Every once in a while, we get surprised. It seems to be a rare thing in this industry these days, but it does still happen from time to time. The Chuwi Lapbook 14.1 was one such surprise when we reviewed it earlier this year. Chuwi hasn’t been around for a long time, but in one fell swoop, they forever changed the expectations on a budget laptop. Reasonable components, coupled with a good IPS display, instantly changed the expectations on any budget offering from the big PC makers. So far, they’ve not really responded, and the LapBook 14.1 is easily the top pick for anyone wanting a 14-inch laptop for not a lot of money.

So, imagine the shock when this still relatively unknown PC maker surprised us again. Earlier this year, they announced the LapBook 12.3, which is now available. It takes the same basic internals from the LapBook 14.1, couples it to the same display found in the Surface Pro, and packs it all into an all-aluminum chassis. The budget bar has been raised again.

The underlying platform is almost unchanged from the LapBook 14.1 that we reviewed in March. At the heart is an Intel Celeron N3450 CPU, which is a quad-core processor based on the Intel Atom lineup, but the latest Goldmont architecture. This isn’t going to be a blisteringly fast laptop, but the N3450 holds its own in light tasks. In addition, Chuwi has bumped the RAM from 4 GB in the LapBook 14.1, to 6 GB in the LapBook 12.3. That’s a very respectable amount for this PC. Storage remains the same 64 GB of eMMC, which isn’t a lot, but is much better than the 32 GB seen in most PCs in this price range. The LapBook 14.1 also had an M.2 slot inside where you could add a SSD if desired, and the LapBook 12.3 makes that even easier with a removable panel on the bottom to access the M.2 slot.

Chuwi LapBook 12.3
CPU	Intel Celeron N3450 4C/4T 1.1-2.2 GHz 2MB L2 Cache 6W TDP
GPU	Intel HD Graphics 500 12 Execution Units (Gen 9) 200-700 MHz
Memory	6 GB Dual-Channel
Display	12.3" 2736x1824 3:2 IPS
Storage	64 GB eMMC Expandable up to +128GB microSD plus M.2 slot (2242 SATA)
I/O	1 x USB 3.0 Port 1 x USB 2.0 Port 1 x micro HDMI micro SD Card Slot 1 x Headset Jack
Dimensions	300 x 223 x 16.7 mm 11.8 x 8.78 x 0.66 inches
Weight	1.45 kg / 3.18 lbs
Battery	37 Wh, 24W AC Adapter
Wireless	Intel Dual Band Wireless-AC 3165 1x1 with Bluetooth 4.2
Price	$310-$330 USD

The star of the show though is the display, with its 267 pixels-per-inch. The 2736x1824 resolution means that it’s also a 3:2 display, giving a bit more display height than a standard 16:9 laptop, and for productivity tasks, that’s been a winning aspect ratio on Microsoft’s Surface lineup. There’s no touch though, but you can’t have everything for this price.

Speaking of the price, this all-aluminum laptop, with a higher resolution display, and more RAM than the LapBook 14.1, can still be had for around the $300 USD mark. At the time of this writing, it’s going for $330 on Amazon, compared to $270 for the larger, plastic, LapBook 14.1, and it can be found for less on other sites. That’s a remarkable price for a device with these kinds of features, and you’d be hard pressed to find a computer that offers more, for less. Let’s dig into the Chuwi LapBook 12.3.

Design

Since most of the internals are shared with Chuwi’s other offerings, such as the LapBook 14.1, and the Hi13 tablet, what sets the LapBook 12.3 apart from those is the design. The small numbering difference between the LapBook 14.1 and the 12.3 could easily fool someone into thinking they were very similar in design, but that’s not the case at all. Whereas the 14.1 model is your typical, budget laptop, with a plastic chassis, the LapBook 12.3 punches way above its weight with a full aluminum chassis. The plastic on the 14.1 was fine, and would be a very durable product, but aluminium really adds a big dash of premium to this budget device.

The 3:2 display is also very welcome here. Microsoft’s Surface lineup has proven that 3:2 works very well on the PC, whether in a portrait touch mode, or the more traditional landscape laptop mode, and that carries on here with the 12.3-inch 3:2 panel. Chuwi hasn’t been able to shrink the display bezels as much as it did in the LapBook 14.1, but on a smaller laptop, it would be tough to fit in the keyboard, trackpad, and all of the internal components if the display bezels were much smaller than they are. The bezels are the same color as the rest of the laptop though, although the bezel is plastic. This coloring makes the bezels all the more obvious to see, but for the price, it’s not a huge issue. The only real solution would be to add a larger display, and there’s a lot less options for 3:2 panels on the market.

