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
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.
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Arbie - Wednesday, September 6, 2017 - link
" 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."I am endlessly amazed that the designers of "On" and "Off" buttons / keys / software have never heard of time delays, multiple-press sequences, or confirmations. I've got at least two computers where accidentally hitting the power button shuts them down - right now, no questions. Why can't Windows give me an optional confirmation in the power options? Stupid beyond belief IMHO.
systemBuilder - Wednesday, September 6, 2017 - link
They are apparently using a Chromebook keyboard with standard windows keycaps.kaidenshi - Friday, September 8, 2017 - link
"Why can't Windows give me an optional confirmation in the power options?"It does, in the Power settings in the control panel. It probably took you longer to type out that comment than it would to change the setting to ask for confirmation.
Samus - Wednesday, September 6, 2017 - link
Still has a power button in a devastating place...who wants a computer that shuts down every time you blindly hit backspace...Ej24 - Thursday, September 7, 2017 - link
Change the setting of what the power button does in control panel > power options > choose what the power button does. Change it to sleep or something other than shutdown. Problem solved.0iron - Thursday, September 7, 2017 - link
I have ASUS UX305, with same power button location. What I did was change setting to 'Turn off the display' & 'Do nothing' when power button is pressed. Problem solved.Flunk - Wednesday, September 6, 2017 - link
I think Chuwi's biggest branding issue is that they name sounds like chewy. That's not something you want if you make electronics. Maybe if you make cookies.Naris17 - Thursday, September 7, 2017 - link
Think I've heard them go by the name 'Beetles' in Asia if that's any better to say.Personally I always equate the Chuwi name to Chewbacca, so I think it's awesome.
Icehawk - Wednesday, September 6, 2017 - link
I still have no idea how fast this is in real life. It would be nice to actually know how it will work in real life - how long to open a PDF, run a filter, merge data in Excel or whatever. I could care less what CineBench score it gets we aren't trying to determine IPC or architecture improvements. More real world testing is what review sites need to be doing as part of their testing IMO.Can it play 1080p HEVC? 4k? How long to load a web site?
sarscott - Wednesday, September 6, 2017 - link
I own the Chuwi 14.1 and if the laptop is in a very cool room and the CPU is not overheating, the laptop can play a 10 bit 4k HEVC mkv video. Don't know if the 12.3 has the same overheating issues. There is a mod to add a copper shim to the 14.1 that works very well but I feel the laptop is not worth the effort. https://youtu.be/uhtgUHZYjZ8