I think the resolution is sensible. Its never going to be too far from your eyes and it will also help battery life. A device like this is emulator heaven and most of the stuff this emulates really well was sub 720p anyway. In a hand held gaming machine a compromise has to be made so that battery life is decent and I think 1280 by 800 is spot on.
Amen to that! The Win Max is the machine that a young me from the 1980s could only dream of! Although it's perhaps a bit sad that I use it a lot to play games from that era!
Hello I just wanted to say that in my case lowering wattage from 25 to 20 actually gave me 2-3 higher fps on the most graphically challenging games and improved my battery life considerably. Most of all it significantly reduced temperatures. At 25 watt after maybe half an hour of intensive gaming the keyboard and mouse pad became hot as hell and where even painful to touch, even though my chip was reading 75 ish Celsius. The keyboard side (the side facing you if you are holding it) has zero cooling as far as I can tell, so even though the chip remains in usable temperatures the rest of the device does not. A second thing to note is that there are 2 very good win max undervolting guides on youtube and it basically is a must to undervolt at least the massively overpowered cpu side of the chip. Every single game I tested that could max the gpu did so as it is almost always at 99-100% load, however the cpu in all my testing never once got even close to 50% load, mostly staying at 23-25% in even the most graphically challenging games. Every chip is a silicon lottery (not my term lol), I've seen people get undervolts as low as -150mV on some of the chip modules. I had to settle on -70 for the cpu and -50 for both cpu cache and system agent while I left the gpu module alone. I found just from lowering the wattage and voltage I actually got one game running on high setting to go from 19-20 fps to 28 and sometimes 30 even. Thats almost a 30% actual fps increase plus whatever battery saving benefits I got from the lower wattage. Probably most of the performance benefit in my opinion comes from lower temperatures and less thermal throttling because of it. A word of warning though: firstly some especially older games like dark souls 1 get 5 fps better if you disable the turbo boost on the chip, however especially very cpu intensive games like ARPGs and Dwarf Fortress will tank in performance like literally getting less than half of the frames. In my case I have not bothered disabling turbo as I just dont think its worth messing with. Secondly under no circumstances should you try to overlook or overvolt or overwatt the chip! As I understand it the chip is locked meaning there is no way for us to change the frequency ranges (so no overclocking even hypothetically); this also means that if you attempt to push more electricity into the chip you will fry it. The 25 watt that the device ships at is already the absolute maximum wattage the chip can handle, I believe I read somewhere that this chip runs stock at 15 watt so its already +10 watt when you get it out of the box. As I understand it undervolting and lowering the wattage should be completely safe and in fact should probably increase the life span of the chip itself over years of use. If someone would say otherwise I would be more than thrilled to hear them out because my own unit is undervolted and set at a lower wattage and I would rather turn it back to stock and get worse performance in exchange for chip longevity if it is the case.
If you are lookin for an egpu, I have both the Aorus gaming box rtx2070 and the Aorus gaming box for the gtx1070 that I have tested with my Win GPD Max. There is a bottleneck in either the thunderbolt3 or the cpu that results in both egpu cards performing just about the exact same on the device, so go with the less expensive gtx1070 if you are thinking of getting an egpu. I have not tested both on external monitors, but if you are using external monitors, which would mean your egpu is kind of like a Switch docking station for your GPD Max, then you might see a slight boost from a rtx 2070 over a gtx1070 due to the higher resolutions, but will still be limited by the cpu.
Hey man, great review! I have one and it's great! :) can you upload the PDF manual to google drive please? I reinstalled windows the minute I got mine, and didn't backup the manual. Thanks! :)
hi i would like to ask how will the gpd win max act if it has a full charge and i have it plugged in a socket? also does this have an option to have the power delivery straight from the plug and not from the battery? i hope you can answer this question thanks :)
Yep, when it's fully charged and plugged in it'll run straight from the power from the wall/socket. They heavily improved the charging circuitry in the win msx
@@meokih it is, the charging circuit is massively improved on the win max as opposed to the win 2 etc. Once the battery is full, the device will draw its. Power straight from the socket.
Thanks for the review . Could you state your experience using office apps such as excel . Would the 8” be a dealbreaker to use these applications on the go ?
