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  • boozed - Friday, April 7, 2017 - link

    WAGRRRRWWGAHHHHWWWRRGGAWWWWWWRR!
  • Kevin G - Saturday, April 8, 2017 - link

    Interesting. Please tell me more.
  • Devo2007 - Saturday, April 8, 2017 - link

    Chewbacca must not like these small laptops.........
  • kaidenshi - Sunday, April 9, 2017 - link

    Whoosh.
  • coolhardware - Sunday, April 9, 2017 - link

    Hi wonder how Chewbacca likes the 3:2 12.3" display (69.83 sq inch) vs 16:9 12.5" displays (66.75 sq inches). I'm thinking Holochess would fit the 3:2 aspect ratio better. ;-)

    Also, the Chuwi 12.3" slots in right outside the top 10 for pixel density:
    http://pixensity.com/list/laptop/
    not bad!

    Lastly, though it is not mentioned on AT, Chuwi DID keep the M.2 slot for SSD upgrades. That is a very classy touch IMHO!
  • basroil - Sunday, April 9, 2017 - link

    But of course they pair a high dpi screen with a low end celeron that can't handle 1080p properly, let alone something with twice the resolution. Overall just junk. Better off with a Surface Pro 3, it's ridiculously cheap right now and has a much better overall package.
  • trane - Saturday, April 8, 2017 - link

    I find it very interesting that this company trades display quality for performance. However, I think they have gone too far with Hi13 and now this. Apollo Lake is no match for nearly 3K resolutions. I can see why they did it though, Core Y series is super expensive. I hope AMD have a cheap fanless Ryzen mobile part later this year that can go into these instead.
  • zodiacfml - Saturday, April 8, 2017 - link

    It is on the other end of the spectrum. I have a Lenovo with a big Core i5 but this costs almost like an Atom laptop due to the poor screen and cheap plastic throughout.
    I do hope the company continue release of new products, probably a modern AMD APU this year or next.
  • Samus - Saturday, April 8, 2017 - link

    I second that Lenovo screens, especially outside of Thinkpads, are complete crap. At least HP uses decent screens with crap resolution in their cheap laptops. Lenovo uses crap screens throughout, even if you pay for higher resolution. The really comical thing is their obsession, along the lines of Acer, with glossy displays that aren't even touch sensitive. There is no excuse for this.
  • close - Sunday, April 9, 2017 - link

    Not even ThinkPads are safe from the screen plague. Mi 1st gen Carbon X1 has a low res screen that also acts as its own privacy filter (probably the crappiest TN I've used this side of the new millenium). For my 2nd generation Carbon X1 I went for the best screen they had, no more compromises... or so I thought. It has the resolution, not the quality. Not to mention that it has horrible burn-in issues. I can literally read text from documents that stayed open and untouched for more than a minute even 20-30s after I minimize the document window.

    In contrast a few months ago I bought a Chuwi Windows 10 Atom tablet for 60E on sale (down from 100E). The screen is a gorgeous 1920x1200, great viewing angles, great contrast, as far as my eyes can tell great color reproduction. If they can do this in a 60-100E budget I'm sure Lenovo could do it in a 2500E one.
  • prisonerX - Saturday, April 8, 2017 - link

    You seem to think that people will be playing Crysis on this thing. 2D graphics isn't exactly challenging for any modern GPU.
  • nagi603 - Saturday, April 8, 2017 - link

    Depends on how and how fast you work. I could choke a 4790K iGPU with quick alt-tabbing needed for work. And it wasn't photoshop or anything like that, but browser windows and coding tools. I could actually work faster with a dedicated GPU because I didn't have to be careful to keep alt-tab pressed for more than a frame. Yes, the average office worker won't run into this, but a high-functioning multitasker probably will.
  • jospoortvliet - Saturday, April 8, 2017 - link

    No offense but I find that EXTREMELY hard to believe. I'm using a Haswell CPU + iGPU to game on a 2560x1440 monitor playing 2003-2005 games (Warcraft 3, Command & Conquer Generals) which play full screen, maximum quality, without stutter. Your alt-tabbin can't get anywhere near 1% of the resource usage, it's just switching between (admittedly large) textures of windows. Unless the OS you use is totally incompetent with regards to the graphical layer or you have serious driver or memory bandwidth issues this can't be a problem in any way...
  • jabber - Saturday, April 8, 2017 - link

    Hey you'll always meet the uber super power user in such discussions. Bow down before them or just roll your eyes choice is yours.
  • MrSpadge - Saturday, April 8, 2017 - link

    If you're so uber-fast simply switch off the fancy animation for alt+tab and that's it.
  • jabber - Saturday, April 8, 2017 - link

    Yeah how much power do I need to configure a router, NAS or switch on the go. I never game on laptops or do video editing so lower power is fine for me and many others. I also don't feel the need to carry around my entire lifetimes collection of music and video.
  • wilsonkf - Saturday, April 8, 2017 - link

    You are not going to play any 3D game on this notebook even if the screen is 1366 X 768 anyway.

