It has no flashy plastic design, no RGB lighting, no overclocking, and the performance isn't even very good, but make no mistake the GPD win max arguably packs more PC gaming punch per leader than anything that's ever come before it and I was lucky enough to be sent a pre production unit. So let's have a look at it together instantly see your current and past network activity, detect malware and blocked badly behaving apps on your pc or Android device with glass wire. Use offer code Linus to get 25% off glass fire at the link below.
The first thing my wife said is that it reminds her of the Aspire one given the thickness of the GPD max and the cramped keyboard. That's not entirely an unfair comparison, but a lot was learned from the early netbooks and performance has come a long way since Intel Atom GPD ended up taking a Shockingly zero compromises approach to the wind max. And the highlights of it specifications include 16 gigs of LP DDR, four x memory, 512 gigs of NVMe storage, an eight inch 508 display lightning fast Wi Fi six and enough IO to embarrass some laptops that are twice its size. But the star of the show is the 10 nanometre Intel quad core processor that manages to turbo all the way up to three to 3.3 gigahertz under light real world all core loads, guys, that is just about the same base frequency as a 4770 desktop chip. And it comes loaded with Iris plus graphics 940 Yeah, we're gonna have to get to that eventually, it uses onboard graphics. But as we've seen so many times before, a complete product can be more than the sum of its parts. Yes, my friends. That is GTA five running on the wind Max, but hold on. It's worth talking about some of the setup first, one of the first things I did was pop into the BIOS and toggle the CPUs TDP to Maximum 25 watts. It's pretty typical these days for Intel to have configurable thermal envelopes for their mobile chips, but usually the device manufacturer will pick one for you and design the thermal solution that allows the chip to go as fast as it can within that limit, not here. Now it's a little kludgy and requires a reboot every time. But leaving this to the user allows those folks who are mostly interested in retro game emulation to extend their battery life considerably by tuning power consumption down or by disabling course, while offering maximum performance to those who are looking to play older triple A PC games or emulated games from much newer consoles when it comes to real world performance. Other than a couple of misleading bits in the marketing. I'm thrilled in truly heavy workloads. The 1035 g seven falls well behind a 4790 K, let's be honest, but PlayStation one emulation was flawless. PlayStation two was super fluid. In fact, almost anything that's normally CPU bound Even dolphin which is notoriously CPU heavy due to the GameCube and wheeze IBM processor ran more like I would expect it to run on something that would fit in my lap. Not something that would fit. In my hand. Even GPS representation of the PC gaming experience is pretty upfront. Modern, demanding triple A games will run as long as you don't mind cranking down the graphical settings and living with a 30 ish FPS experience. As for older triple A games, fees, run, oh, it crashed. Yeah, it's an early unit and the firmware and the hardware are both not final. So I did run into some issues here but until it crashed, it was running great. I mean, it's crazy because I remember when you needed a top tier gaming PC to run Batman Arkham Asylum. This thing though, you can basically max it out running at 60 FPS with only very occasional stutters and that's that native resolution And therein lies some of the magic built into the wind Max, isn't it? IPS panel that's rated for 500 nits max brightness and runs at 1280 by 800 resolution that is pretty low for a modern display. And if you have sharp eyesight, the experience is not as good as they seem to make it out to be in the Indiegogo pitch. GPD points out how the pixel pitch so the pixel density of their display compares to common laptop and desktop display sizes and pixel counts. The problem is that the way that you would typically hold the GPD max puts it much closer to your face than those other displays. So you need more pixel density in order for it to reach retina levels where you can't make out the individual pixels. I do understand the design limitations that play here though, it's not like the iris pro graphics, we're gonna be able to drive anything higher than an HD panel anyway and playing at a lower but still native resolution is definitely better the alternative. Truthfully, I'd have done it exactly the same way. I just felt that it was a little disingenuous to make the comparisons that they did some more good Good news, though, is that I absolutely love the built in controller. As we've seen on previous GPD products, there's a rocker on the side that toggles the controller between mouse mode with the shoulder buttons acting as left and right click and gamepad mode which is a standard x input, meaning that it usually requires no configuration to just work. This is far and away their best efforts so far, the AB xy buttons are delightfully clicky but not loud. The D pad is the best I've seen on anything that isn't a dedicated game controller and the analog sticks. They might take up a ton of space internally that might have been great to use for battery, but they were totally worth it. The tension on them is just right. The plastic ribbon on the top is the perfect balance of control and durability. And I got no annoying dead zones putting me in perfect control all the time. I had to complain about the gamepad. I would say the shoulder buttons are a little light for my taste. The intake fennel on the bottom actually makes my fingers cold when I'm playing. If I'm not wearing a warm hoodie from LTT store calm That is the word max itself is heavy enough that you pretty much have to rest it on something if you're playing for more than about 15 minutes back to the marketing though my final beef is this While it is true that PlayStation three emulation is possible with the win Max, you're going to be limited to the much lighter games from that console and the Xbox 360 for that matter, if you want frame rates of 30 fps or more now I did technically run some heavier games. This is Bioshock two for example. But as you can see, the experience was not great. One way around this would be to use the Thunderbolt three port on the back to hook up an external GPU. That is super cool like Thunderbolt three in this thing. Dang, I have long been a thunderbolt three graphics card enthusiast but all the compact Thunderbolt three graphics cards that I'm aware of, either never made it to market or have gone extinct. Meaning that if you want to do that you're stuck tethered to a big old brick that's plugged into the wall at that point. I mean, why wouldn't I just use a normal controller and play on the larger display of my real laptop or TV or something, but Linus, you might say, maybe the wind Max is your only computer, use it as a handheld on the go and you dock it at home, you simply must have a solution to this problem. And given the luxury pricing of both the wind Max and an E GPU, I find that scenario pretty hard to swallow. But at least Hey, the option is there if you're into it, and performance is shockingly good. The wind Max is open air flow bottom might give it a bit more flex than I'd like and it can get pretty loud, but it allows the dual fan cooler to breathe extremely well and kept the CPU in the high 60s to low 70s. Throughout my testing, all of which was done again at max TDP. I bought a MacBook Air would need water cooling for that. We should test that. get subscribed to see it just make sure to though that a webcam. Yeah, it took me a while to realize it's missing one and a separate keyboard is part Your docking solution if you want to go that route, I really wanted to like the keyboard and the touchpad be included dedicated F keys, which I appreciated. And it's pretty neat how in controller mode, you can kind of thumb the trackpad around, but the arrow keys are terrible. This Caps Lock should absolutely be tab and it's just too cramped to really gain comfortably on Not to mention that I can type faster on my phone, then I can type on this thing that's really the final nail on the I'm gonna make this My only computer pipe dream for me. I see the wind max as a second, or maybe even a third PC, but that does not mean that I don't like it. This is a really cool device. Once they sort out those stability issues that prevented me from even testing battery life. I'd expect 10 hours or maybe more in our light office benchmark, which is pretty darn good considering the 57 watt hour battery. That's 10 nanometre for you like anything though, it's full of sacrifices and it lacks the kind of polish that you might expect from the likes of Dell if that weird Alienware, Nintendo, switch to ever comes to market but bottom line, if you're the kind of person who was already salivating over the prospect of a handheld emulation monster, and you were just waiting for me to say, Yep, they pretty much does what they said it would do then go now just buy it. This is without a doubt one of the coolest PCs on the market and it may be a long time before something this unique comes along again, you know else might not come along again anytime soon. A segue this move. Private Internet access lets you mask your IP and encrypt traffic to and from your devices. P IAA has reliable service with over 3000 servers in more than 30 countries. They've got no bandwidth caps. 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