I think excel would be the most difficult. Not in terms of the screen size but the keyboard. I've gotten used to the letter portion of the keyboard and can type almost as fast on it as I did on my Surface Book . But the numbers definitely make you stop and slow down. So, typing a lot of formulas and such into Excel would likely take a lot longer than on a full-sized laptop. Word Processors aren't bad, though. I did not use Microsoft Office on it, but stuff I've written up in Wordpad has been fairly simple and easy to do. At least once I got used to the feel of the keyboard
Reviews 2 Go thanks a lot for the quick reply , good to hear your had a descent typing experience on the keyboard . I spent a lot of time commuting in trains for work and was considering giving up my 14” laptop for this device for on the go usage
@@imre31000 I find typing on the Win Max to be comfortable enough after getting used to it although not at the speed I would be doing it on a proper keyboard. Those with smaller hands (which isn't me) would be less affected. In the end, 8 inches is not a wide enough area to ever place a fully user-friendly QWERTY layout. As Reviews 2 Go says, it's the numbers that take the most adjustment and I'm still not there. Hitting the number key without hitting an F key with it is still hard without me momentarily stopping flow and cautiously selecting the correct key. I've got a slim fold-up bluetooth keyboard for on the go typing left over from my GPD Win days and that still does the trick in terms of greatly improving speed and accuracy. I think that'll be travelling with the Win Max too. Otherwise the Win Max's built in keyboard is good for a bit of email writing and comment posting, but not for work applications. My verdict really is that the Win Max design is tailored to mobile PC/retro gaming on the go, and to that end they've got a winner. But for regular pc tasks there are sacrifices, such as the low screen res, cramped keyboard and eccentric (but effective once you're used to it) mouse controls. All of that is remedied by having USB or Bluetooth devices ready to plug in, and turn it into a solidly capable PC. However, the more external devices you need to plug in, the less "portable" the machine becomes.
@@imre31000 you could go with 12" laptop if you want more compact device for such things. but if you want to have the controller... yeah. i guess it won't be impossible, but slow. after all this is a gaming device. for non gaming activities, this should be "docked". keyboard,mouse and a monitor to get the normal screen resolution (i mean the resolution for such size is good, but it's not meant for productivity).
So, I'll probably showcase it in a post-review game tests video next week. But, I did download Madden 21 today and tested a few Exhibition Matches. When I put things on Low Settings, I got the fps to stay around the 30s-40s throughout most plays, it dropping to 30s and occasionally 28 during the cinematic replays. I did test Medium Settings as well but it was just barely able to hit 30 fps during plays and was around 15-20 during replays so I opted for Low Settings.
just to note that one of the USB-C is a thunderbolt, which opens some options like hooking up external graphical cards for increased gaming performance for "docked" mode. also, of course the analog sticks would be awkward to use for shooters. i mean small, large... it's not a mouse, so yeah.
Few errors in the review. You don't have two internal drives, you have one. It's a 512gb biwim SSD that's split into two partitions. You can merge the two partitions to make it one, as you'd expect. No idea why Gpd shipped it with the m.2 drive split into two partitions. You can upgrade to a 2tb single sided m.2 nvme or sata SSD. As I said in your game test videos, there's a few tweaks you can do to increase your fps/performance without sacrificing any visual quality. Also you didn't touch on undervolting, which is something EVERYONE should do on the win max. You'll get lower temps during gameplay, quieter fan speed, less power usage on battery AND a performance increase in games. The problem you had with blurry games in full screen can be fixed by disabling full screen optimization via right clicking on the games .exe and going to compatibility and unchecking full screen optimization. Disabling game mode also increases fps. There zero risk with undervolting, that will not kill your device, on the contrary it will increase the longevity via less heat and less voltage fed to the SoC. Overclocking/overvolting is the ones that can decrease lifespan of cpus, gpus/Socs. Also I didn't hear you mention the silent fan mode, which is toggled via FN+F on the keyboard. During browsing, watching UA-cam, movies etc and lighter gaming it enables essentially a silent system. I did enjoy your review but I do feel you missed a bunch of things that really do make for a much better experience on the Gpd win max. There's a community discord server for the win max where 100s of IGG backers help each other troubleshoot, tweak performance and discuss accessories etc. There's also a Gpd employee who comes in to collect feedback from us and solve any issues, I do strongly recommend joining if you have a win max!
