Walmart's $250 laptop is AWESOME!

walmart made a big splash last year when they launched their overpowered brand of gaming desktops and not in a good way you're gonna get a crap power supply a crap ssd i'm just not comfortable telling anyone to buy this thing this is objectively worse so you'll have to excuse my skepticism when i saw this 250 notebook from motile also a walmart house brand now on paper this looks great we're talking ryzen processor aluminum chassis windows hello facial recognition and full fat windows 10 for 250 dollars and look at this come here this video is brought to you by freshbooks freshbooks accounting software is custom built for how you want to work helping you stay organized and productive try their 30 day free trial at freshbooks.com forward slash tech [Music] tips i got david too you bamboozled me right out of the box things are going surprisingly well actually now at 250 dollars i make assumptions like that it's gonna have a plastic shell but i was floored to find out that the sleek metallic design advertised on the website doesn't mean a cheap metallic finish on a plastic laptop but rather that all of the major panels are made of metal now we saw some speculation that it's a magnesium alloy but given that this unit has been as cheap as 200 on promo in the past we suspect that it's aluminum not that the difference is big on a 14-inch model like this one now the thing is though metal can still be flimsy and this is not the most rigid laptop shell that i've ever encountered but what i will say is that this is among the best or maybe even the best feeling 200 machine that i have ever held and what the metal construction should give it is a bit of extra durability if you pack your laptop in a bag for school or for work every day on the topic of daily use the 45.6 watt hour battery is far from the largest we've seen in this form factor but the ryzen 3200u isn't power hungry and the motile m141 ended up chewing pretty well away from wall power and the good news keeps on coming doesn't it on the left hand for io we've got a kensington lock gigabit ethernet with that handy dandy little folding hinge thing that lets you put a full size jack into a thin and light laptop usb 2 usb 3 and a combo headphone microphone audio jack what the hell is this thing it's nothing oh okay weird over on the other side we've got usb type-c another usb 3 full-size hdmi and a barrel plug for charging actually if you look at the front lip too there it is there's a little bitty tiny micro sd reader this is really impressive for a modern thin and light basically unless you want dual external monitors you're good to go dongle free and i can understand why you might want an external monitor or two let's fire up a movie trailer no time to die trailer wait is this still daniel craig wow is he the longest lasting james bond at this point i mean he is amazing david you got any thoughts on this monitor yes it is turned up to the maximum brightness uh are you sure about that yes just eyeballing it i would give this maybe a 400 or 500 to one contrast ratio and it's really warm looking there's no way they're grading the movie like that now off camera we ran some numbers and it's almost as bad as it seemed i was way off on the contrast ratio turns out it's actually a thousand to one but that doesn't mean that the experience is any better than i felt like it was the maximum luminance here is only about 150 nits and that perceived warmth may not have even been to do with poor out-of-the-box calibration this thing can only handle about 65 coverage of the srgb color space that is the worst result i have ever seen from an ips panel onto the keyboard it's got two levels of backlighting with the simple function f7 or function f6 which is nice to have especially at this price point but if i turn that on it's got a significant amount of light bleed which combined with how dim the lights are and the poor quality of the keycaps means that in a bright room it can actually be surprisingly difficult to read the legends on the keys in terms of actually using it though this is not actually bad i have seen worse keycap stabilization on laptops that cost literally five times this much like i can press right on the corner there and if there's anything that causes a keyboard to feel like junk it's bad keycap stabilization because that means that if you accidentally don't hit it perfectly right in the middle it might not actuate or it might have a very different amount of force required and unnecessary deck flex not the best i've ever seen but at reasonable amounts of pressure it's not half bad i mean it's not going to win any blind keyboard taste test challenges or anything but for 250 bucks this might be the best keyboard i've encountered as for the trackpad it is mostly really good it's a great size like they didn't skimp there it uses the windows precision drivers the multi-touch gestures work as intended and the shortcut to disable the trackpad by double tapping this little dot in the corner really nice touch even the clicks feel reasonably good a little bit of kind of hollow feeling this but pretty good the only issue we ran into is that there's this odd kind of dead zone when you move your finger only slightly where the cursor doesn't track with your finger and there's no combination of speed adjustments pointer precision settings or palm rejection that