 It has no flashy plastic design, no RGB lighting, no overclocking, and the performance isn't even very good. But make no mistake, the GPD Win Max arguably packs more PC gaming punch per liter than anything that's ever come before it, and I was lucky enough to be sent a pre-production unit, so let's have a look at it together. Instantly see your current and past network activity, detect malware, and block badly behaving apps on your PC or Android device with GlassWire. Use offer code LINUS to get 25% off GlassWire at the link below. The first thing my wife said is that it reminds her of the Aspire One. Given the thickness of the GPD Max and the cramped keyboard, that's not entirely an unfair comparison, but a lot was learned from the early netbooks and performance has come a long way since Intel Atom. GPD ended up taking a shockingly zero compromises approach to the Win Max, and the highlights of its specifications include 16 gigs of LPDDR4X memory, 512 gigs of NVMe storage, an 8-inch 500-nit display, lightning fast Wi-Fi 6, and enough I.O. to embarrass some laptops that are twice its size. But the star of the show is the 10-nanometer Intel quad-core processor that manages to turbo all the way up to 3 to 3.3 gigahertz under light real world all core loads. Guys, that is just about the same base frequency as a 4770 desktop chip, and it comes loaded with Iris Plus Graphics 940. Yeah, we were gonna have to get to that eventually. It uses onboard graphics. But as we've seen so many times before, a complete product can be more than the sum of its parts. Yes, my friends, that is GTA V running on the Win Max. But hold on, it's worth talking about some of the setup first. One of the first things I did was pop into the BIOS and toggle the CPU's TDP to the maximum, 25 watts. It's pretty typical these days for Intel to have configurable thermal envelopes for their mobile chips, but usually the device manufacturer will pick one for you and design a thermal solution that allows the chip to go as fast as it can within that limit. Not here. Now, it's a little kludgy and requires a reboot every time, but leaving this to the user allows those folks who are mostly interested in retro game emulation to extend their battery life considerably by tuning power consumption down or by disabling cores, while offering maximum performance to those who are looking to play older AAA PC games or emulated games from much newer consoles. When it comes to real-world performance, other than a couple of misleading bits in the marketing, I'm thrilled. In truly heavy workloads, the 1035G7 falls well behind a 4790K, let's be honest. But PlayStation 1 emulation was flawless, PlayStation 2 was super fluid. In fact, almost anything that's normally CPU-bound, even Dolphin, which is notoriously CPU-heavy due to the GameCube and Wii's IBM processor, ran more like I would expect it to run on something that would fit in my lap, not something that would fit in my hand. Even GPD's representation of the PC gaming experience is pretty upfront. Modern, demanding AAA games will run as long as you don't mind cranking down the graphical settings and living with a 30-ish FPS experience. As for older AAA games, these run... Oh, it crashed. Yeah, it's an early unit and the firmware and the hardware are both not final, so I did run into some issues here, but until it crashed, it was running great. I mean, it's crazy because I remember when you needed a top-tier gaming PC to run Batman Arkham Asylum. This thing, though, you can basically max it out, running at 60 FPS with only very occasional stutters, and that's at native resolution. And therein lies some of the magic. Built into the WinMax is an H.I.P.S. panel that's rated for 500 nits max brightness and runs at 1280 by 800 resolution. That is pretty low for a modern display, and if you have sharp eyesight, the experience is not as good as they seem to make it out to be. In the Indiegogo pitch, GPD points out how the pixel pitch, so it's the pixel density of their display, compares to common laptop and desktop display sizes and pixel counts. The problem is that the way that you would typically hold the GPD Max puts it much closer to your face than those other displays, so you need more pixel density in order for it to reach retina levels where you can't make out the individual pixels. I do understand the design limitations that play here, though. It's not like the Iris Pro graphics were gonna be able to drive anything higher than an HD panel anyway, and playing at a lower but still native resolution is definitely better the alternative. Truthfully, I'd have done it exactly the same way. I just felt that it was a little disingenuous to make the comparisons that they did. Some more good news, though, is that I absolutely love the built-in controller. As we've seen on previous GPD products, there's a rocker on the side that toggles the controller between mouse mode, with the shoulder buttons acting as left and right click, and gamepad mode, which uses standard X input, meaning that it usually requires no configuration to just work. This is far and away