The keyboard is exactly the same as the LapBook 14.1, and it offers decent travel and a good feel, but there’s no backlighting available. That’s also something that is to be expected at this price point, but it has to be pointed out, since it would be missed. Chuwi has also kept the somewhat strange keyboard layout, with the power button where Delete should be, and other keys shuffled around. The keyboard size and feel is fine, but the layout could use some work, and it would be best if Power wasn’t so easily pressed by mistake. It’s fairly frustrating to accidentally shut off your computer when you meant to make an edit.

The trackpad is all plastic, and is easily the biggest let-down in the Chuwi lineup. Good trackpads are hard to come by on Windows laptops, but the Chuwi model offers some of its own quirks as well. The two-finger scroll direction is the opposite of almost every other PC available, and there’s no drivers to let you swap it around if you wanted to. The trackpad feel is poor as well, thanks to the not smooth plastic surface and poor response. The money saved on the laptop would be well spent on a good mouse to use with it.

Chuwi continues its other quirks as well, with the single USB 3.0 port on the left, and single USB 2.0 port on the right, both upside down compared to every other laptop. That’s not the end of the world, but certainly odd enough to cause you confusion a few times during the USB superposition games everyone must play trying to connect devices. There’s also a microSD slot, and mini HDMI connector as well.

Overall, the design is quite impressive for a laptop hovering just over the $300 mark. The aluminum construction offers a very premium feel to the laptop, and the build quality and hinge feel solid despite the price. The small size will likely scare away some buyers, but the keyboard feels just as good as its larger cousin, the LapBook 14.1.

System Performance

Powering the Chuwi LapBook 12.3 is Intel’s Goldmont CPU architecture, meaning this is an Atom based PC. The benefit here is that the system is completely fanless, thanks to the only 6-Watt TDP of the CPU/GPU, but the downside is that performance is not in the same league as a Core based CPU. We went over Apollo Lake in detail on the LapBook 14.1, so check that out if you want a bit more background on this platform.

Although there are Goldmont Celerons available with dual-core, Chuwi has kept the quad-core version in the lineup for the LapBook 12.3, with the Celeron N3450. This has a maximum boost frequency of 2.2 GHz, and Gen 9 graphics with 12 EUs. Chuwi has added even more dual-channel RAM to this configuration though, bumping the total to a very respectable 6 GB. Overall, it would be expected to perform similarily to the LapBook 14.1, but with a bit more RAM to help out on multi-tasking and web browsing.

The LapBook 12.3 was run through our standard test suite for laptop performance, and it you’d like to compare it to any other system we’ve tested that’s not listed here, please check out our online Bench database.

PCMark

The PCMark scores are very similar, but a bit lower than the LapBook 14.1.

Cinebench

Once again, this is very much in-line with the LapBook 14.1, as expected.

x264

This is a bit lower than the LapBook 14.1 results, but still within expectations.

Web Results

The web is clearly one of the most important aspects of any testing, but web browsing performance is also impacted by the browser’s ECMAscript engine. For our testing, since Windows 10 was launched, we’ve moved to Microsoft’s Edge browser, since it is now in the same ballpark as the other browsers for performance.

CPU Conclusions

Overall, the LapBook 12.3 performed more or less the same as the LapBook 14.1, which is to be expected since they both use the same CPU under the covers. The increased RAM doesn’t affect overall performance much, since the tests are not memory limited, but if you’re going to have more tabs open in your browser, or more apps open overall, the extra RAM will be a bigger impact then. As we said in the previous Chuwi review, the Goldmont is a nice step forward for performance in the Atom cores, but still lags behind Core by a significant amount. The gap isn’t as large as you might think though, with the N3450 around 70% or so of a Broadwell Core M processor, but for a fraction of the cost. It’s not going to be the ideal machine for people who need to crunch a lot of numbers, and Intel clearly draws a line in the sand between the U series Core and Apollo Lake, but for a small and portable laptop, it should be fine for most light tasks.