@@daniel1929 Yup, go to disk manager in Windows, delete the large partition (not the one with windows on it) this will ofc delete any data you have one the larger partition so it really should have been done when you first got the device. Then right click on the smaller partition with windows on it and click extend. Then click OK (it will automatically extend the partition by the amount of space available, which will be the same as the size of the large partition you just deleted.)
@Zahir Datoo it all comes down to how you look at it the win max is expensive for a handheld but if you compare it to the price of a decent laptop then the price is more reasonable and then if you compare it to the cost of a surface or a gram it then its a down right steal for the indegogo price.
@@MrPtd1969 There are already videos on how to tweak your gpd with undervolting. When you limit the CPU multiplier and turn off cores. You give more power to the GPU, and you bring the temperatures down on your CPU. So it dosent go into full fan speed. I can play many games with fan mode set to silent.
Your reviews are always nice. Might look into getting this because of your review.
There is a discount on droix.net and a coupon for the pre order.
I think the resolution is sensible. Its never going to be too far from your eyes and it will also help battery life. A device like this is emulator heaven and most of the stuff this emulates really well was sub 720p anyway. In a hand held gaming machine a compromise has to be made so that battery life is decent and I think 1280 by 800 is spot on.
My questions are can it handled modded version of our games? Such as Fallout 3, 4, & New Vegas & XCOM 2. If yes how well can it do?
It took 40 years to see this in my lifetime and I'm proud to say that My 👀 eyes have seen the GLORY!!! 😁 Oh Happy day! What a glorious gaming device.
Amen to that! The Win Max is the machine that a young me from the 1980s could only dream of!
Although it's perhaps a bit sad that I use it a lot to play games from that era!
30 in my case but yes I agree. Here, Here
GPD Win 3 is another smaller successor of this mini beast
It seems you missed the TB3 port thinking it is only a USBC port.
Yep that was my bad. I realized after I’d made the review and uploaded it initially. It looks so similar to a C port that’s what I figured it was.
@@Reviews2Go its literally a usb-c port
Hello I just wanted to say that in my case lowering wattage from 25 to 20 actually gave me 2-3 higher fps on the most graphically challenging games and improved my battery life considerably. Most of all it significantly reduced temperatures. At 25 watt after maybe half an hour of intensive gaming the keyboard and mouse pad became hot as hell and where even painful to touch, even though my chip was reading 75 ish Celsius. The keyboard side (the side facing you if you are holding it) has zero cooling as far as I can tell, so even though the chip remains in usable temperatures the rest of the device does not.
A second thing to note is that there are 2 very good win max undervolting guides on youtube and it basically is a must to undervolt at least the massively overpowered cpu side of the chip. Every single game I tested that could max the gpu did so as it is almost always at 99-100% load, however the cpu in all my testing never once got even close to 50% load, mostly staying at 23-25% in even the most graphically challenging games. Every chip is a silicon lottery (not my term lol), I've seen people get undervolts as low as -150mV on some of the chip modules. I had to settle on -70 for the cpu and -50 for both cpu cache and system agent while I left the gpu module alone. I found just from lowering the wattage and voltage I actually got one game running on high setting to go from 19-20 fps to 28 and sometimes 30 even. Thats almost a 30% actual fps increase plus whatever battery saving benefits I got from the lower wattage. Probably most of the performance benefit in my opinion comes from lower temperatures and less thermal throttling because of it.
A word of warning though: firstly some especially older games like dark souls 1 get 5 fps better if you disable the turbo boost on the chip, however especially very cpu intensive games like ARPGs and Dwarf Fortress will tank in performance like literally getting less than half of the frames. In my case I have not bothered disabling turbo as I just dont think its worth messing with.
Secondly under no circumstances should you try to overlook or overvolt or overwatt the chip! As I understand it the chip is locked meaning there is no way for us to change the frequency ranges (so no overclocking even hypothetically); this also means that if you attempt to push more electricity into the chip you will fry it. The 25 watt that the device ships at is already the absolute maximum wattage the chip can handle, I believe I read somewhere that this chip runs stock at 15 watt so its already +10 watt when you get it out of the box.