we were able to get rid of it with so that was a little bit annoying but it was something that i think i can overlook given the price now let's look under the hood once we get past the six cruise we are greeted with hey who put that sticker in there we don't even have stickers on lttstore.com yet just fantastic merchandise and water bottles also in here we've got a single heat pipe that runs from our 3200 u processor over to this small heatsink and blower fan it ended up keeping our cpu at around 80 degrees under full load so that's running a blender render while being audible but not particularly annoying and this this is something i'm really happy to see user upgradeable components now the single ram slot means that you will lose some performance because you're running in single channel mode but it also means that you can save a buck today with the basic 4 gig stick that's in here now and then upgrade down the line when second hand 8 or 16 gig sticks are cheap and also while the os is loaded up on an inexpensive 128 gig sata m.2 drive leaving only about a hundred gigs free once windows has taken up its chunk this extra slot here is nvme ready meaning that you could actually add a ton of fast storage to this thing in a matter of minutes on top of that this thing even uses an intel card for its wifi and bluetooth this is exactly the kind of stuff that normally these cheap machines cheap out on to save a buck and get this when you go to put your bottom panel back on look at that they've even got a thermal pad between the ssd and the chassis and in some cases ssd cooling is not configured in such a way that it's actually going to affect the longevity of the components but because this heatsink is so large i would actually expect that to make a difference that's freaking awesome i'm gonna just put this back together real quick this is all great so far but because our ryzen 3200u is such a power sipper and such a low end processor it's just two cores four threads you need to keep your gaming expectations realistic we used rocket league as our benchmark with our quality set to high and we got a reasonable 40-ish frames per second now with a little bit of quality sacrifice we were able to get to 60 fps so this is the great thing about amd's apus some light gaming is on the table but that's about it light gaming and the same can be said for any manner of creative work if you just need to do like some basic image cropping or something along those lines you're going to be in pretty good shape but you should leave the 4k video editing to your desktop bottom line then this thing is freaking awesome sub 500 laptops always have some kind of horrendous deal breaker like an unusable keyboard for example but the closest that this one gets is a screen that's just not bright enough for use outdoors and a little bit of weird trackpad behavior i mean even the speakers and webcam are passable and on top of that i mean i already said this but it is worth mentioning again it's got a metal chassis and freaking windows hello facial recognition signing i mean if i was on a tight budget the immediate competition to this is mostly running chrome os or last generation hardware i mean that's not terrible but having a full-fledged windows experience on a modern amd processor is better and the bang for the buck here is impossible to ignore the ryzen 3200 ube that's packed inside this thing it's not a powerhouse but it does give ample processing power at a price you can't scoff at so for this particular market segment i'd say this is a great choice if you're looking for something with a bit more horsepower however maybe take a look at our stop buying the macbook air video where we look at some great options in the five to eight hundred dollar range and subscribe so you don't miss our video where we're gonna convert an old laptop into a media center pc i was supposed to mention that earlier but i didn't this video is brought to you by backblaze backblaze is an unlimited cloud backup for macs and pcs for just six dollars a month they've restored over 35 billion files and they back up docs music photos videos drawings projects anything you can imagine you can restore your files from anywhere and you can directly download them on the web or restore them by mail they've even got a mobile app so that you can access your files on the go if you restore by mail because you've got like gigantic files or whatever you can actually purchase your restore via hard drive they will overnight fedex it to you and then after you copy the data to something new you can either return the hard drive to them for a refund or just keep it and then you've got a hard drive with data on it they've got no wonky cost structures and it's unlimited backup at a fixed price get a fully featured 15 day free trial at backplays.com ltt so go there play with it start protecting yourself from potential bad times we're gonna have that linked down below thanks for watching guys that's it go watch that other video about other cheap laptops it's good

Channel: Linus Tech Tips

Views: 3,377,201

Keywords: ryzen, 3600x, radeon, vega, vega 3, graphics, thin and light, laptop, aluminum, performance, motile, thx, windows, windows hello, cheap, affordable, bargain, budget, 1080p, IPS, NVME, SSD, FHD, M141, 14

Id: 0hMdQAjy43A

Length: 11min 42sec (702 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 01 2020