Storage Performance

With 64 GB of eMMC storage, the key here isn’t going to be outright performance, but just having enough capacity that Windows isn’t constantly tripping over itself. 32 GB machines tend to quickly fill to the point where you’re going to struggle with everyday tasks, but 64 GB is enough of a buffer that you can generally get by if you don’t store a lot of media on the eMMC itself. For those that need expansion, there’s a microSD card slot, as well as a M.2 slot on the bottom of the device to add another drive if you are that ambitious.

The performance is as expected for eMMC, with decent read and write sequential speeds, but random access is not great.

GPU Performance

When we tested the LapBook 14.1, the results from the 12 EU Gen 9 graphics on the Celeron N3450 were not great. In fact, they were outright dismal. Even our lowest end game, Dota 2, at our lowest settings, only achieved 15 frames per second. Therefore, there wasn’t much point in going over that again here, since the results will be exactly the same. 3DMark was run on it just to get some numbers into Bench, but for anything beyond the most basic tasks, the GPU in the Celeron is not going to be enough.

There is an improvement over the older Atom Celeron platform, but it’s simply gone from terrible to very bad. With most of the Intel Core lineup having at least double the execution units, and more CPU performance, any GPU tasks are going to be a lot better on a laptop with Core.

Display Analysis

When you consider that the Surface Pro has one of the best displays in a PC, it’s never going to be a bad thing for Chuwi to leverage Microsoft’s panel production in order to outfit their devices. This isn’t the only Chuwi device which has the same panel as a Surface either; the Chuwi Hi-13 2-in-1 tablet uses the 3000x2000 13.5-inch panel from the Surface Book. Maybe we’ll get lucky and they’ll release an AIO with the Surface Studio’s 28.125-inch 4500x3000 display too. They seem to have no qualms about using these panels, and the customer is the winner in the end.

It’s fair to say that none of us really wanted the laptop industry to move to 16:9 displays, but when HDTV standardized on that aspect ratio, the entire industry built their tooling around that, so anyone offering anything other than 16:9 would be doing so at a significant increase in cost. That ended the 16:10 aspect ratio for pretty much all devices, although a few tablets did end up using it, without much success.

When you consider that much of what we do on a laptop involves height, it really has been a shame to see the taller displays disappear, but with the success of the 3:2 aspect on some devices, it’s great to see a PC manufacturer like Chuwi step in and utilize that supply chain.

With 267 pixels per inch, this is certainly in the realm of High DPI for most people. Windows can still struggle with that, although for most tasks, it’s not the issue it once was. Some apps, like Steam, can still be a pain in High DPI, but if you’re looking at a LapBook 12.3, you can pretty much ignore Steam anyway. The high number of pixels per inch, coupled with the taller than normal display, really do make a difference.

Some may recall that the Surface Pro lineup, which shares this display panel, is also one of the most accurate displays around, but Microsoft calibrates each display at the factory. It’s pretty much an impossibility that Chuwi would be able to do the same, considering the different price categories these two devices are in, but to see how the LapBook 12.3 fares, we’ve tested it with SpectraCal’s CalMAN software suite, along with an X-Rite i1Pro2 colorimeter for brightness and contrast testing, and the X-Rite i1Pro2 Spectrophotometer for color accuracy testing.

Brightness and Contrast

Although the backlight on the Chuwi LapBook 12.3 doesn’t get overly bright, it does have great contrast ratios, with a very dark black on this LCD display. It’s impressive that such an inexpensive laptop can have this kind of contrast. For those looking to use the LapBook in the dark, it’s not advisable since it doesn’t have a backlit keyboard, but also because the display only goes down to 37 nits at 0% brightness, which is still pretty bright for a very dark room.

Grayscale

SpectraCal CalMAN

Here’s the first indications that Chuwi hasn’t bothered with calibrating this panel at all. Grayscale on the LapBook 12.3 is quite awful. The grayscale results show the green values climbing as the brightness level increases, and at maximum brightness, the dE2000 is well over 10. It’s just not good, but it’s also expected at this price point.

Gamut

SpectraCal CalMAN

The panel and backlighting actually does a decent job covering the sRGB gamut, with 100% color levels that are quite close to the correct levels. The white point is what throws the average up so high, and here we can clearly see the white point drifting into green quite a bit.

Saturation

SpectraCal CalMAN

Much as we saw at the extreme 100% levels in the Gamut test, the saturation sweep shows a similar picture. The color levels are surprisingly solid on this device, and it’s mostly let down by the white point.