    The high resolution screen is great for text. For Chinese text it is even greater - CHUWI is a Chinese company and China is of course their most important market.
  • cerberusss - Saturday, April 8, 2017 - link

    It looks like it's charged over the USB-C ports on either side but the specs don't mention it. Am I correct?
  • davepermen - Saturday, April 8, 2017 - link

    Looks like someone got access to spare surface pro 4 screens. identical format and resolution..
  • Calin - Sunday, April 9, 2017 - link

    It's possible they are failed Surface 4 screens (production batches with too many errors would fail the entire batch, not only the failed screens). Or screens built on Mondays, or in the night shift, or something.
  • flashpowered - Saturday, April 8, 2017 - link

    It would be nice if these 3:2 displays were adopted much more widely by PC makers. As much as I love my Surface Book, I want something more like the new MacBook to take everywhere with me and 16:9 is far less comfortable to use when reading and writing on a smaller display.
  • yhselp - Saturday, April 8, 2017 - link

    I wonder what type of coating is used on these Surface displays found in Chuwi's Hi10 Plus, Hi12, Hi13, and LapBook 12.3 - hopefully not the matte finish from the LapBook 14.1.
  • haukionkannel - Saturday, April 8, 2017 - link

    It is good to see good displays in these cheapo computers. I am so tired of really bad 768 screens in these normally. For writing and reading text these are superior to normal usage, even if the cpu is not too good. If you want to have faster, just spent 2000$, but anyone who does not use this for gaming, this is very good candidate!
    Give us more machines like this and maybe some bigger brands also find out that people also care about their eyes and overall quality also in this price segment.
  • yannigr2 - Saturday, April 8, 2017 - link

    It took many years for the known tech sites to acknowledge the existence of Chinese smartphones, it's nice to see that they acknowledge the existence of these Chinese laptops. If those laptops get more attention from tech sites and consumers, we might start seeing a few better low end laptops from known manufacturers too.

    This is a general comment. Just to be clear, I am not pointing any finger at Anandtech. The opposite.
  • DanNeely - Sunday, April 9, 2017 - link

    I'd agree with one major caveat. Only if they address OS licensing problems. As discussed in the comments the smaller Chuwi laptop that was reviewed here recently comes in two price points. For $250 you can have a version running 100% Genuine Warezdoze 10. Or for $265 you can have a model running Win 10, but sold under a program that offers heavily discounted ($15-30 vs nominally $100) licenses for very low end systems, which by virtue of having 64GB of flash instead of the program maximum of 32 the laptop doesn't qualify for.
  • abufrejoval - Saturday, April 8, 2017 - link

    I ported the 8Bit color passive frame buffer X-Windows server to an accelerated 32Bit color-depth graphics card in the early 1990's for my computer science masters degree so I've always had this notion that desktops and compute power should not be in the same room, if only for the noise.

    And I've worked with Citrix since NT 3.51 because that's where I thought Windows started to get interesting.

    I like big fat powerful computers, I just never liked the noise they make (it's incredible how low-noise today's desktops have become).

    So I bought a BayTrail J1900 motherboard when they came out simply because they were as noisy as a SparcStation 1 to see if they would provide acceptable desktop power while operating without any moving parts. I put 8GB of RAM in it, the official maximum and an Intel Postville SSD, officially retired from my SATA3 desktops, but still a great match for this BayTrail.

    It wasn't too bad at 1080p resolutions, even if it lost out in all aspects, graphics and CPU to a Qualcomm 820 mobile part. Office work, browsing, e-mail all of that doesn't require CPU power and if I want more, there is always a couple of fat Xeons just an RDP or x2go session away. Even Steam games stream well enough for some casual gaming to wherever this box happens to sit.

    At least it got the software compatibility right, everything from the various Windows versions, different Linux variants, Android-x86 or RemixOS just works fine and out of the box. I remember struggling with VMware ESx, but VMware workstation works just fine, as would KVM, Virtualbox or any container based virtualization solution.

    Nice to have something so compatible yet at an energy footprint where you simply don't worry about leaving it on.

    I got a Braswell next because I wanted to see how the much beefier graphics would stack up: Well they still lost to the Qualcomm 820, but not as badly. Stuffed 16GB of RAM into that, which works fine (also with the J1900 btw.) never tried 32GB.

    That one didn't like Windows 7 as much, although after a BIOS update I guess it would now. I'm switching it between Windows 10 and RemixOS because I see that as the only viable Linux competition on the desktop. And RemixOS is a real pleasure on these devices, because they have very much the same compute and graphics capacity of a high-end smartphone while they use 3-4 times the power (guess that's why Intel gave up in the phone market). Even Android games run really well, as long as they don’t depend on touch screen or gyros.

    The relatively brawny iGPU gives a certain degree of snappiness to Braswells and probably Goldmonts (could resist to by that) so unless you are forced to use them (e.g. because your boss wants to stint on the money for your new PC), they are really quite ok. In other words: They are easy enough to like them if you want, but you’ll find plenty of help if you want to hate them.

    I've recently done some tests with Windows 2016 and the RDP Client on my Nexus 10 tablet with a bluetooth keyboard just to see how well a potent server + RDP on a light touch enabled desktop might feel. It was much better than I feared so I'm actually thinking about getting either one of these or one of the Lenovo Braswell tablets with Transformer like keyboards.