As I understand it undervolting and lowering the wattage should be completely safe and in fact should probably increase the life span of the chip itself over years of use. If someone would say otherwise I would be more than thrilled to hear them out because my own unit is undervolted and set at a lower wattage and I would rather turn it back to stock and get worse performance in exchange for chip longevity if it is the case.
If you are lookin for an egpu, I have both the Aorus gaming box rtx2070 and the Aorus gaming box for the gtx1070 that I have tested with my Win GPD Max. There is a bottleneck in either the thunderbolt3 or the cpu that results in both egpu cards performing just about the exact same on the device, so go with the less expensive gtx1070 if you are thinking of getting an egpu. I have not tested both on external monitors, but if you are using external monitors, which would mean your egpu is kind of like a Switch docking station for your GPD Max, then you might see a slight boost from a rtx 2070 over a gtx1070 due to the higher resolutions, but will still be limited by the cpu.
Hey man, great review! I have one and it's great! :)
can you upload the PDF manual to google drive please? I reinstalled windows the minute I got mine, and didn't backup the manual.
Thanks! :)
Sure can - drive.google.com/file/d/1XY7XnQcOcYtKCcDTAHXs7pMIBNGXi4cc/view?usp=sharing
hi i would like to ask how will the gpd win max act if it has a full charge and i have it plugged in a socket? also does this have an option to have the power delivery straight from the plug and not from the battery? i hope you can answer this question thanks :)
Yep, when it's fully charged and plugged in it'll run straight from the power from the wall/socket. They heavily improved the charging circuitry in the win msx
@@jakeroscoe8238 so it's safe to charge this while playing, right? thanks! Just wanna make sure.
@@meokih it is, the charging circuit is massively improved on the win max as opposed to the win 2 etc. Once the battery is full, the device will draw its. Power straight from the socket.
Pretty good review
Thanks for the review . Could you state your experience using office apps such as excel . Would the 8” be a dealbreaker to use these applications on the go ?
I think excel would be the most difficult. Not in terms of the screen size but the keyboard. I've gotten used to the letter portion of the keyboard and can type almost as fast on it as I did on my Surface Book . But the numbers definitely make you stop and slow down. So, typing a lot of formulas and such into Excel would likely take a lot longer than on a full-sized laptop.
Word Processors aren't bad, though. I did not use Microsoft Office on it, but stuff I've written up in Wordpad has been fairly simple and easy to do. At least once I got used to the feel of the keyboard
Reviews 2 Go thanks a lot for the quick reply , good to hear your had a descent typing experience on the keyboard . I spent a lot of time commuting in trains for work and was considering giving up my 14” laptop for this device for on the go usage
@@imre31000 I find typing on the Win Max to be comfortable enough after getting used to it although not at the speed I would be doing it on a proper keyboard. Those with smaller hands (which isn't me) would be less affected. In the end, 8 inches is not a wide enough area to ever place a fully user-friendly QWERTY layout. As Reviews 2 Go says, it's the numbers that take the most adjustment and I'm still not there. Hitting the number key without hitting an F key with it is still hard without me momentarily stopping flow and cautiously selecting the correct key.
I've got a slim fold-up bluetooth keyboard for on the go typing left over from my GPD Win days and that still does the trick in terms of greatly improving speed and accuracy. I think that'll be travelling with the Win Max too. Otherwise the Win Max's built in keyboard is good for a bit of email writing and comment posting, but not for work applications.
My verdict really is that the Win Max design is tailored to mobile PC/retro gaming on the go, and to that end they've got a winner. But for regular pc tasks there are sacrifices, such as the low screen res, cramped keyboard and eccentric (but effective once you're used to it) mouse controls. All of that is remedied by having USB or Bluetooth devices ready to plug in, and turn it into a solidly capable PC. However, the more external devices you need to plug in, the less "portable" the machine becomes.
