A little over two years ago, I reviewed Chuwi LapBook 14.1 Apollo Lake laptop with Windows 10, but it happened to run Ubuntu 17.04 fairly well, until the company made a major redesign of the laptop a few months later, and updated the BIOS to disable the Linux option.
So I would not recommend Chuwi laptop if you’d ever want to run a Linux distribution, but if you’re after a affordably priced laptop with 4K (3840×2160) display, the upcoming Chuwi LapBook Plus laptop, also based on an Apollo Lake processor, may be worth a look.
Chuwi LapBook Plus specifications:
- SoC – Intel Atom x7-E3950 quad core Apollo Lake (Embedded) processor @ 1.6 GHz / 2.0 GHz (Turbo) with Intel HD Graphics 505,up to 500MHz; 12W TDP
- System Memory – 8GB LPDDR4 (dual-channel)
- Storage – 256GB SSD, plus M.2 2280 socket for optional SATA SSD
- Display – 15.6″ 4K HDR display with 3840×2160 resolution
- Video Output – 1x micro HDMI 1.4 port
- Audio – Built-in stereo speaker and 2x microphones, 3.5mm headphone jack
- Connectivity – Dual band 802.11a/ac/b/g/n WiFi 5, Bluetooth 4.0
- Camera – 2MP font-facing camera
- USB – 1x USB 3.0 port, 1x USB 2.0 port
- User Input – Backlit QWERTY keyboard and touchpad
- Battery – 36.48Wh
- Power Supply – 12V/2A
- Dimensions – 362 x 242.1 x 6-14.9 mm
- Weight – 1.52 kg
The LapBook Plus ships a charger, and a user manual in English. It may be one of the most affordable 4K laptop, as it is sold for $439.99 on GearBest for the next two days. It’s also available on Aliexpress at the normal $499.99 price.
Now you may wonder about the rational of using an Atom processor to drive a 4K display. But the 12W Atom x7-E3950 processor should be faster than 6W/10W Celeron or Pentium Apollo Lake processors with a higher base clock. Still, the Apollo Lake processor family is known for its low price, low power, and entry-level performance, so there may certainly be applications where the 3840×2160 resolution proves to be challenging including gaming or/and 4K YouTube video playback. The latter can be accelerated by hardware so it might be OK, but some games will have to be run at lower resolutions to be playable.
Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011.
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I was not impressed at all with the Atom x5 in Atomic Pi. My tests showed XU4 easily beating it on CPU workloads. The Intel ARK shows Atom x7 is only 160Mhz faster than x5. Oddly enough, I am looking forward to the PinebookPro. Despite having many RK3399 devices in my ARM SBC Graveyard(tm), something about its design peaked my interest even though I can’t quite quantify it. I keep telling myself “this time will be different!”. My expectation is that it should easily outperform “Apollo Lake”. If it does not, I will attach an Apple logo sticker to the… Read more »
When comparing with the Atomic Pi you should keep in mind that there the CPU is limited to 1672 MHz instead of 1.9GHz by UEFI restrictions. Something similar might happen in this laptop though…
Wrt ‘Apollo Lake’: a Pentium J4205 is also Apollo Lake. RK3399 will be somewhere in between E3950 and J4205 with multi-threaded loads and most probably slightly outperform with single-threaded stuff: https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/Intel-Atom-x5-Z8350-vs-Intel-Atom-E3950-vs-Intel-Pentium-J4205/2774vs2893vs2877
You can’t really compare Atom X7-E3950 to Atom X5-Z8350 processor by just looking at the frequency since they are part of two different families: Apollo Lake vs Cherry Trail.
An Apollo Lake processor will be fairly faster than the Cherry Trail processor for some, but not all tasks: https://www.cnx-software.com/2017/02/07/intel-atom-x7-z8700-cherry-trail-vs-intel-pentium-n4200-apollo-lake-benchmarks-comparison/
Atomic Pi? I call it the Radioactive Pi 🙂 I candidly bought two of them given the price. They are now in a box in the “refuse” closet. The only positive thing out of this experience is that I finally bought the tools to make my own Dupont cables to power them.
“some games will have to be run at lower resolutions to be playable.”, some?!?
I’m sorry but with an Intel HD 505 even games from 6-7 years ago won’t be playable at 2160p resolution, unless you find 10-15fps playable… 🙁
I’d expect Tetris and Candy Crush Saga to run fine at 4K 🙂