Gretag Macbeth

SpectraCal CalMAN

The most comprehensive test is the Gretag Macbeth, which doesn’t just test the primary and secondary colors, but also mixes in many other shades, as well as the important skin tones. The overall average is actually pretty decent again, although values under 3.0 would be better. Looking a the colors, most of them are decent but the whites and blacks show the most error.

Relative Colorchecker

Just to get a perspective on what these errors would look like, we’ve also run the colorchecker on the LapBook. Note that this is a relative error level, since any errors on your own display may affect the picture. Colors on the bottom are the target, and what’s displayed on the panel is on the top.

SpectraCal CalMAN

Here you can easily see the green cast on this display, but as we saw in the other tests, the color levels are much stronger.

Display Conclusion

It feels like its almost a shame that Chuwi wasn’t able to calibrate these devices at the factory, since the grayscale would be easily correctable and would make this display one of the best around, but thanks to it’s ultra-low price point, a calibrated display would be a bit of a stretch to expect. Still, the highlights of this display are the pixel density and aspect ratio, and for most people buying this laptop, the green cast isn’t going to be a huge issue, especially if they are coming from a TN display.

Battery Life

Every mobile device with a battery is going to be held back by it’s battery life, and there’s always trade-offs to be had. Larger batteries cost money, and add weight, so smaller batteries with higher efficiency can be the way to go. Chuwi has only outfitted the LapBook 12.3 with a 37 Wh battery, compared to the larger 45 Wh battery in it’s larger LapBook 14.1 sibling, so expectations are that it won’t be able to live up to that device for outright battery life.

Battery Life 2013 – Light

Our older 2013 battery life test opens a set of four web pages every minute, using Edge. It’s gotten to be that it’s far too light for almost any device, so it’s been replaced with an updated test, but since we have a large backlog of data to work with, we still run this one as well.

This is why you have to test things. Going in, with a higher density panel, and smaller battery, it would have seemed there was no way the LapBook 12.3 could keep up with the decent battery life of the LapBook 14.1, but in fact, the smaller laptop actually outperformed the bigger one. Pretty impressive start.

Battery Life 2016 – Web

Our 2016 web test is much more CPU intensive, so the scores have dropped for most devices compared to the 2013 test, unless the laptop was a gaming laptop where the CPU only makes up a fraction of the power draw. That’s not the case with the Chuwi though, and it was only slightly beaten by the LapBook 14.1. This is a solid result as well.

Normalized Battery Life

To look at the device’s efficiency, we remove the battery size from the equation to get a minutes per Wh result. The LapBook 12.3 does much better here than the 14.1 model did, coming in ahead of the much lower resolution HP Stream 11, although it can’t quite match some of the most efficient devices we’ve ever tested, especially the discontinued Surface 3. It’s still a good result, and really makes the smaller 37 Wh battery last.

Movie Playback

Movie playback can be offloaded to fixed function hardware, so it generally makes the battery last longer than our 2016 web browsing, and that’s the case here as well, but the difference isn’t huge. Still, our Tesseract score lets you know you can watch The Avengers three times before the laptop will shut down.

Charge Time

The laptop ships with a 24-Watt AC Adapter, which is 100V-240V. The review unit shipped with the wrong cable, but since it’s a standard PC cable, it wasn’t difficult to dig up the proper North American plug, which is no issue because the adapter itself handles both voltages.

With a smaller battery than it’s bigger brother, it does charge a bit faster, but it’s not going to set any speed records here.

Wireless

Chuwi has stuck with the Intel Wireless-AC 3165 NIC for the smaller LapBook, which is an 802.11ac model with a 1x1 antennae. Most Ultrabooks are going to ship with a 2x2 solution, which would double the bandwidth, but for a budget system, sticking with a cheaper 1x1 model is fine. The great part about the 3165 is that it’s 802.11ac, meaning it’s both 2.4 and 5 GHz capable, and if you have an 802.11ac access point, the performance should be reasonable.

Despite the metal chassis, the LapBook 12.3 actually outperformed the plastic LapBook 14.1, although only slightly. This is a solid wireless offering, and the Intel drivers have been, in our experience, the most stable and reliable of any of the wireless NIC cards, so it’s great to see Chuwi keep a good offering here. The 1x1 is a drawback for outright performance, but for light tasks, it’s going to be fine. You probably won’t be copying multiple GB of data to this machine over the network anyway, since the storage is so limited, but if you do, it’ll take a while.

