Embedded Video Issue

The reviewer was testing a mini PC with embedded videos and noticed that scrolling down felt choppy due to the high CPU usage. The performance was not flawless, especially when running multiple tabs with content and images. As a result, the scrolling experience was noticeable laggy.

Gaming Performance

The reviewer tested the laptop's gaming performance on a competitive map of the game Dust2 at 720p resolution, which is one of the lowest possible visuals. Unfortunately, the performance was not amazing, and the frame rate dropped to around 20 frames per second. The reviewer noted that this performance is semi-playable but would have preferred a smoother experience.

Battery Life

The laptop's battery life was a major disappointment for the reviewer. With general use, they struggled to get over three hours of battery life. However, with reduced brightness and content consumption, they managed to squeeze out around 3-4 hours. This is not an impressive battery life for a laptop, especially considering its 38 watt hour capacity.

Linux Compatibility

The reviewer tested the laptop's compatibility with Linux, loading a live image of Linux Mint and successfully booting it up. However, this was not enough to redeem the laptop from its other shortcomings.

Final Verdict

Despite some positive aspects, such as low power consumption and decent thermals, the reviewer was disappointed with the overall performance and battery life of the mini PC. The embedded video issue and poor gaming performance made it clear that this laptop is not suitable for demanding tasks or content creation work. As a result, the reviewer decided to be more selective in reviewing laptops and focus on products they think are worth their time.

