The Chuwi LapBook 12.3 Review: Premium Feel, Budget Price
by Brett Howse on September 6, 2017 8:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Laptops
- Apollo Lake
- Goldmont
- Chuwi
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.
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serendip - Friday, September 8, 2017 - link
The Cherry Trail Atom chips are surprisingly powerful. I run Linux server VMs on my tablet, along with Grass/QGIS and image stitching programs. I haven't run SPSS but R works fine, albeit slowly. This thing will never compete against an i7 Surface Pro but at $200, I'm not complaining.thetuna - Friday, September 8, 2017 - link
Something amusing not mentioned in this article:The power port uses a 3.5mm barrel plug.
It is exactly the diameter of the 3.5mm headphone port, and indeed, the power plug fits nicely into the headphone port :)
Unfortunately, it does not charge that way (but it also doesn't light on fire, so that's good).
max347 - Saturday, September 9, 2017 - link
If only it charged through a usb c port. Now that my phone uses one, the next laptop I buy definitely will have the same port for convenience.Narg - Friday, September 15, 2017 - link
I bought a Chuwi once. Was riddled with viruses from the factory. No thanks.lmcd - Sunday, September 17, 2017 - link
Adorable, you almost started reading the review.hybrid2d4x4 - Friday, September 15, 2017 - link
Brett, can you comment on the functionality of the M.2 slot? With the eMMC being complete garbage (as it always is), what kind of throughput can we expect if we put in a SSD? Is this some gimped solution where it runs at much lower speeds than expected?Does the microSD run at (at least) USB2.0 speeds? I've got an Asus netbook, the T100, that advertises expanding storage via uSD, but fails to mention it maxes out at 13MB/s continuous read...
lmcd - Sunday, September 17, 2017 - link
This. What's it keyed? NVM support or SATA only? Bootable?Brett Howse - Friday, September 22, 2017 - link
It's a SATA 2242 slot. Looks like it can be set as the boot drive as well.lmcd - Sunday, September 17, 2017 - link
If you could fix the movie playback graphs that'd be cool, the "tesseract" makes no sense. 2 min of video playback != over 30% of a viable test movie.chrkv - Thursday, September 19, 2019 - link
Does anyone know the dimensions of power adapter's connector? I've lost mine and looking for a substitute :(