The GPD Wind Max is a handheld gaming PC that offers a unique experience with its tiny size and button-based interface. Unlike traditional gaming controllers, which require finesse to use effectively, the GPD Wind Max's trigger system is more straightforward, making it suitable for fast-paced games like first-person shooters.

However, when it comes to racing games, the lack of finesse control can be a significant drawback. The device's tiny size and button-based interface make it difficult to navigate complex tracks or execute precise maneuvers. This can lead to frustrating gameplay experiences, especially for players who prefer a more immersive and interactive experience.

To overcome this limitation, one potential solution is to use a full GPU with Thunderbolt connectivity, such as the Liquid-cooled RTX 2080 TI Thunderbolt Gaming Box. By plugging in this powerful graphics card, which is connected via a single Thunderbolt cable, the GPD Wind Max can suddenly become capable of more demanding games.

In reality, few people will be using the GPD Wind Max for gaming purposes, so its limitations may not be as significant. However, if one is looking to use the device as a laptop replacement or primary computing solution, it's essential to consider its compromises and limitations.

To address these concerns, we spent about three minutes plugging in the full GPU with Thunderbolt connectivity to our GPD Wind Max device. We then set it up to play Red Dead Redemption 2 at high settings on a quad-core processor, which is significantly more powerful than the device's own processor.

With the full GPU power, the GPD Wind Max was able to handle demanding games like Red Dead Redemption 2 with ease, achieving frame rates of over 40 FPS at high settings. This is an impressive feat, considering that this device is designed for handheld gaming and has a relatively modest specs sheet.

The only minor compromise we encountered during our testing was the lack of MSAA (Multi-Sample Anti-Aliasing) or other advanced graphics features. Nevertheless, the GPD Wind Max's ability to deliver smooth gameplay at high settings, coupled with its compact size and button-based interface, make it an intriguing option for gamers who want a unique gaming experience.

One of the most surprising aspects of our testing was how well the device cooled down during extended use. The fans were slightly loud, but they remained stable at 3.3 GHz consistently throughout our tests. This is impressive, considering that the GPD Wind Max's quad-core processor and powerful GPU are designed to deliver intense performance.

In conclusion, while the GPD Wind Max has its limitations as a laptop replacement or primary computing solution, it shines when used for handheld gaming purposes. By taking advantage of its Thunderbolt connectivity and plugging in a full GPU, this device can deliver impressive performance at high settings. Its unique design and compact size make it an attractive option for gamers who want a portable and immersive gaming experience.

The GPD Wind Max is a great example of how innovative design and technology can come together to create something truly unique and exciting. While it may not be perfect, its strengths as a handheld gaming PC far outweigh its weaknesses, making it an excellent choice for those looking to take their gaming on the go.

WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: eninside this box is something I am very excited about the brand new GPD when Max they may see in a couple of videos on this but if you haven't the idea is that this is the world's smallest gaming laptop asterisk they could play actual games unlike some small app tops that suck so of course standard disclaimer applies GPD were very kind enough to send this out early so it is a pre-production sample there will likely be some things that will change between now and the actual full shipping date but like many GPD products we take a look at in the past there's always a lot of very unique and cool decisions inside and they also use lots of yellow tape lots and lots of yellow tape alright so we have the wind max itself look at that look at the triggers built in so this is a very unique hybrid yeah actually legit triggers built in so the thing that makes this unique is that it's essentially a laptop a mini laptop with a trackpad and a keyboard but we also have joysticks we have XY AV buttons we have a little Xbox button essentially this is like if a small laptop and an Xbox controller and a switch got together you would have the GPD when max it's a very unique device but inside you're getting something which can play actual PC games so well yes this certainly does not have an RT X 2080 fit inside what it does have is a still reasonably powerful Intel isolate processor so in this case it's the i-5 with the iris pro graphics iris Pro iris + Irish Plus graphics that might not sound and precedent for you're used to the old school Intel integrated graphics of yesteryear but this actually has roughly the same sort of level of performance as like a low-end laptop dedicated GPU which means that especially consider we have a 1280 by 800 display you can actually probably play a lot of games at that resolution with no worries I just realized the screen actually goes totally flat so you can play it like this but hinge actually feels pretty decent so the keyboard immediately is usable but a little odd so obviously the main layout is bad right these keys are a little bit small but it's someone who uses like the service go and the iPad pro a lot I'm kind of used to a little bit of a small keyboard what I'm not used to though is that we have a sort of split top row where we have like the number oh and the function keys sort of together those are really small but I don't think a lot of people are probably going to be using a laptop like this as their main sort of essay writing machine it's much more so a small gaming console slash gaming PC slash Ken's dream laptop you would use this though right oh yeah I feel like you steal every little tiny laptop that we get in the office I do pretty accurate statement so around back we have not only full size HDMI to USB a a USB C and a Thunderbolt 3 port on an 8 inch laptop you know we're gonna get into some shenanigans with that on top of that we have a full-size Ethernet jack we have a micro SD card slot and we have a little toggle switch on the side which will move it between Mouse mode as well as a sort of gamepad Xbox mode you can actually open this thing up and you do have access to at least the end two slots so if you ever wanted to upgrade the SSD you can a lot going for a 8 inch tiny gaming laptop so I will say opening the GPD when max is not the easiest thing in the world the screws are actually pretty far inset so a lot of my bits weren't even fitting and it's uh it's impressively machined in that it's very hard to even get a sort of separation on the bottom chassis so the first thing I notice is that we have our three cell battery which is actually attached to the bottom of the chassis that's actually a really big battery for something which is this small I believe this is sixty watt hours which if that's true is roughly what you get on a lot of like 13 laptops so inside immediately you see that you have dual fans with ic1 heat pipe I'm assuming that a second heat pipe on this side so you can really see that when you're cranking this thing it's just pulling clear air straight through the bottom and it's exhausting it out the back here so this is very much sort of designed to get as much air flow through it as possible to cool that core i5 underneath something else I noticed we do have our soldered down Wi-Fi card but it does have Wi-Fi six which is nice now we cannot upgrade the RAM so it does have 16 gigs I believe of lpddr4 memory on the motherboard underneath this heatsink but that's fine honestly 16 gigs should be plenty I've got to say they've actually done a really good job with sort of the layout of this board I mean we've got obviously Ethernet all these ports you have what are obviously these huge PCBs for what you need to actually make those thumbsticks work and considering that we have such a thick beefy battery I'm legitimately really impressed for a small device there's a lot going on here so after about a week with the wind max there are a few things that really come to mind first of all this is a lot of hardware for less than $800 with that isolate Core i5 it means that we're getting solid graphics and plenty of performance to really rival a lot of full like Core i5 and core i7 laptops now there are some downsides to the hardware so this is a pre-production sample I will definitely give the caveat to but it doesn't feel incredibly sturdy there's a little bit of flex I can't really hear it too much but there's a little bit of flex to it and beyond that the actual coating they have on the outside on if you can see but it's actually gotten slightly scuffed up now mind you I will say that's partially my bad I did put this in a bag with my sort of metal laptop but it did end up getting a little bit scuffed up on the outside ultimately I feel like that's not a huge issue and certainly at the price and concerning the specs it's not a big deal but something to consider now one thing I do have a slight issue with is the screen now I get that they made this decision because this is really focused on gaming with a 1280 by 800 resolution that's not really great for Windows 10 it doesn't give you a lot of screen real estate it's