 This tiny gaming PC is absolutely wild. It's got a built-in controller. It's playing Doom Eternal at HD resolution, medium details, anywhere from 65 to 80 frames per second. And not only that, but it's so powerful that I can actually stream to Twitch TV without a separate streaming box. It's got eight core 16 threads, onboard RDNA2 graphics, and not one, but two M.2 storage slots. We're gonna have to crack this baby open and see what makes it tick. Oh, what's this? Ah, it's a message from our sponsor. Zoho CRM is a 360 degree solution that offers an intuitive UI, AI predictions, and a design studio to help you get your sales done faster. Get 50% off with code ZCRM50 using the link down below. Let's go. Meet the GPD Win Max 2. It's what you would get if an Alienware gaming laptop and the netbook had a baby. Everything about this is better than the last gen, and I have been so excited to get my hands on this. Starting with the screen, it's touchscreen with stylus support for the artists out there, and is just over 10 inches with a 16 by 10 aspect ratio and a native resolution of 2560 by 1600. That is 299 pixels per inch, making it shockingly sharp. And the best part, since this is basically a mini laptop, is that unlike other handhelds, the screen is actually a natively landscape display rather than a portrait one that is constantly running 90 degrees out of sync. We've actually got another video coming out about the IONEO AIR, and one of the problems we run into is when trying to emulate games, that since the screen is portrait, you need some fixes to get older or poorly coded games to display properly. Speaking of games, the high resolution should also help make lower resolutions not as interpolated and crappy looking. Since we've got so many pixels crammed into a small display like this, playing at 720p or 800p isn't gonna be a stretchy mess where the software and the display fight over which pixels should go where. Integer scaling should also behave more appropriately since the screen is simply double an 800p image. Let's talk I.O. Over on the right, we've got two USB 3 ports. At the front, power button with included fingerprint sensor. Do like to see that. On the left, this is cool. The GPD Win Max 2 stands head and shoulders above the rest when it comes to storage expansion. Steam Deck, Micro SD with a single 2230 SSD, IONIO Next, 2280 SSD, and I don't believe it has any Micro SD expansion, IONIO Air 2280, but you won't be using a double-sided one, and Micro SD. Here, we get a 2280, that's your boot drive. We get two SD slots, full-sized and micro, so you could put two terabytes there, and an additional 2230 SSD slot, gen four in case you want maximum performance, that is easily accessible at the back with just one screw. You could conceivably load this thing up with like eight terabytes of storage without buying any wild exotic, you know, eight terabyte double-sided SSDs. And that ignores that we could use external storage. At the back, alongside our headset jack and HDMI 2.1 port, we have another USB type A, and a USB 3 type C, along with a USB 4 type C, which means that we could actually hook this bad boy potential, theoretically, up to a Thunderbolt enclosure, or Thunderbolt storage, or even an external GPU. Not that we thought of that before. Ahem, we're definitely gonna try that after. Speaking of games, you might think that that high resolution means that you're going to have a pretty crummy low FPS experience, but that's not actually the case. Because we've got so many pixels crammed into such a small area, we can run this display at non-native resolutions without nearly the same kind of awful interpolation that we might've expected from older LCDs. Also, because this resolution is a multiple of 800p, which is the resolution that the Steam Deck and other handhelds use, you can actually use integer scaling to get no interpolation whatsoever. It just takes whatever value was supposed to be for one pixel, and makes it a two by two grid. Nice and clean. Check this out. Because of the way that GPD optimized the spacing between the keys on the keyboard, it is shockingly usable in spite of its tiny size. So this isn't just a portable gaming machine, it's actually a usable laptop. The touchscreen being up on the top of the keyboard, yeah, it's not the most amazing experience ergonomically, but quite frankly, I very rarely found myself using it anyway because, ah yes, making a return is GPD's classic little switch that takes our integrated game pad and switches it over from game pad mode to, da da da da da da, mouse mode. That awesome or what? Okay, it's a little slow and it can be a little bit clunky, but it was and remains one of the best implementations of Joy to Mouse that I have yet