can what you'll see later on in this
video is I decided to add another 8 gigabytes of RAM and it also has a
replaceable wireless card and you can add a 2.5 inch SSD but the main feature
of this laptop here is it has a dedicated NVIDIA MX 150 with 2 gigabytes
of double data rate 5 RAM which has moderate performance that paired up with
the CPU is going to be a little bit limited in the box you will find our
power supply which is rated to 19 volts 3.4 amps and it has that Mickey Mouse
style connector on the end we also get a keyboard protector as well included
which fits it perfectly because it's coming from the manufacturer and it's a
first that I've seen this included on the left side of the laptop you've got
dcn HDMI 2.0 a so that's 4k 60 Hertz 2 USB 3 ports a type C port which is also
USB 3 spec on the right a Kensington lock slot an SD card reader which is
only USB 2 spec a USB 2 port 3.5 millimeter headphone jack with mic
support and lastly an LED so this is red when charging green once
fully charged which takes just under two hours taking a look at the internals now
so we have a reasonably good layout here the build quality looks good there is an
internal metal frame that everything is screwed into so we've got a 41 watt hour
battery right here we have a replaceable mini PCIe card that's your Wireless
right now it has an Intel 9462 that's in there and look at this upgradable Ram
so it comes with eight gigabytes installed it'll be running in single
channel of course it's a data Ram so it's a reasonable brand of RAM but I'm
going to upgrade it here because I believe a lot of people will probably
actually do this running 16 will make things a little bit smoother there's
also a 2.5 inch SATA 3 bay here which is great so you can install a 1 terabyte
hard drive or another SSD the connectors right here they've just taped it inside
so if you hear something rattling around and that's what it is and right under
this ribbon cable right here we have a 20 to 80 set of 3 SSD it's 256 gigabytes
so you're able to replace and upgrade that if you wanted to and for calling we
have a single fan here with two copper thermal transfer pipes so the GPU will
be right here that's the MX 150 and then that in 4102 quad core so that chipset
does not generate a lot of heat so the fans aren't going to be on often but
when you're gaming or using the GPU with the switchable graphics that's when the
fan will come on when you do something demanding as you can see here the laptop
powered up just fine it took a little bit longer to boot because the buyers
had to detect to the new eight gigabytes of installed ram which it has here so
you can see it it's running Windows 10 home it just went straight into the
desktop so it's already been set up by someone so it would be careful doing a
factory reset on this model as it could end up with everything back in Chinese
which it might have originally had so they have partitioned that 256 gigabyte
drive with a Windows installation of 80 gigabytes and then the rest of the space
for your data and in the device manager I just wanted to quickly point out so
there we have our dual graphics here so it has switchable graphics between the
geforce MX 150 and then the ultra HD graphics 600 that's the intel one which
of course uses a lot less power it'll be on there by the defi
but you can override it anyways use the more powerful GPU if you want so I'll
display is a 1080p display it is met coated and it has a very poor maximum
brightness I measured just 98 luxo it doesn't even scrape a hundred Lux inside
it looks fine you'll be running it at 100% maybe 50% but if you gonna be using
this in very bright LED environments I mean I do have some powerful studio
lighting on at the moment because of the anti-glare coating it makes it a little
bit better but it's not amazing so we have an sRGB rating here of 63%
ntsc is only 45% Adobe RGB 47 so this is not a screen you want to be using for
color grading work so I was going to screen capture this one but I thought I
would show you the screen since it's not flickering on camera anything to give
you an idea of what kind of performance you can expect out of this hardware so
it's got a very weak CPU we know this but it is running at 10 watts and aided
by the fact that I'm running dual channel and the extra 8 gigabytes around
things are very quick and snappy so I just loaded up a couple of random tabs
here and they all popped in very quick this really does feel a lot like a more
modern core i3 or in older say fourth or fifth generation Core i5 so I go back
into Chrome right here I'm just gonna type in dogs and I have never searched
this before and I'm just going to randomly start opening up tabs and just
to demonstrate how fast this is working so the wireless is that Intel chip
that's in there and it's a lot better than the 3165 the 9640 2i
my file transfer test I managed to get close to 400 megabits throughput on that
one so you can see those tabs are loading in and really that is pretty
quick overall that performance it feels good it feels snappy and really it does
not feel like a low-end Sauron when you're doing light tasks like this now
you can do a bit of multitasking which I am doing because we've got the extra RAM
you'll get a load a lot more into that Ram so here I have a very large doc file
so this is 860 pages so it is massive and it
did take a good and I'm not joking here about three minutes to load in was very
slow and the initial load once it gets going you can see scrolling is a little
slow you can do your typical edits and move things around cut and paste that
performance however doesn't seem to be affected too much so it's not gonna
drive you wild being real leggy and slow with a large doc file like this now the