Laptop Design Flaws

The reviewer also mentioned some design flaws with the laptop, including a stuck-on bezel look that was peeling off from the outside of the screen. The webcam, which is often an afterthought in laptop design, seemed to be particularly problematic.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enAffordable laptops i have not been reviewing a lot of them lately and you'll probably see  why i haven't after the review of this model here so it's called the dre m11  it was sent out to me from a company called dhgate it arrived really quickly  and the spec of this laptop has the jasper lake so it's got the sauron in 5095 with its  four cores it's a 10 nanometer chip paired up with 12 gigabytes of ram and a 256 gigabyte ssd  it didn't sound too bad to me as a 15.6 inch affordable laptop it didn't mention if it has an  ips screen only that it's a full hd screen and the build of it metal in this red color as you can see  so is it a laptop that is okay well that's what i'm here of course to find out and let you know  and a little bit of a spoiler here that uh no it's not one you want to be considering or shortlisting  and in fact my review will probably help you want to avoid this model and you'll see why so inside  the box apart from the laptop we do actually get quite a few extras that they have included  so we've got the power supply for the m11 which is a two-pronged style they include a cheap  webcam i'm not even going to test this out it is the d-ri or the dairy brand and a cheap mouse  a usb 2 hub and this right here too which is some stickers over the top of the keyboard there  they're in spanish and they even include a mouse pad for us and then our user manual this color is  there red now it is a red that at certain angles leans towards almost looking like pink especially  when we look at the keyboard which we'll get onto shortly so the top of the lid this is made out of  alloy it has a matte finish to it it's going to be very easy to scratch it's a very soft alloy  so this is just a sticker right here we should be able to pull that off without any problems  at all and lifting this up one-handed no you cannot do that you need both hands to do that so  keyboard layout here full sized keyboard which is good now typing on it the keys aren't too  bad and pressing down there really is no bounce and there's no flex in the middle it's not a bad  keyboard but i wouldn't rate it as high quality it still feels a little bit plasticky plastic keycaps  they do curve in slightly ever so slightly and you can see that we've got all our shortcuts there  screen uh scroll lock there print screen button dedicated one and then full size arrow keys is  good to see and then our number keypad here too as well the power button away at least it's not right  next to the delete key or where the delete key is with some units status led is at the top here for  our power battery life and the caps lock and yes it is a backlit keyboard so you can see right now  there are the keys lit up now it's not that clear just around where some of the keys are like enter  here and shift so uneven distribution of that back lighting but it is good that we do have at least  the backlighting there with this keyboard our palm rest is made out of alloy again  and we do have a touch pad that is really quite large in size but it's not really that good  okay i find that the more sensitive movements the cursor can sometimes lag a little bit so you move  and it doesn't register quite as well as i would hope it can be a little bit jumpy at times so a  frustrating touch pad so the fingerprint reader that's there and it's good and it is a focal tech  brand one and it seems to work okay i don't really have any issues with that at least now it does  have left and right clicky mouse buttons built within it it does not rattle the touchpad but i  would certainly be using a mouse maybe that's why they gave us a mouse in the box because they know  it's a poor touchpad and you'll see here on the right we have our microphone which is kind of an  odd location on the right hand side you see we have our dc in there for charging you can see  that it doesn't quite line up perfectly that dc plug there the bell plug usb 3.0 hdmi which is  2.0 so this does 4k 60 with the jasper lake and the uhd graphics and then this is data usb 3.0  type c so it's not type c it supports video out unfortunately and you can see they try to make  it look a little bit slimmer here by doing this with the design and how thick is it well measuring  right here is 19 millimeters and the weight of it is 1.7 kilos for a 15.6 inch laptop weight wise  is actually not bad and the thickness is well it's okay it's definitely not as chunky as a  gaming laptop but it's no thin ultrabook and on the left we've got gigabit lan so that is good to  have because you don't normally get that anymore it does have wi-fi ac built into this a combo 3.5  millimeter jack there usb 3.0 again and then an sd card reader this is good to have but it is  only usb 2 speeds this one as i expected it is slow so it caps out about 24 25 megabytes per  second read and writes then gaining access to the internals which is something you don't have to  do because we've already got our boot drive right there that's all you can change because the ram is  not upgradable replaceable and you'll see you do have to remove however these two screws that are  under that large rubber rear foot once you do that this rear panel then it should just lift off okay  like so which is good ah but there we go you can see of course we've got room then to install  a set of three 2.5 inch drive to screw that into place so that's the only reason you'd really  want to open this up here build quality looking yeah pretty average a lot of tape around here  holding down some of those cables pcb quality doesn't seem super high-end as you would expect  and you can see there's a fair amount of copper on here which is good and now this one is configured  as a 10 watt chip the sauron 5095. we are off to a bad start here when you take a look at the display  now the website did state that it's just a full hd screen that's it they didn't say ips when they  don't mention ips then you know it's probably going to be a tn panel which it is look at this  colors shift out it looks very washed out you have to look at it directly if you don't it does not  look great and the brightness on it okay this full hd matte coated anti-glare panel only 166 nets  that's crazy low okay 166 nets full brightness i'm almost on right now is not good we're not  off to a very good start at all color coverage here adobe rgb of only just 42  that is really poor okay and then ntsc of 40 that's bad and 56 s rgb so a super low end  low grade extremely poor panel that they've gone with in the m11 here moving over to screen capture  now it's just a little easier for me because that screen is not great to record i've had a bit of  difficulty doing that and we can pick up on this a lot better too with the screen capture you can see  that when i bring up the start menu that it comes in a little bit laggy now it's not actually as bad  as it looks here because it would be in 1080p so this is maybe causing a little bit of that  slowness there and it could be because i'm capturing too but it's external capture card  that is connected up to this so under our device manager here uh you can see task manager sorry  that ram we have a look at the memory it is a dual channel and it is running at 2933 megahertz which  is good that's going to help the uhd graphics and we have 156 gigabytes dedicated to that 11th gen  uhd graphics there from intel now the m11 it does if you look under system here ship with windows 10  pro okay that's what it is you need to run updates however windows 11 support i've just confirmed and  i'll do it again with the pc health app that it is not running unfortunately secure boot  so you see now when i check uh oh this pc does not currently