The Chuwi LapBook 14.1 Review: Redefining Affordable
by Brett Howse on March 10, 2017 8:00 AM ESTBattery Life
With a 6-Watt Celeron branded processor, featuring the latest generation Atom CPU core, and a 45-Wh battery, the Chuwi Lapbook 14.1 has the capability of offering some great battery life, but the devil is always in the details, and there’s more to battery life than just the CPU. Let’s take a look.
2013 Light Web Browsing
All our battery life testing is done at 200 nits, which on the Chuwi means the display is almost at 100% brightness. This is certainly a contributing factor to dragging down the battery life somewhat. I was expecting over ten hours on this test, and the Chuwi fell well short of that. It’s a respectable 7.5 hours, but for an Atom powered laptop with a decent size battery, it really should have done more.
2016 Web Browsing
The newer battery life test is much more demanding of the CPU, and it really shows. The extra workload drops the battery life down to 6.25 hours, and it’s really a long way from where this laptop should be. When a laptop manufacturer really strives for battery life, every component needs to be looked at and evaluated, and at this price point, that’s likely not a realistic scenario. It’s still a decent result, but it should be higher.
Normalized
By removing the battery size from the equation, we can see just how efficient the overall platform is. Here you can really see how much the Chuwi is lacking compared to more premium devices. The now discontinued Microsoft Surface 3, with quad-core previous generation Atom, is basically double the efficiency of the Chuwi, and most recent Ultrabooks are well over it as well. Some work here by Chuwi could go a long way on the end user experience with their product.
Movie Playback
The movie playback test splits the difference between the web browsing tests, and our Tesseract score lets you know you can almost watch The Avengers three times before having the machine turn off. This isn't as good as hoped.
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.
The charging capabilities of the Chuwi are about the opposite of the battery life. With just 24 Watts, it takes about 3.25 hours to charge from 5% to 100%, which is quite a long time for a 45 Wh battery. So, the result is the battery life is less than expected, and the charging time is longer than expected. That’s not exactly a great combination, but when you want to hit a price point, sometimes things have to be sacrificed.
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Mikuni - Friday, March 10, 2017 - link
Pointless, probably $400 in Europe.vladx - Saturday, March 11, 2017 - link
It's around 300 euros here in Europe.YoloPascual - Saturday, March 11, 2017 - link
Given the perf/watt of zen architecture, can we expect AMD to release ryzen mobile chips at this tdp?hojnikb - Saturday, March 11, 2017 - link
There is a chance, but not as 4 core parts. Maybe if they do a special 2C4T part with smaller gpu just for cheap and low tdp devices. Sorta like stoney ridge.YoloPascual - Saturday, March 11, 2017 - link
This is what I am thinking too. AMD seems to emphasize "scalability" of zen architecture. I wonder if they can scale downwards too.wumpus - Saturday, March 11, 2017 - link
Not directly. 4C4T 2GHz @ 6W sounds more like Bobcat/Jaguar in the AMD world (what's in PS4/XBox1). Half a raven ridge would still suck twice the power (at max, probably doing more than twice as much).On the other end, this whole architecture is a dead end. No idea how long Intel will produce it (or even update the GPU, they aren't updating the CPU). I doubt AMD is all that interested in updating the "cat" architecture either (although obviously they will continue to produce PS4/Xbox1 SOCs). Given time, "1/2 raven ridge" will probably become pretty competive for this type of thing, assuming you don't go straight to ARM chromebook/android/Linux on ARM/Win10ARM [Microsoft keeps insisting that last bit *is* a thing, but haven't managed to convince anyone else].
DanNeely - Saturday, March 11, 2017 - link
Maybe, but their 8/16 desktop parts being at the same TDP as Intels 4/8 ones suggests that their core design power is significantly lower than Intels, and the last few generations of their architecture can scale down to 4-6W from 90 at a 50% core count so AMD being able to do the same with Ryzen wouldn't surprise me. OTOH a 2/4 core chip at that level seems a lot more likely as a potential atom challenger. OTOH with the first Ryzen laptop parts not due until the second half of this year (and probably the 4th quarter or they'd've said Q3 instead of H2) I wouldn't be surprised if the first chip in this power class isn't available for a full year.fanofanand - Monday, March 13, 2017 - link
Ryzen 8/16 being lower than Intel 4/8 isn't as big a deal as it's being made of. The intel parts being used in that comparison all have a gigantic iGPU that takes up half the die space. This is the same issue as "Ryzen's chip is smaller than Core" well yeah because there is no iGPU! If you were to compare the non-iGPU portion of the Core die, you will see that it's smaller than the Ryzen die, and likely the same would hold true with power consumption. All that said, AMD will definitely have low power cores and they will most likely be on the Ryzen architecture. Way too early to even guess at performance but all signs point to it being a competitive chip.OnthroX - Saturday, March 11, 2017 - link
$230 at GearBest with a EU Plug (vs $270 at Amazon)http://www.gearbest.com/laptops/pp_602696.html
I added DHL Shipping for $5 -- order came out to a total of $235.23
My first time shopping at GearBest but I hear they are okay.
Diji1 - Saturday, March 11, 2017 - link
Good to see Ars covering a Chuwi product.The "Chinese manufacturers" phone, tablet and ultra/laptop recieves relatively little coverage in English speaking media which should change IMO.
It would be great if you looked at Cube, another Chinese brand on tablets andultrabooks.