same goes with Excel now this is not a huge spreadsheet a handle spreadsheets a
lot better but this is only ten thousand lines I think so again yeah a little
slow it's not gonna perform like the latest generation Core i5 of course not
you can't expect that from this kind of CPU but all in all and this performance
is good I will open up a high bitrate pharmacist a chi VC the codec and I will
play this with VLC so that pops up really quick even at this higher bitrate
that is gonna be fine are the same guys for 4k so ever since
the Apollo Lake we've had native decoding of vp9 codecs and a chi VC so
performance there is as expected overall it feels quite quick and snappy
and you can see there is that animation stutter that lag that's something that's
been around on this chipset for a while now it's a bit quicker but I just wanted
to run through a few benchmarks so I benched marked the nvidia MX 150 it is
the 15 not the 10 watt version sorry this is 25 watt so it's not the crippled
version of this GPU so we get 444 open CL score thousand and that isn't what
the overclocked so what I did is I added an additional 200 megahertz to the core
clock of this GPU and an extra 1000 to the RAM because of my experience with
these lower end GPUs you can normally overclocked and quite a bit not like the
high end stuff and that gives us a result of almost 50,000 then in OpenCL
which is very good for the particular GPU and considering the cpu we have now
if you were to force it on to the integrated which is Intel's UHD 600 you
can see that scores look at the difference there so quite an
increase going from the integrated graphics to the dedicated GPU as
expected and then we take a look now at Geekbench for so these scores yeah they
are very low but for this hardware compared to the other laptops I've
tested out like the lap book SC from chewy similar results here maybe a
little fast on the single core score because this is actively called not
passive like the other ones if I strike from 3dmark says it's a very demanding
test for that GPU not an amazing score but what the overclock you do gain 15%
just over 15% which is really nice I also did benchmark the SSD on here so
it's a light on branded one 256 gigabytes SATA 3 spec really good speeds
for a set of 3 Drive this is perfectly fine it's not going to cause any
bottlenecks here so just how is this keyboard well the layout of it is fine I
do like the spacing they have used the texture of the keys feels good the
plastic they have used 1.5 millimeters of travel approximately there's a little
bit of flex there you can see and perhaps a little bit of bounce when
you're typing but overall it is a good keyboard it's just not a premium one
it's not as good as the one for example in the me notebook pro or even in my
Chewie let book SC the touchpad has a smooth plastic finish to it
it supports Windows gestures and it is a Windows precision touchpad my days using
it I find it to be average it's fine it's certainly not the best I've used
I've used a lot worse as well this laptop will stream 4k video just fine
but I wanted to focus here on the audio which is truly an absolutely
disappointing so bad the speakers they have no volume to them give you a sample
of them now
so as you could hear from that that they lack a huge amount of volume the 3.5
millimeter headphone jack is much louder it's got very clean sound there's no
static desert interference however it's still not as long as it should be so
very disappointing audio on this laptop over winners file is to edit some 4k
footage here in Adobe Premiere Pro so this is very demanding for the CPU but
if you have a look now at the preview if I play this now you can see that's
running in real time but that's only rendering it at half the resolution when
you skip ahead and various different edits it does really start to bog down
now 1080p video editing it will run a hell of a lot better than a 4k because
remember this is a very low-end chipsy export times as well super slow it's
going to take more than double the length of your clip into 4k to encode it
even though it is hardware accelerated using the cuter cause and Intel's
quick sync and a very quick peek at Linux this is Linux meant that it's
running and there's no issues to report whatsoever everything seems to be
working that includes your Bluetooth your wireless everything like that and
you can of course install it as well so you could set this up as a dual boot
machine now there is one thing if you follow me on Twitter that you've
probably seen me mention as this this is driving me almost insane that whatever I
try all those different methods the custom INF files the config files
I cannot upgrade the graphics driver on this it just will not happen for some
reason it seems to be when you have a look at the device ID that's fine it is
the 25 watt as mentioned TDP and video MX 150 but it's like a generic VGA
device it's something's wrong with it there that I just cannot upgrade the
drivers on this this is going to be an issue especially with some games
so this title here is GTA I've got it running on the lowest settings it's
1080p and it's playable I mean if you want a faster frame rate than what I'm
about to show you then you could probably run it to 720p with this is
looking okay I mean it's not amazing performance
but there's no way that just that salon in 4100 bite South would be able to run
this game so forget about 34 frames per second 32 but as long as it keeps over
30 yes that's some really bad driving from
me it is fine so stepped it up now to a more demanding game this is Witcher 3
low settings presets 720p over 40 frames per second this is actually a lot better
