GPD Win MAX Review :
The idea of a handheld that plays pc games has been around for an extended time. Anybody remember the smok, zero or smok z. it had been years ago that it had been first announced and it went through of these development updates over the years was supposed to be at some game, shows and had pre-orders open up, but are we actually ever gonna get it? it had been supposed to fill up a space and the development time left that window open for gamepad digital to swoop.
In with the gpd win about three or four years ago, instead of just being a handheld console that could play pc games, it was an actual legitimate laptop that had a gamepad built into it. the original win was competent at what it was trying to do.
It was pretty much the first handheld pc love it and it could run games like skyrim, okay, but that was three years ago now. they’ve got a new handheld with an i5 16 gigabytes of ram and pretty good performance for a lot of newer games.
GPD Win MAX Review : Here is my review of the gpd win max. First, let’s. go into the Design, as you’ll see here, it’s a full keyboard setup outside of a number pad, with the full row of numbers and f keys. Above it, though, the smaller size of the number and f keys do lead to some awkwardness, which i’ll get into a bit later above.
The keyboard is that the most important part. The built-in gamepad we have got two analogs. which will click for the l3 and r3 triggers a d-pad four face buttons and we have got slightly pad in the middle for mouse movements very small.
But if you notice, just above and to the left of the touchpad, we have got three buttons for start select and menu, which is basically just like the xbox or playstation button. and the final piece of the gamepad puzzle is right.
Behind the hinge for the screen right back here, we’ve, got four triggers for the l and r button set up in the same kind of style and design. As on the nintendo switch, though this does have two modes that you simply can go into as not all pc games are compatible with a gamepad on the left hand, side of the device you’ve got a little switch which will switch between gamepad mode and mouse mode.
When you enter mouse mode, the left and right analog sticks change. What they do. the right stick moves the mouse cursor around on the screen and therefore the left stick becomes four directional movement and is the w a s and d keys.
You can also use the triggers to enhance the mouse, l and r being left click and right click and r2, allowing you to move the mouse cursor faster as far as ports go on the back right past. All of the fan vents we’ve, got two usb-c ports, two usb 3.
0 ports and a fully sized hdmi port, which made recording for this review. Incredibly easy. then we continue to the right side. Where we have got a slot for a micro sd card, also as a totally sized ethernet jack.
If you would like to hardwire the connection, the final ports that we’ve are right under the arrow keys on the very bottom front of the device, which is an auxiliary port for headphones and a tiny little microphone receiver, the bottom doesn’t have much on it, if you look right here where i’m, pointing these are the game’s, speakers for the audio – i do have some words to mention that , but we’ll get into that later.
GPD Win MAX Review : Next, let’s discuss about the system specs we’ve, got an i5 8 cpu processor, 16 gigabytes of ram intel, iris, plus graphics, along with 8 gigabytes of shared memory, and as far as how much space you’ve got to store stuff, it’s, definitely not as much as i’d, like we have got two internal drives.
The c drive fits about 100 gigs and therefore the d drive fits about 364.. I say this is not optimal, because if you’ve seen a lot of pc games, especially newer games, there are tons of them that range from 60 up to 100 gigabytes apiece.
I’m. looking at you forza, 7. speaking of forza, let’s, mention games and therefore the performance i got out of them last week and in the week just about every moment that i wasn’t working in was home was spent downloading and testing Games for performance and before i get into the actual performance test, i would like to clarify something i found out just a couple of days ago.
When i did my initial testing. i tried the resident evil 2 remakes demo and it would never boot for me giving me errors when I bought the full game. It ran just fine. I test games like gta 5 fallout 4 halo, the master chief collection and forza 7 all run pretty much 40 to 60 frames per second, depending on what settings you’re using and when we get to newer games it’s, a touch lower, but still pretty acceptable.
For example, fallout 76 normally ranges about 25 to 35 fps on low settings and overwatch stayed above 30. As long as i didn’t use high settings, though i will be able to admit the control and speaker placement. Isn’t super optimal.
The small analog sticks take a while to get used to and are pretty difficult to use at first with fast-paced shooters like overwatch. you’ll adjust them, as I have over the past week and a half, but it takes a bit of effort and while a bit minor, the small size of the menu start and select buttons makes it a little bit difficult to hit what you want because of Their location in size it’s very easy to try to hit the start button and accidentally hit the menu button which pulls up the xbox dashboard.
But what’s not that minor is the speaker placement considering the speakers are on the very bottom of the device and you will , typically be holding it up like a handheld. a lot of the sound are going to be moving away from you.
Instead of towards you now, when I move my palms down over the speakers, it bounces off and comes back at me and sounds pretty good. But even my larger hands cannot use the gamepad when they’re down that low and when you have it.
Setting down on a table it’s, also not really going to be projected at you very well, okay, that’s. All I have to mention about gaming. So let’s very quickly.
GPD Win MAX Review : Let’s discuss about General use! I wanted to play this not just as a game device but as an everything device.
How did i do that? Well, i installed every program i use on my surface book 3 and look at the capture card software recording itself on the screen really messes with you.
So, as far as using this as a normal computer, the memory isn’t a bad situation. I did have audacity freeze up on me once when the battery was low, but outside of that it ran most of my software without any problems.
The big problem or awkwardness comes when you’re typing on the keyboard. whenever i might just be smoothly typing something and would have to add a number i’d, have to stop and kind of go into a hunt and peck mode to very carefully put those numbers in one.
Other thing i should mention is that the resolution. the maximum resolution that you simply can put the display on is 1280×800. It can’t, go any larger than that.
GPD Win MAX Review : let’s, go into the power and battery situation.
The first thing i’ll say is that this fan came from the dragon ball z universe. it’s a screamer, it’ll, go off when you’re, doing a lot of things. which will not necessarily be using a lot of memory.
I’ve had times where i’ve, just connected the wi-fi and opened google chrome and therefore the fan started screaming at me for about 20 seconds before calming down. Needless to mention , you ought to expect it to constantly go whenever you’re playing a game, and now let’s go into battery life, i didn’t go into the bios to do anything you’ll and there is even instructions within the quick start guide.
That’s, built into the desktop on first boot, but i messed with a lot of overclocking and voltage settings on my original gpd win and that unit ended up dying so to form sure that did not happen here. I didn’t mess with it at all, but it’s worth noting that you can go in and change the voltage which will increase the battery life.
So when you’ve a heavy game playing like halo. The master chief collection or fallout 76 – you’re, not going to get that much battery life out of it, even if you set it on best performance mode, you’re only going to get about two to four hours total.
Now, if you’re, not playing a game and you’re just using it as a normal computer to watch youtube videos or type something up during a word processor, on your normal battery settings, you’re gonna get around four to five hours, out of it and on best performance mode, you’ll, get about eight to ten.
It’s. Also worth noting that less graphically intense games, like visual novels, will just about keep the battery life as it would be if you were just normally using the pc, and that i don’t really have anything else to write down about it.
But if you’re wondering about the price of this, it’s, going for about 700 to 800 on gpd’s website, whereas a certain user on amazon is charging about 1000 for pre-orders. Now. last , gpd had some mild success when they launched the win back a few years ago, but they’ve done some impressive work with the win max.
While there are some design annoyances with key placement and small analogs, along with the pretty meager battery life for intense games, but for the performance you’re, getting it is not a bad price and therefore the specs allow for productivity applications as well, So let’s give rates in below comment section.