their best effort so far. The ABXY buttons are delightfully clicky, but not loud. The D-pad is the best I've seen on anything that isn't a dedicated game controller. And the analog sticks? They might take up a ton of space internally that might have been great to use for battery, but they were totally worth it. The tension on them is just right. The plastic ribbing on the top is the perfect balance of control and durability, and I got no annoying dead zones, putting me in perfect control all the time. If I had to complain about the gamepad, I would say the shoulder buttons are a little light for my taste. The intake fan on the bottom actually makes my fingers cold when I'm playing, if I'm not wearing a warm hoodie from LTTStore.com, that is. The Win Max itself is heavy enough that you pretty much have to rest it on something if you're playing for more than about 15 minutes. Back to the marketing, though. My final beef is this. While it is true that PlayStation 3 emulation is possible with the Win Max, you're going to be limited to the much lighter games from that console, and the Xbox 360 for that matter, if you want frame rates of 30 FPS or more. Now, I did technically run some heavier games. This is Bioshock 2, for example. But as you can see, the experience was not great. One way around this would be to use the Thunderbolt 3 port on the back to hook up an external GPU. That is super cool. Like, Thunderbolt 3 in this thing? Dang. Like, I've long been a Thunderbolt 3 graphics card enthusiast, but all the compact Thunderbolt 3 graphics cards that I'm aware of either never made it to market or have gone extinct, meaning that if you want to do that, you're stuck tethered to a big old brick that's plugged into the wall. At that point, I mean, why wouldn't I just use a normal controller and play on the larger display of my real laptop or TV or something? But Linus, you might say. Maybe the Win Max is your only computer. You use it as a handheld on the go, and you dock it at home. You simply must have a solution to this problem. Eh. Given the luxury pricing of both the Win Max and an eGPU, I find that scenario pretty hard to swallow. But at least, hey, the option is there if you're into it, and performance is shockingly good. The Win Max's open airflow bottom might give it a bit more flex than I'd like, and it can get pretty loud. But it allows the dual fan cooler to breathe extremely well and kept the CPU in the high 60s to low 70s throughout my testing, all of which was done again at max TDP. I bet a MacBook Air would need water cooling for that. We should test that. Get subscribed to see it. Just make sure, too, though, that a webcam... Yeah, it took me a while to realize it's missing one. And a separate keyboard is part of your docking solution if you want to go that route. I really wanted to like the keyboard and the touchpad. They included dedicated F keys, which I appreciated, and it's pretty neat how in controller mode, you can kind of thumb the trackpad around. But the arrow keys are terrible. This caps lock should absolutely be tab, and it's just too cramped to really game comfortably on. Not to mention that I can type faster on my phone than I can type on this thing. That's really the final nail in the I'm gonna make this my only computer pipe dream for me. I see the Win Max as a second or maybe even a third PC, but that does not mean that I don't like it. This is a really cool device. Once they sort out those stability issues that prevented me from even testing battery life, I'd expect 10 hours or maybe more in our light office benchmark, which is pretty darn good considering the 57-watt-hour battery. That's 10 nanometer for you. Like anything though, it's full of sacrifices, and it lacks the kind of polish that you might expect from the likes of Dell if that weird Alienware Nintendo Switch thing ever comes to market. But bottom line, if you're the kind of person who was already salivating over the prospect of a handheld emulation monster, and you were just waiting for me to say, yep, it pretty much does what they said it would do, then go now, just buy it. This is without a doubt one of the coolest PCs on the market, and it may be a long time before something this unique comes along again. You know what else might not come along again anytime soon? A segue this move. Private Internet access lets you mask your IP and encrypt traffic to and from your devices. PIA has reliable service with over 3,000 servers in more than 30 countries. They've got no bandwidth caps. They've got configurable encryption and an internet kill switch to keep you in control of your connection, and you can try it risk-free with their 30-day money-back guarantee. They've got clients for Windows, Mac OS, Android, iOS, and Linux, and their MACE feature blocks requests, to known malware and tracking domains altogether. So go check it out at the link in the video description. If you guys enjoyed this video, maybe check out our preview of Alienware's similarly equipped switch clone thing from CES this year. Wow, remember trade shows? That feels like a lifetime ago, eh?