barely wide enough for a lot of sort of apps and websites it would be nice to have seen something like a 1080p display I get why they did this it is a solid panel but the problem is is that it just doesn't really feel great for anything beyond just pure gaming right I definitely would like to see a little bit higher and something else I'd like to see higher is a higher refresh rate now as we'll see here in the games in a minute this thing is capable of pushing some pretty compressive frame rates especially on sort of more eSports oriented titles that are really that heavy and because of that I would love to see something like 120 FPS display but if I gotta have any real change on this it would definitely be at least a 1080p display I think that would make a difference just in the general usability so our first game is csgo which admittedly is a terrible game to play with the controller however with a little bit of tweaking it does work and even with the settings cranked to high we're still looking at a hundred frames per second 90 us I'm walking through here which honestly is not bad mind you we are playing at 1280 by 800 this is a really a game where I feel like we could really benefit from being able to take advantage of higher frame rates okay I need like 100 percent more sensitivity Oh everyone sucks me included I can't believe I'm about to say this but this is actually like fun and playable performance is not an issue at all and the screen resolution really makes sense for this sized screen it's not perfect right I don't think anyone should ever play csgo with the controller but this is a PC if I want I can plug in a mouse and keyboard if I have the space and if I'm on the go I can just play over Wi-Fi and have no problems so next up we have overwatch which you're going to try to play at 1280 by 800 at low settings and see what it looks like which it does immediately look like it's playable it is a little bit loud though I love you can hear that but like it definitely is definitely cranking but that's fine we're playing handheld gaming PC stuff so that's okay oh yeah so we get these weird stutters so it's like huge frame time spikes our FPS is fine though it's like sort of hovering 40 50 or so which I mean even though we're on low settings on the smaller display it really does kind of help sort of cover up the the lack of super high graphical fidelity but the problem though is that that sort of frame rate whenever dips below 60 kind of gets just sort of we see these like yeah like stutters like that where we'll just drop significantly for like half a second oh okay there we go and see that's yeah everyone comes out and we're just it's a slideshow yeah and that's playable mmm-hmm so it's a little bit inconsistent now I will say that there are different modes available for the wind max so you guys can go into the BIOS and manually turn up the TDP if you feel comfortable with that band really cranking in the system a little bit warmer you can turn it up to get more performance we should probably help out here yeah it's a little bit a little choppy like it runs smoothly until it doesn't we're getting like these weird lag spikes I wonder if I plug it in if that helps let me go grab a power cable and see because the battery is getting Malone okay okay okay oh wait what oh what oh how do I shift hello shift oh there we go oh no that was terrible so the only thing I'll say about this immediately for f1 is that they're the triggers have no it's just a button right so unlike like say the Xbox controller where you have the finesse it's either full throttle or nothing which means that it's fine for something like a first-person shooter when it comes to a racing game all it means is you're either flooring it there's no sort of room for finesse okay that's really hard to drive okay this is immediately if you want to use this for racing games this is pretty much a deal-breaker for me so here's the thing the GPD when max has a lot going for it but it also has some major compromises so I think the best way to solve them is actually with a very simple little life hack and that is to take advantage of this you look spend about three port to plug in a full GPU that is where this comes in so this is a liquid-cooled r-tx 20 80 TI thunderbolt gaming box now we've done an entire video about this previously what I like about it is that for what is admittedly a very large amount of money you can add some incredible graphics horsepower to literally anything with a thunderbolt port including our tiny little gaming PC this is a dumb idea literally zero people on earth are going to plug this into a 20 80 TI but let's see what happens when we take the world's tiniest gaming laptop and give it the most powerful graphics card that we can all right so with the GPD wind max plugged in with these single Thunderbolt cable to our 20 ATI while the 20 80 I is powerful we're being bottle necked first of all by Thunderbolt which always knocks a little bit of performance off but also by the fact that this is a mobile quad-core processor and a tiny game PC so we're probably gonna get good performance I think it will be playable but this is really sort of a very extreme example of what this PC is technically capable of because of the Thunderbolt port so something I haven't actually realized this actually does a good job of cooling it we sit at three point three gigahertz really consistently while the fans a little bit loud it actually isn't bad so as far as Red Dead goes we're just gonna go full out right so we are setting it to the quality setting so it's pretty much maxed out at 4k the only thing is we don't have MSAA or anything but were already taking advantage of their taa there's a couple of meetings of medium settings in here and by a couple I mean there's one so why don't we run the benchmark and see what this is capable of I anticipate we're probably gonna be looking at sub 60fps ultra oh yeah 40 fps that being said that looks nice yeah we're pegging the CPU our GPU is it 300 right nope sorry 3,800 percent so at three thousand percent GPU usage that's pretty solid yeah we're looking at like 40 fps which is perfectly reasonable considering that