Experience of ordering a budget laptop for work in China

I would never have thought that I would order laptops in China, because their weight adds additional shipping costs and, as a result, it turns out to be more expensive offline. It turned out not, and the benefits are significant. I don’t know whether the networkers “got drunk”, or the manufacturers significantly reduced prices — in fact, in the same CSN there are models similar to the one under review, only with a DEXP sticker. Well, since I started talking about this store, let’s look at the range in the range of $ 150-250

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So, we run into models on Z8350 and N3350 processors, 2-4 GB of RAM and a 32 GB SSD.
In my case, the N3050 processor, 4 GB of RAM and 120 GB of SSD at a cost of $170
Well, the processor is obviously worse and older, and therefore cheaper, and you can buy RAM and a disk separately, right? Not quite so, the Z8350 generally does not support more than 2 GB, which of course is sad in 2018. Let’s show a comparison of the characteristics of these processors.

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It turns out that the N3050, although a year older, is not particularly inferior to the competitors in question. Why the Z8350 was released a year later with its 4 cores and a single-channel memory controller remains a mystery to me, maybe someone will explain in the comments =)
Overpaying $100 for Lenovo, after which I considered it unreasonable to buy an additional SSD for $30-40 and ordered the reviewed model, namely DEEQ R34.

Unpacking and appearance

Unprinted cardboard box, slightly wrinkled during delivery.

The package is standard — a laptop, a charger and a couple of pieces of paper.

Case plastic matte

On the left is a charging connector, Ethernet, 2 USB 3.0 ports, miniHDMI, a headphone jack and a microSD card slot

On the right it is clean, only the nest for the display lock is visible

The lower part is also pristine, you can print and stick any information, which is usually done.

I highlighted the speakers in the photo above. There are really two of them, the laptop produces a full-fledged stereo

Charger for 12 Volts, 2 Amperes

I’m interested to look at the genius who came up with the «skirt» around the fork. It does not fit into euro sockets.

The laptop started up out of the box without problems, pre-installed non-activated Win10 Pro x64 EN.
In the photo already with the software and localization thrown over.

Functionality

A quite adequate operating system was preinstalled, though in English and not activated.

So it wasn’t a problem to sort it out.

Threw a language pack, it became more familiar

And then I looked at the assembly version, figured out how long the update would take, and decided to immediately install a fresh one, at the same time get rid of possible malware that, in theory, could throw a bonus.

Bios UEFI InsydeH2O

Stripped down to the bare minimum

Secure Boot on the drain is not active, one problem less

The stock disk layout structure looked like this

I cleaned it, created it again, launched the installation and went to drink tea. When I returned, everything was almost ready.

Grace. I did not install any drivers manually, they all picked themselves up.

Brief configuration:

Testing

To start the screen. Size: 14 inches, Aspect Ratio: 16:9 Resolution: 1920 x 1080 (FHD)
Of the weaknesses — viewing angles, they are certainly not terrible, but could be better. Pictured is a 45 degree swivel/tilt.

In terms of brightness, the margin is not bad — it does not blind at a minimum at night, and during the day it is quite readable at an average level.

Temperature

CPU cooling is passive, so the first thing I did was a stress test in Hades. For an hour at maximum load, the temperature did not even reach 60 ° C. Room temperature 26°C

Same as a table

Performance

The figures are certainly not very high.

But the hard drive surprised me. I was sure that they installed the cheapest of what lay under my feet

Speed ​​test says it’s far from the worst possible option

The USB 3.0 ports also turned out to be real and showed the same result as the ports of a stationary PC.

For those who like to measure performance by FPS in games, I did some testing.

For starters, known to many World Of Tanks.

Oddly enough, the game started at minimum settings, and the frame rate was kept at 25-30 fps.

The younger brother WoT Blitz launched at high and gave out 50-60 fps

But War Thunder lagged terribly even at the minimum settings, on average 15-25 fps

autonomy

BatteryMon pulled out the following battery data:

But no one is interested in what the controller thinks there, so I conducted full-scale charge and discharge tests.

The charge from 10 to 100% took 2 hours 22 minutes, the screen was on all this time, the brightness level was average.

During the discharge, the program “wanged” for about 6 hours of work, so I decided to download a few free games from the market and pass the time, and the indicators will be close to everyday needs. As a result, the laptop worked for 5 hours and 15 minutes, discharged up to 3%. A particularly sharp drop occurs below 30%.

Probably many have noticed that there is no Cyrillic alphabet on the keyboard. There are two solutions here:
1. Learn to type blindly.
2. Buy stickers with the desired alphabet for a dollar.
Like these ones:

10 minutes of work with tweezers and we have a «human» keyboard >

Of the additional pluses — the characters are clearly visible at night, even at the minimum level of screen brightness.

And if you need to work in a nightclub, you definitely won’t miss the right letter (they glow brightly in UV).

Results

Personally, I’m happy. Thanks to the SSD drive and 4 GB of RAM, the laptop runs smoothly in all the applications I need. The processor remains surprisingly «cool» even during heavy loads, and this is with passive cooling. The same CHUWI vi10 could leave a burn if you lean the back glass cover against your leg during active work. The screen is not bad, viewing angles of course could be better, but for $ 180 it’s a sin to complain =)

You can buy here

Also banggood provided a coupon 19BGR34which reduces the price to 165$ before 05.01.2019.