    I also have a notebook with an i5-6267U in it. That's basically the i7-6500U with a double sized iGPU, 64MB of 4th level cache on the CPU die carrier, slightly higher clocks and *cheaper* than the i7-6500: Probably costs Intel twice as much to make as the i7*U, yet they (used to) sell it at a cheaper price just to kick some AMD Kaveri ass. That dual-core hyperthreading CPU will run rings around any true quad-core Atom and puts my 100Watt A10-7850K Kaveri APU to shame at 28Watts.

    Of course that chips is the much, much better *everything*, CPU, GPU, SoC. But unfortunately Intel is charging an ARM or three Atoms for it.

    It also runs virtually silent in that notebook of mine, unless I start really compute intensive stuff.

    I'm perfectly convinced that a nice big passive desktop sized cooler would allow a completely silent desktop with enough power to satisfy any non-gaming workload. It is definitely the better chip for this form factor, it might even sip less power at low load or idle.
    But these Atoms are good enough for quite a lot. So I’d buy them and recommend my friends buying them, if only to signal the need for something that sips power and budget like a smart-phone Atom but performs like a mobile i7 with the graphics power well above a Kaveri A10-7850k.
    I don’t are who satisfies that need, but I want it quenched: Get to it!
  • watersb - Sunday, May 7, 2017 - link

    A beautiful front-end to server-closet power: we are just now trying to re-visit that with things like nVidia Tegra, right? I would expect a 3K display to require some non-trivial power.

    I have a big storage bin in my garage filled with cables: VGA, DVI, SCSI, FireWire, eSATA, RS-232, Centronix.. . none of them matter anymore. But it has taken decades to render them obsolete.

    I use my iPad for web stuff like this comment, and it seems that the state of our art requires perhaps more computing power than we need to render all the web things.

    As a specific solution in a controlled environment, display-server front ends make a lot of sense. As a general consumer product, will we ever be able to deploy simplicity?
  • Lolimaster - Sunday, April 9, 2017 - link

    3:2 is the way to go for computing.

    TV's in the future and video recording should change to 16:10.
  • watzupken - Sunday, April 9, 2017 - link

    I think the use of a high resolution LCD panel is not required in this case, even though it is good to have. I believe the Apollo lake processor in there will struggle with such a high resolution screen.

    Nonetheless, it is good to see Chinese laptop manufacturers pushing the value boundary. At the low end market, most of the international manufacturers are just churning out very low end hardware, i.e. use of low end TN panel.
  • serendip - Sunday, April 9, 2017 - link

    I'm still rocking a Baytrail Windows 8" tablet that's great for ultralight travel. I wish Chuwi made a successor to the Surface 3 (non-Pro). A 9" sub-500 g tablet would be perfect.

    6 GB RAM is huge, I'd settle for 4 GB. 64 GB EMMC is still usable for Windows but a MicroSD card slot is a must. It would be great to have a full size USB or a USB-C slot, so you could charge over micro USB and still use peripherals.
  • watersb - Sunday, May 7, 2017 - link

    I refurbish obsolete laptops for a tedious hobby, and I have seen that device longevity is determined by RAM capacity, more than processing speed.

    Now that the industry is moving away from sockets and parts, I would buy the most RAM I could afford. It takes far *more* computing expertise to use older kit. I can't give the old stuff away. Unless it has enough RAM to look familiar.
  • webdoctors - Sunday, April 9, 2017 - link

    Looks like these support Ubuntu:

    http://forum.chuwi.com/thread-3571-1-1.html

    Looks like I have my next laptop picked out!
  • damianrobertjones - Sunday, April 9, 2017 - link

    "64 GB eMMC"

    Well... At least it's not 16GB! I hope it has an SDCard slot otherwise the new Win 10 builds are going to push things slightly.
  • Visual - Monday, April 10, 2017 - link

    They probably do (a lot of other cheap Chineze tablets and laptops do) but it's still not a good substitute to enough internal storage. The ones I've tried did 10MB/s writes, with Samsung cards that advertised being able to do 20MB/s. I can't be 100% sure it's the cardreader's fault and not the card's fault, as I didn't have any of the expensive Pro cards that advertise 60-90MB/s, but you'd do well to keep a grain of skepticism about the reader until you find some reviews showing it's good.
    Still, there is some hope. The tablets that I've dealt with were from the previous generation, right before USB 3.0 speeds (tho 20M/s should have been easy even if they used 2.0 connection). Maybe things will improve on this generation.
  • BrokenCrayons - Monday, April 10, 2017 - link

    Chuwi's doing some good things. I hope the company becomes a disruptive force in the laptop market in the US. A 12 inch notebook is more in line with what I'd be interested in purchasing and the specs are good except for one minor quibble. I know it's a primary selling point of the product, but I don't really care for the high screen resolution. It's not necessary for the work I would expect to perform so it seems like it'd be unnecessary. If its possible to run the panel at half resolution like say 1368x912, then it'd mitigate some of the problems, but I just don't see a need to drive that many pixels with a relatively weak iGPU.

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