this is a modern triple-a game 4k full Ultra settings I mean if this was in a dedicated desktop with a Kerr real sort of gaming CPU we probably wouldn't be looking at that much more performance probably like 60 fps or so but this is really impressive the fact that we're taking advantage of thunderbolt with this tiny little gaming PC means that theoretically you can get a lot more performance if you want there's a thing with the GPD when max is that there are a couple of ways of looking at this on one hand you're looking at a sort of handheld gaming PC with the controller built in and when you look at it like that there's a lot going for it now if you are also wanting to use this as say your computer a lot of the compromises are much more difficult to deal with I mean I still even after a week have not gotten used to this sort of weird arrangement of the number row and the function keys it's very much sort of like the bare basics for what you would expect out of PC but if you're looking for at a laptop replacement unless you're a very specific kind of person this is not it you really need to think about this as a handheld gaming PC first and everything else second and by that metric there is a lot going for itinside this box is something I am very excited about the brand new GPD when Max they may see in a couple of videos on this but if you haven't the idea is that this is the world's smallest gaming laptop asterisk they could play actual games unlike some small app tops that suck so of course standard disclaimer applies GPD were very kind enough to send this out early so it is a pre-production sample there will likely be some things that will change between now and the actual full shipping date but like many GPD products we take a look at in the past there's always a lot of very unique and cool decisions inside and they also use lots of yellow tape lots and lots of yellow tape alright so we have the wind max itself look at that look at the triggers built in so this is a very unique hybrid yeah actually legit triggers built in so the thing that makes this unique is that it's essentially a laptop a mini laptop with a trackpad and a keyboard but we also have joysticks we have XY AV buttons we have a little Xbox button essentially this is like if a small laptop and an Xbox controller and a switch got together you would have the GPD when max it's a very unique device but inside you're getting something which can play actual PC games so well yes this certainly does not have an RT X 2080 fit inside what it does have is a still reasonably powerful Intel isolate processor so in this case it's the i-5 with the iris pro graphics iris Pro iris + Irish Plus graphics that might not sound and precedent for you're used to the old school Intel integrated graphics of yesteryear but this actually has roughly the same sort of level of performance as like a low-end laptop dedicated GPU which means that especially consider we have a 1280 by 800 display you can actually probably play a lot of games at that resolution with no worries I just realized the screen actually goes totally flat so you can play it like this but hinge actually feels pretty decent so the keyboard immediately is usable but a little odd so obviously the main layout is bad right these keys are a little bit small but it's someone who uses like the service go and the iPad pro a lot I'm kind of used to a little bit of a small keyboard what I'm not used to though is that we have a sort of split top row where we have like the number oh and the function keys sort of together those are really small but I don't think a lot of people are probably going to be using a laptop like this as their main sort of essay writing machine it's much more so a small gaming console slash gaming PC slash Ken's dream laptop you would use this though right oh yeah I feel like you steal every little tiny laptop that we get in the office I do pretty accurate statement so around back we have not only full size HDMI to USB a a USB C and a Thunderbolt 3 port on an 8 inch laptop you know we're gonna get into some shenanigans with that on top of that we have a full-size Ethernet jack we have a micro SD card slot and we have a little toggle switch on the side which will move it between Mouse mode as well as a sort of gamepad Xbox mode you can actually open this thing up and you do have access to at least the end two slots so if you ever wanted to upgrade the SSD you can a lot going for a 8 inch tiny gaming laptop so I will say opening the GPD when max is not the easiest thing in the world the screws are actually pretty far inset so a lot of my bits weren't even fitting and it's uh it's impressively machined in that it's very hard to even get a sort of separation on the bottom chassis so the first thing I notice is that we have our three cell battery which is actually attached to the bottom of the chassis that's actually a really big battery for something which is this small I believe this is sixty watt hours which if that's true is roughly what you get on a lot of like 13 laptops so inside immediately you see that you have dual fans with ic1 heat pipe I'm assuming that a second heat pipe on this side so you can really see that when you're cranking this thing it's just pulling clear air straight through the bottom and it's exhausting it out the back here so this is very much sort of designed to get as much air flow through it as possible to cool that core i5 underneath something else I noticed we do have our soldered down Wi-Fi card but it does have Wi-Fi six which is nice now we cannot upgrade the RAM so it does have 16 gigs I believe of lpddr4 memory on the motherboard underneath this heatsink but that's fine honestly 16 gigs should be plenty I've got to say they've actually done a really good job with sort of the layout of this board I mean we've got obviously Ethernet all these ports you have what are obviously these huge PCBs for what you need to actually make those thumbsticks work and considering that we have such a thick beefy battery I'm legitimately really impressed for a small device there's a lot going on here so after about a week with the wind max there are a few things that really come