A 4K Laptop For $440: Chuwi LapBook Plus Review

[Redaktion]

It's got the looks of a $1000 Ultrabook but with the performance of a $100 netbook. There's a good reason why you don't see many Intel Atom laptops with 4K UHD displays in the market; they are an imbalanced pairing.

https://www.notebookcheck.net/A-4K-Laptop-For-440-Chuwi-LapBook-Plus-Review.426959.0.html

[palace]

At least it is not affected by meltdown and mds.

[NikoB]

It's shame for all notebook makers, who not installed in 1000$ version normal FHD IPS (>90% sRGB) or UHD IPS!

Chuwei made it easy! What prevents them? After all, the wholesale price of normal IPS FHD is only $5-10 higher than the infamous cheap, with less than 60% sRGB! The greed of large producers is prohibitive and inadequate!

[Mauricio Guerrero]

I'm going to try one. I need the screen space more than the speed to run Android Studio on Linux. I have a crappy AMD laptop with half the performance of this atom. Of course if windows 10 is used it's going to be slow... too many disk reads and writes occur frequently even after getting an SSD. Currently I'm using linux mint, however i'll try clear linux (by intel for intel hardware) and write back.

[Chris H]

I've owned this laptop for the past week, and I have to say I'm impressed, and extremely happy with my purchase.

But... you need to be willing to work around the limitations of the machine. Initially the machine felt very slow. I then switched from Chrome/Firefox to Brave instead. Brave is lighter weight, but machine felt slow still.

I then downloaded a driver updater and found 20+ drivers many over two years old (including the gpu driver). Web browsing now is gpu accelerated in browsers, meaning the gpu can take load off the cpu. Browsing now feels lightning quick in 4k on Brave, and was fine in Firefox as well.

Just as importantly, Brave blocks all the adds, which are often the majority of a webpage's data and processing requirements.

I was extremely surprised to find this computer playable run Civilisation 6 well enough for me to enjoy playing (albeit at 1280x720 on low graphics settings). Light gaming though at best. The GPU is about 1/3 of the speed of a standard HD630 and perhaps 1/5 the speed of a modern laptop cpu.

As we speak I'm listening streaming music, installing MS Word, and web browsing. Laptop feels snappy. But... bloated, inefficient software will ruin the experience.

The 4k screen is absolutely beautiful for movies and game replays.

There is also something very nice about a passive system with no fan, but the reviewers are spot on... that bottom left corner gets hot under full load.

I'm not glossing over the shortcomings. The weak cpu is a pretty major one, but with a bit of effort that can mostly be worked around. Speaker volume is a bit low. The touchpad is good. The construction of the laptop is high quality. For the price and the right user willing to put in a bit of effort to work around the shortcomings, this machine is incredible for the price.