meet windows 11 system requirements  so that means without a bias update to enable that secure boot this is not going to be able to run  windows 11 so that is bad there okay hopefully they can correct this now that drive i showed  you before the king fast say to three spec ssd 256 gigabytes it's not amazing those speeds but  it's okay i mean it is sata3 so if we had pci 3.0 that would be a lot better a lot faster perhaps a  little bit more expensive would have been nice to have but really with this chipset i don't think  it matters too much so free space 206 gigabytes is what you will find and just to point out too  in our devices here with device manager that the lan port and the wireless is real tech okay  now the adapter is actually sorry it's courtship this one which i've never seen before chip adapter  in there now this realtek adapter it's only about 320 megabits per second wireless 6 would have been  better so this is wi-fi 5 spec wireless ac but ax would have been better but we do not have that  and our processor you'll see it in here at sauron so the n50 95 maximum turbo single thread is 2.9  gigahertz so it's a step up from the old gemini lake and it does have now a 10 nanometer process  instead of 14 intel has finally moved away from the 14 nanometer process even with these entry  level system on a chip geekbench 5. i ran this with the power connected of course  if it was just on battery it would be a lot slower so 639 single core score and just over 2  000 multi-core score here 15 watt processor so it is a little bit faster than what we had previously  especially with those gemini lakes that were only configured to just six watts it certainly  has a little bit more headroom there with that power limit of 15 watts and the fan inside  so it's an okay score but still very low in there this is not a powerhouse of a laptop at all  video playback i have noticed now that with this jasper lake you'd expect it to be  well just as good as gemini lake if not better right so a few stutters in the beginning  and it's still doing it it's dropping frames here so the performance a little choppy now it  is a super demanding file hevc and the fact that it's a high bit rate too 140 megabits per second  and 10 bit now it's smooth but it does need around like seven eight seconds to smooth out and then  it's running fine what about 4k 60 this is another one of those demo clips that i always test out now  this particular clip you can see that it seems to be in slow motion a little bit  it's definitely there we go it's lagging okay that's not running at 60 frames per second  now it is and then it's just dropping frames like crazy and become choppy so the video performance  not good now i don't really have anything in the background running at all i've just got a  spreadsheet here just to show you that this is really what this kind of laptop is ideal for  is very light things so documents spreadsheets google stuff like that chrome okay you don't  really want to be taxing this because it's not a powerful laptop it's for basic computing needs  now onto our chrome performance looking at youtube here this is a 4k clip that's not even running  in 4k yet and it is dropping frames okay so it's not a good sign at all to see this okay that was  in 1440p so let's put it into 4k 60 is it even going to be out of hand you can see that cpu  is just maxing out 100 memory is fine okay but it's not even full screen at the moment so swap  it over to full screen mode and look at this dropping a lot of frames oh yeah that's constant  and the playback is choppy so just like the video there quite disappointing performance  now i have updated to the latest intel drivers i've done all of that got it from the intel  software update the live update tool and it's not that that's to blame it's just that cpu is having  a bit of trouble here playing such demanding resolution through chrome now an egypt would  probably be quite a bit better so i'll get out of this and just go into standard google  and have a look a quick search and see how many tabs we can open and what kind  of performance are we going to experience out of this particular spec so taking a look here at catsand let's open up about i normally run about 10 tabs you're going to have to control that  not because of the ram not ram managing but really down to just those course being maxed out  it's only a quad core if it had eight threads it would be a little bit better here now that's okay  swapping between these tabs that's fine and i'll just scroll down here because there's an embedded  video and this was in the mini pc video too you can see now yeah that feels choppy scrolling down  our cpu still maxed out starting to drop down now to 50 percent and then going through these tabs  again i think that performance now i mean this is it's okay but i wouldn't call it flawless  definitely with the embedded videos and lots of content lots of images that scrolling is okay  but now all the images some definite noticeable lags you probably want to run really  a few less tabs right here this will be the only game i'll be testing on this spec here so i'm  going to run the lower resolution here not the lowest but i mean 720p that's pretty low there  lowest possible visuals and we'll take a look and see how the dust2 competitive map is going  to run on this jasper lake here we go so around 30 frames per second i have seen it get down to  25 this performance is not amazing semi-playable here i hope it sticks to more like 60 frames  per second but oh oh oh oh and yeah i got killed anyway all down to 20. so not good for gaming this  jasper lake even though yes it's 15 watts this performance is very very low end as you can see  finally some good news and that is it doesn't go over 66 degrees and it pulls about 10 watts here  according to hw info now i've been pushing it hard benchmarking gaming and the fan does come  on you do hear it it's not that loud and it's not a hot chip either it's only a 10 watt processor  so with that fan these thermals are great it does have quite a bit of copper in there so that's one  area they've actually done something decent the rest of the laptop however well yeah if  you've been watching not so good okay battery life what is it like on this particular model  well it's not amazing it's only a 38 watt hour battery and you're looking at i struggled to get  over three hours with this with my general kind of work on it so if you watch this video content  and you've got the brightness down which is already loaded start well if you've got it  even lower uh then yeah you may be able to get a little bit more than that but it's terrible it's  not good at all so linux that does actually work no secure boot on here i tested a live  image boot image of linux mint it worked uh and hey you won't be getting this laptop anyway  so i just thought i'd mention it that i have actually tested it out so true disappointment  here i thought it might be better than what it looked like on their website but that is also what  i'm here for they're not everything's going to be amazing and a positive review there certainly  isn't and now you know of course to completely review this to completely not consider it and  i wasted here quite a few days testing this out which is very frustrating so if you  don't see any more just belake laptops or these affordable laptop reviews from me in the channel  and i just start focusing on products that i think are going to be good and start getting quite  nitpicky and selective or what i agree to review you know why because units like this are just a  waste of your time a waste of my time oh and i can see with the lid here too now this is a new thing  there is this stuck-on bezel look it's peeling off from the outside of the screen oh wow what  a laptop what a webcam that it's got in it too thank you for watching this lemon of a laptop  review here and i'll see hopefully in the next one with something a lot better than this model\n"