than I expected I thought this one would definitely bring things coming down to a
whole under 20 frames per second now I did try it in 1080p but it's not
recommended 1080p I was getting a maximum frame rate of only about 35 and
it was hovering around 29 30 frames per second on average total said to me that
wasn't really good enough so I'll just upset the guards here to see if that's
gonna cause a huge frame dip or not okay not really so this one's gonna be yeah
100 cent playable 720p low settings this title here is Call of Duty World War 2
and it's hopping around 40 frames per second but when there's a lot of action
going on screen when there's explosions and you're in those cutscenes it drops
down to about 25 frames per second so it's a it's semi playable this one here
you do see a lot of screen tearing and whatnot even on the low setting 720p I
can't really lower it much further you can lower the resolution down but it
doesn't make much of a difference
because it wouldn't be complete without showing you Counter Strike global
Offensive this is on 1080p resolution medium
settings now you can lower the resolution and it will give you a better
framerate and you can just want to show you too that in the smoke there you can
see it dipped down to 40 so this is yeah play of all about 720p will run a little
bit better so let's have a look at those temperatures now which is important so
maximum temperatures on the CPU 83 degrees it doesn't tend to exceed this I
haven't seen it go over that and that is almost after three hours and if we take
a look at the GPU and that is 77 degrees and the fan noise is actually quite low
it's very hard for me to capture a sample but not very loud this laptop
taking a look at the external teams here so it does get up to about 37 degrees
Celsius just along the top right there we can see the red dot where the laser
is and overall those temperatures are fine in nothing like the more powerful
laptops I've looked at that have reached up and over fully eight degrees Celsius
so very hot to the touch this one's just warm to the touch so
there's webcam in a very awkward position that kind of looks up your nose
isn't the greatest quality it's HD either side of it we do have jewelry
microphones and there is a status LED to let you know it's on so here's a sample
from the webcam the mics either side of it as I pointed out and when you type on
the keyboard you don't get as much feedback through those microphones of
that as you doing ones that are placed on the laptop itself overall this
quality is very average the mics as well and the webcam location is not the
greatest-looking up your nose having it right down there it should be up in the
top bezel ok so just going to recap here as I do the end of my video so I've got
plastic palm rests element on the top aluminium or aluminum on the bottom it
is cooled by a fan the fan noise is not bad there's a bit of heat from it but
not a problem they gets up to about 83 degrees so that is fine there the screen
is nothing amazing yes it has the slimmer bezels which may
look a little bit more modern a little bit nice-looking there I'll just turn
the screen on for you can see you can see it there but the low brightness okay
it's saving grace probably because it has met coded means that indoors it
looks fine but a hundred Lux is just not bright enough and then if you're gonna
be color grading photos and things like that the color gamut the coverage we're
getting from the screen not good I mean I kind of expected that because this is
a cheaper Chinese a laptop here so the big problem that I had was the drivers
I still cannot install Nvidia's latest drivers on this I don't know why I tried
everything you can think of I got some help from other people on Twitter as
well so installing in safe mode and using that driver and install utility
get rid of all the drivers and add a fresh install went offline I tried to
stop windows and automatically installing its own driver which kept
happening a lot too I was ripping my hair out after almost a whole day
actually a day and a half two days messing with that I got fed up and just
almost went insane I was gonna throw this thing out the window so you cannot
update at least I can't update the graphics driver on this which it's going
to be a energy for gaming so gaming performance as you saw is surprisingly
good it's not a high-end system such a weak CPU it does limit it with some
games but there were a lot of titles there on 1080p low settings playable
framerate so that's good too this kind of what this thing is about are the
touchpad the keyboard it's good to type on it overall has an average build
quality but for the price they're $5.99 that it cost me well no because I feel
you're better off saving an extra 200 us and getting something like shammies me
laptop Pro that one there is often on sale for $7.99 or even a little bit
lower than that and it's got just so much better performance a premium build
to a backlit keyboard this isn't backlit I wrote it's a better experience yet
really it's a battery life it'll go for seven or eight hours which is good
that's on par with other Sauron in 4100 that I've looked at the gym no lake is
good on batteries so that's probably one of the positives on all this so really
need to factor that in if you can get up maybe you for a lot cheaper then
possibly but then you probably find something with an AMD APU that'll go a
lot better run a lot better than those had better performance but the
performance did surprise me with the extra rain with the upgrade ability
that's a big positive with us it did run great a lot better in fact the best N
4,100 that I have reviewed thanks so much for watching this video and I do
hope to see you back in the channel soon bye for now