used. The shoulder buttons handle your left and your right click, and as soon as you're done, you flip it back over into game pad mode and you're ready to start playing. Now, I'm not gonna lie, it's a little on the heavy side at just over a kilogram, and it doesn't have the world's greatest integrated game pad, but especially when you factor in the benefit of the screen size, it is shockingly usable. For scale, here's a Steam Deck. Yes, this is a substantially larger device, but this is also a substantially larger screen, and while it might not be the best game pad in the world, it's surprisingly not bad. Holding onto it like this, you've got a little bit of grip on the back of the device, and it manages to not get too hot in the areas that you need to touch it, and these joysticks, while they're a recessed style joystick like you might find on a mobile console, they're actually Hall-Effect joysticks, meaning that your concern about them wearing out should be much lower than a potentiometer-based joystick like you would find on an Xbox or a PlayStation controller. Ooh, I really like the D-pad. Really clicky, that is one of the best D-pads I think I've felt in quite some time. That's a, yeah, that's very V-desk. That's really nice. There are integrated covers for the joysticks if you prefer not to look at them. They sit like that, and when you're not using them, they go back here. Personally, I think that's the kind of thing that I would probably leave tucked away 100% of the time, but, well, why? Productivity, it looks like a laptop. You can take it into the office. Productivity makes it look more professional. Ah, yes, well, sure. At my job, it's no problem to be carrying around a gaming device, so. That really raises the question, what kinds of other fun goodies are we gonna find inside this thing? Man, this is a really cool device. GPD just makes such cool stuff, man. And these screws are, ooh, not all the same. Well, that's good to know. Ours is a kitted out model, okay? There's our one terabyte SSD complete with DRAM cache. Then we've got our heat sink fan assembly here that is actually larger than I would expect to find in a PC like this. We've got two heat pipes, and then you can see here, it looks like the heat sink fins are quite short, but they actually get a lot taller towards the back, which probably contributes to how quiet this thing is, even while gaming. So under that, we've got the eight core 16 thread, as I mentioned before, AMD Ryzen 6800U APU. That is how we are getting the absolutely wild performance we're seeing out of this machine. Also, it contributes to the excellent battery life you can expect from the WinMax 2. GPD specs a 67 watt hour battery, but opening it up, we can see clearly this is a 72 watt hour battery. They say to expect three hours of heavy use, six to eight hours of moderate use, which is where most people will likely fall, and 14 hours of light use, depending on the specific applications. There's not really much else for us to see in here. We've got our Hall effect joysticks, which look very user repairable. Memory is soldered. Of course, if you wanna get battery life anywhere near that, you're not gonna be able to have it sucking back 30 watts playing AAA games like Halo Infinite, though it's certainly nice to have the option. I mean, look how smoothly this is running. It's at 1280 by 800, low details, but darn it, it's running. Blah, blah, blah, blah, I got him. Oh, hey, look at that. Gotta talk about the merch. We just launched the RGB hoodie. It's comfortable, stretchy, and it has these little colorful bits woven into it for a fun little splash of color without being too fun. It's gray, right? Oh, on the subject of fun, I didn't mention these before, but there are actually Z3 buttons on the bottom, so you can bind additional functions to those if shoulders and triggers aren't enough for you. And the triggers themselves, analog triggers. So racing aficionados, rejoice. One thing I will say though is the haptics are not great. The whole device vibrates. It actually kind of reminds me of the way that Valve did it on the Steam Deck. Can you hear that? Yeah. The speakers though, probably the best praise that I can give them is that I didn't notice them being, you know, little crappy laptop speakers. They've got two on the sides, two on the front, and they actually get reasonably loud and are pretty clear. Let's crank them up. Here we go. Maybe then I won't have to listen to the vibrating haptic motors. For some really good tips on optimizing your performance and battery life, I'd actually recommend checking out the Fox's channel. He has put this thing absolutely through the wringer and found that while the Steam Deck crushes it for performance at much lower