Audio

It’s a rare laptop that manages to find a way to pack good speakers in, thanks to the cramped quarters, and the additional weight that would be required for a proper speaker magnet. Pretty much the best we can hope for is that the laptop gets reasonably loud.

This is one area where the Chuwi once again shows its budget nature. The speakers only get to around 80 dB(A) measured one inch over the trackpad at maximum volume, and the sound quality leaves a lot to be desired. No laptop can produce much sound in the lower end of the frequency range, but the Chuwi is especially poor in this regard.

Software

We mentioned this in the last Chuwi review as well, but it certainly bears mentioning again. Chuwi ships the LapBook with a bone stock Windows OS. There’s no extra software installed at all, other than the drivers for the hardware.

In an age where everyone wants to bump their margins by installing paid trail-ware on their systems, it’s impressive that one of the most budget machines around doesn’t need to do this.

Final Words

This is one of the shortest reviews we’ve ever done of a laptop, mostly because it is almost a complete replica of the larger Chuwi LapBook 14.1 we reviewed earlier this year. With the same internals, the performance is practically the same, and it would be very easy to write the smaller version off as a smaller version of the larger notebook. In fact, this isn’t actually the case at all.

Honestly, Chuwi needs to work on its branding more than almost anything. They’ve fallen into calling their devices names that are very similar to other products from other manufacturers. This is probably with the attempt to leverage some of that existing brand recognition, but it is to Chuwi’s detriment to do this. Their products can stand on their own, and be judged on their own. They aren’t all home runs; Chuwi sent the Hi-13 2-in-1 tablet a while back for us to check out, and although we’ve not had a chance to do a full review on it, the Hi-13 is a bit too heavy and awkward as a tablet, and the 2-in-1 nature means that it’s even heavier when used as a laptop, but the LapBook’s we’ve checked out are a different story. Both the LapBook 14.1 and LapBook 12.3 are great devices for the money.

Their naming is confusing though, since they offer several models in the LapBook range, and the only thing different is the screen size tacked on the end, but the LapBook 14.1 and 12.3 are very different devices. The plastic 14.1 is a fine machine for $270, with a good 1920x1080 IPS display that you normally don’t see in a laptop that price, but the LapBook 12.3 is a step ahead of the larger 14.1 in several categories. What makes the LapBook branding even more confusing is that they also offer a LapBook 15.6 which is an older Atom X5 platform, with a 1920x1080 TN display. That means there are three LapBook models, and all of them are significantly different than the others. The company needs to do a better job differentiating its products.

The LapBook 12.3 does jump ahead of the 14.1 in several areas. The display is one of the standout features. The 12.3-inch panel offers great pixel density, for very sharp images and text, and the 3:2 aspect ratio makes it great for productivity tasks. The bezels are larger than many other laptops, including the LapBook 14.1’s 7mm bezels, but is a fact of life when Chuwi can’t afford to get their own custom panels made. They wanted to go with the 3:2 panel, and it was a good choice, despite the bezels.

The all-aluminum build on the LapBook 12.3 puts it into a much higher category of laptop for look and feel. The plastic on the 14.1 was fine, and durable, but this design has that sleek, cool feel of aluminum that you just can’t replicate. It doesn’t change the way you use the device, but it really makes it feel like it’s something you paid a lot more for.

Overall, the Apollo Lake platform is speedy enough for light tasks, and the generous 6 GB of RAM is far more than you see on most budget devices. The 64 GB of eMMC is adequate, but you can pretty easily add more storage via microSD or M.2 if you need it. Even the WiFi is an Intel solution, meaning it’s going to be a stable connection, at least in our experience.

The LapBook 12.3 takes everything that made the 14.1 great, and steps it up a notch. But the amazing thing is that it does this, and doesn’t take the price and put this laptop into another category. The Chuwi LapBook 12.3 isn’t going to be able to compete with Ultrabooks on many fronts, but it does offer a lot of an Ultrabook’s appeal in its thin, light, and sleek design, but with a much, much lower price point. Not very long ago, buying a laptop for under $500 meant it was going to offer several severe compromises, but Chuwi has proven, again, that a low-cost computer doesn’t need to be that way. If you’re ok with the smaller display on the LapBook 12.3, you end up with an amazing laptop for the price.