@@imre31000 you could go with 12" laptop if you want more compact device for such things. but if you want to have the controller... yeah. i guess it won't be impossible, but slow.
after all this is a gaming device. for non gaming activities, this should be "docked". keyboard,mouse and a monitor to get the normal screen resolution (i mean the resolution for such size is good, but it's not meant for productivity).
Can you play it with external controlers
You can. USB controllers work as well as Bluetooth with adapters like the 8bitdo USB Adapter.
Please show Madden
So, I'll probably showcase it in a post-review game tests video next week. But, I did download Madden 21 today and tested a few Exhibition Matches. When I put things on Low Settings, I got the fps to stay around the 30s-40s throughout most plays, it dropping to 30s and occasionally 28 during the cinematic replays.
I did test Medium Settings as well but it was just barely able to hit 30 fps during plays and was around 15-20 during replays so I opted for Low Settings.
How "drift resistant" are these? I've gone through nintendo's joy-cons and I really don't want the same problem on this.
They are ps vita stick. They won't drift.
@@benjaminsalas2478 EPIC I'm going to buy one of these cute little PCs
@@nordstrom7615 Just pre ordered one, the first batch sold out like candy. Time to sell my GPD Win 2 now.
just to note that one of the USB-C is a thunderbolt, which opens some options like hooking up external graphical cards for increased gaming performance for "docked" mode.
also, of course the analog sticks would be awkward to use for shooters. i mean small, large... it's not a mouse, so yeah.
Few errors in the review. You don't have two internal drives, you have one. It's a 512gb biwim SSD that's split into two partitions. You can merge the two partitions to make it one, as you'd expect. No idea why Gpd shipped it with the m.2 drive split into two partitions. You can upgrade to a 2tb single sided m.2 nvme or sata SSD.
As I said in your game test videos, there's a few tweaks you can do to increase your fps/performance without sacrificing any visual quality. Also you didn't touch on undervolting, which is something EVERYONE should do on the win max. You'll get lower temps during gameplay, quieter fan speed, less power usage on battery AND a performance increase in games. The problem you had with blurry games in full screen can be fixed by disabling full screen optimization via right clicking on the games .exe and going to compatibility and unchecking full screen optimization. Disabling game mode also increases fps. There zero risk with undervolting, that will not kill your device, on the contrary it will increase the longevity via less heat and less voltage fed to the SoC. Overclocking/overvolting is the ones that can decrease lifespan of cpus, gpus/Socs. Also I didn't hear you mention the silent fan mode, which is toggled via FN+F on the keyboard. During browsing, watching UA-cam, movies etc and lighter gaming it enables essentially a silent system.
I did enjoy your review but I do feel you missed a bunch of things that really do make for a much better experience on the Gpd win max. There's a community discord server for the win max where 100s of IGG backers help each other troubleshoot, tweak performance and discuss accessories etc. There's also a Gpd employee who comes in to collect feedback from us and solve any issues, I do strongly recommend joining if you have a win max!
How do you merge the two partitions into one with this device? Any idea?
@@daniel1929 Yup, go to disk manager in Windows, delete the large partition (not the one with windows on it) this will ofc delete any data you have one the larger partition so it really should have been done when you first got the device. Then right click on the smaller partition with windows on it and click extend. Then click OK (it will automatically extend the partition by the amount of space available, which will be the same as the size of the large partition you just deleted.)
Jake Roscoe gonna try it. Fingers crossed, thnk u
Jake Roscoe in disk management, “delete volume” is greyed out. It won’t let me delete it. This is driving me nuts!
@@daniel1929 Pretty sure you right click on the partition and click delete partition
Good but very niche in part due to it's expense.
@Zahir Datoo it all comes down to how you look at it the win max is expensive for a handheld but if you compare it to the price of a decent laptop then the price is more reasonable and then if you compare it to the cost of a surface or a gram it then its a down right steal for the indegogo price.
Dude, my win max makes very little fan noise when I play games. It's very easy to tweak.
How did you tweak it? Can you provide us some step by step guide? Thanks.
@@MrPtd1969 There are already videos on how to tweak your gpd with undervolting. When you limit the CPU multiplier and turn off cores. You give more power to the GPU, and you bring the temperatures down on your CPU. So it dosent go into full fan speed. I can play many games with fan mode set to silent.