TDPs in that eight to nine watt range, once you get into the 15 watt range, the Steam Deck's max TDP, the Win Max 2 leaves it in the dust and you can eke out a bit more performance going up to its maximum of 28 watts. However, one of my kind of bummers with the Win Max 2 is that in order to change those performance profiles, you have to reboot, go into the BIOS, tune them, and then boot up into Windows. For comparison, AYA, one of their competitors, has this cool little overlay that you can adjust your fan and performance profiles through on the fly. But enough about that. Let's pivot to what I think is one of the coolest use cases for a device like this. I'm gonna connect it to an external RTX 3080 and see what kind of performance we can pull off. This is exciting. It required a reboot for some reason, but it looks like our RTX 3080 GPU is showing up. Is this Thunderbolt on AMD? Well, yeah, okay, it's not technically Thunderbolt, but it's functionally the same. Is it 40 gigabit per second? Can I run a GPU? Yes. All right then. Well, you don't like when I call things by the slightly wrong name and you correct me. So yeah, if you call it Thunderbolt, I'm gonna tell you it's USB 4. Because now with our external GPU, I am fully expecting to be able to run this display at native resolution. Initially, I wasn't that impressed by the performance. We're getting anywhere from 65 to 75 frames per second, which to be clear is fine for our 60 Hertz display, but I kind of expected more. That is until I dropped into the settings menu here and realized that, oops, once it realized I have a 3080 in here, it defaulted me to ultra nightmare. Totally unnecessary to have everything cranked like that on such a tiny display, but hey, at least we know that we can do it. Freaking cool. Oh, wow. You know what's wild? This is loud fan mode. I mean, compared to the Steam Deck, I was already really impressed by how quiet it was. It has a silent mode. Hold on, here we go. Function shift. Silent mode. Around 85 degrees, yeah. That's fine. For the fans I have too. Yeah, no kidding. Remember we're not using the onboard GPU right now though, so that's an advantage. Don't get me wrong. This thing is not perfect and it's not for everyone. We ran into some weird issues with delays in the touchpad input that seemed to be caused by algorithmic palm rejection. And unlike last generation model, it no longer has an RJ45 network port, which was a bit of a bummer to me. But what it is is utterly unique. It's not gonna compete with the gaming focused design of something like a Steam Deck or an IONEO. And frankly, it's a worse laptop than pretty much any other dedicated laptop at this price point. But if what you want is the one device that does it all, there's nothing else that does it quite like this. There are people out there that are using their Steam Decks as their only computer and power to you. But for most people, that's gonna be pretty frustrating when you're on the go. And in the same way, there's a lot of folks out there that use their laptop, keyboard and track pad pretty sparingly, but actually do a fair bit of gaming. Well, guess what? With something like this, you don't have to carry a game pad. So are there many of those people? Probably not, but there are certainly enough for GPD to keep existing and keep pumping out these devices. And I'm glad, cause this thing is super cool. Just like our sponsor. Ubisoft and Rocksmith. Rocksmith Plus is an interactive tool for learning guitar that gamifies the process to make studying how to play music much more accessible. With over 5,000 different tracks to choose from, ranging from a multitude of genres, there'll be always something to start learning and something to work towards. They're always adding new tracks to try with authentic arrangements, so you know you're playing the songs the way the artist intended. Rocksmith actively analyzes your progress, breaking down your day by day and skill by skill advancement. And as you get better, so does Rocksmith. The program will adapt and suggest songs that it believes you will enjoy while also benefiting your overall growth. Due to the focus on playing first, backed by different visual styles and real time feedback, 95% of users stated Rocksmith helped improve their guitar and bass skills. The Rocksmith Plus Connect app allows you to use your phone's microphone to pick up both acoustic and electric guitars, so you don't need any extra gear to get started. Join over 5 million fellow guitarists today by clicking the link down below. If you guys enjoyed this, go check out our video on the ultimate steam deck. We actually cut a hole in the back of it and put like a hot rod style cooler sticking out of it. Legitimately made it way faster.