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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cfenton - Wednesday, September 6, 2017 - link
How are they doing 6GB of RAM in dual-channel? Is it just Flex Mode, or am I wrong that dual-channel only works fully with matching capacities?Ryan Smith - Wednesday, September 6, 2017 - link
Apollo Lake supports LPDDR4, which is readily available in 12 and 24 Gbit sizes.cfenton - Saturday, September 9, 2017 - link
I had no idea. Thank you for the answer.serendip - Wednesday, September 6, 2017 - link
What's with the poor battery life? I've got a Teclast tablet with an iPad screen (how do they get these surplus parts?) and it lasts 9-10 hours with web browsing or Excel crunching. It uses a more efficient but slower Z8500 Atom and a smaller yet still hi-DPI screen.sarscott - Wednesday, September 6, 2017 - link
Bought the Chuwi 14.1 Lapbook and the screen is great for the price and I like the look and feel very much. There is one major fault that is causing me to return the Lapbook: Overheating! When cool, in a very cool room, the laptop performs great but even in an air conditioned room at 74 degrees the laptop overheats just trying to play a 10 bit HVEC mkv. There is a mod to add a copper shim but I feel that is too much effort for the price. Of minor annoyance is the trackpad requires a complete reinstall of the Windows OS to function normally as a touchpad. Otherwise the touchpad is only recognized by Windows as a mouse which disallows any sort of modification of the Touchpad like disabling the horrendously dysfunctional Tap to Click function. One minor downside is the internal eMMC is slow but you can install a m.2 SSD to make the Lapbook much faster. In summation, if I have to spend time and money installing a copper shim and m.2 SSD the $270 price I paid seems too much as I can buy a Spin 5 with an i5, 8GB of ram, 256 SSD, and better IPS display for $450 brand new at Walmart. The SSD alone adds $100, then factor in my time and extra cost for the shim and thermal paste and your close to $400 already! For any extra $50 to $70 you can get a much better laptop, albeit not as thin, with a better warranty and english speaking customer service!kmmatney - Wednesday, September 13, 2017 - link
I haven't not purchased this laptop, but have had similar experiences with other chinese products. Just too many problems, both software-wise and hardware wise, and usually it's hard to get support. It's just better to just pay a little bit more for a known brand like Acer, etc... Not much more money, but much better quality control and support. For now, I've completely given up on electronic products from lesser known chinese brands.Nevod - Thursday, September 7, 2017 - link
Just recently I've been looking through convertible atombooks looking for something with Surface display, yet there was nothing. The best thing was Acer Spin 1, but it has it's drawbacks and second generation is slowly coming out.Now there's this, but without touch and on a 12" display, not 13". And Gemini Lake is coming out.
Maybe 6 mothns later something really optimal will appear.
vortexmak - Thursday, September 7, 2017 - link
Can you please review the Chuwi Surface competitorsLiverpoolFC5903 - Friday, September 8, 2017 - link
A Core M3 or M5 machine would have been a good inclusion in the benchmarking process. Its GPU is significantly better than the first gen Core M.You can get machines like the Cube i7 book for 350 USD, with a Core M3 (M6Y30), Full HD IPS panel with multi touch support, a 64/128 GB SSD + Full keyboard + trackpad. All the works are there.
Compare that with this. The processor in the Chuwi is at best a tablet processor. Its going to struggle with anything remotely intensive, including basic software like SPSS or Stata.
Hurr Durr - Friday, September 8, 2017 - link
>basic software>IBM analytics
Yeah, right. I guess Photoshop is a basic image resizing program as well now.