to mind first of all this is a lot of hardware for less than $800 with that isolate Core i5 it means that we're getting solid graphics and plenty of performance to really rival a lot of full like Core i5 and core i7 laptops now there are some downsides to the hardware so this is a pre-production sample I will definitely give the caveat to but it doesn't feel incredibly sturdy there's a little bit of flex I can't really hear it too much but there's a little bit of flex to it and beyond that the actual coating they have on the outside on if you can see but it's actually gotten slightly scuffed up now mind you I will say that's partially my bad I did put this in a bag with my sort of metal laptop but it did end up getting a little bit scuffed up on the outside ultimately I feel like that's not a huge issue and certainly at the price and concerning the specs it's not a big deal but something to consider now one thing I do have a slight issue with is the screen now I get that they made this decision because this is really focused on gaming with a 1280 by 800 resolution that's not really great for Windows 10 it doesn't give you a lot of screen real estate it's barely wide enough for a lot of sort of apps and websites it would be nice to have seen something like a 1080p display I get why they did this it is a solid panel but the problem is is that it just doesn't really feel great for anything beyond just pure gaming right I definitely would like to see a little bit higher and something else I'd like to see higher is a higher refresh rate now as we'll see here in the games in a minute this thing is capable of pushing some pretty compressive frame rates especially on sort of more eSports oriented titles that are really that heavy and because of that I would love to see something like 120 FPS display but if I gotta have any real change on this it would definitely be at least a 1080p display I think that would make a difference just in the general usability so our first game is csgo which admittedly is a terrible game to play with the controller however with a little bit of tweaking it does work and even with the settings cranked to high we're still looking at a hundred frames per second 90 us I'm walking through here which honestly is not bad mind you we are playing at 1280 by 800 this is a really a game where I feel like we could really benefit from being able to take advantage of higher frame rates okay I need like 100 percent more sensitivity Oh everyone sucks me included I can't believe I'm about to say this but this is actually like fun and playable performance is not an issue at all and the screen resolution really makes sense for this sized screen it's not perfect right I don't think anyone should ever play csgo with the controller but this is a PC if I want I can plug in a mouse and keyboard if I have the space and if I'm on the go I can just play over Wi-Fi and have no problems so next up we have overwatch which you're going to try to play at 1280 by 800 at low settings and see what it looks like which it does immediately look like it's playable it is a little bit loud though I love you can hear that but like it definitely is definitely cranking but that's fine we're playing handheld gaming PC stuff so that's okay oh yeah so we get these weird stutters so it's like huge frame time spikes our FPS is fine though it's like sort of hovering 40 50 or so which I mean even though we're on low settings on the smaller display it really does kind of help sort of cover up the the lack of super high graphical fidelity but the problem though is that that sort of frame rate whenever dips below 60 kind of gets just sort of we see these like yeah like stutters like that where we'll just drop significantly for like half a second oh okay there we go and see that's yeah everyone comes out and we're just it's a slideshow yeah and that's playable mmm-hmm so it's a little bit inconsistent now I will say that there are different modes available for the wind max so you guys can go into the BIOS and manually turn up the TDP if you feel comfortable with that band really cranking in the system a little bit warmer you can turn it up to get more performance we should probably help out here yeah it's a little bit a little choppy like it runs smoothly until it doesn't we're getting like these weird lag spikes I wonder if I plug it in if that helps let me go grab a power cable and see because the battery is getting Malone okay okay okay oh wait what oh what oh how do I shift hello shift oh there we go oh no that was terrible so the only thing I'll say about this immediately for f1 is that they're the triggers have no it's just a button right so unlike like say the Xbox controller where you have the finesse it's either full throttle or nothing which means that it's fine for something like a first-person shooter when it comes to a racing game all it means is you're either flooring it there's no sort of room for finesse okay that's really hard to drive okay this is immediately if you want to use this for racing games this is pretty much a deal-breaker for me so here's the thing the GPD when max has a lot going for it but it also has some major compromises so I think the best way to solve them is actually with a very simple little life hack and that is to take advantage of this you look spend about three port to plug in a full GPU that is where this comes in so this is a liquid-cooled r-tx 20 80 TI thunderbolt gaming box now we've done an entire video about this previously what I like about it is that for what is admittedly a very large amount of money you can add some incredible graphics horsepower to literally anything with a thunderbolt port including our tiny little gaming PC this is a dumb idea literally zero people on earth are going to plug this into a 20 80 TI but let's see what happens when we take the world's tiniest gaming laptop and give it the most powerful graphics card that we can all right so with the GPD wind max plugged in with these single Thunderbolt cable to our 20 ATI while the 20 80 I is powerful we're being bottle necked first of all by Thunderbolt which always knocks a little bit of performance off but also by the fact that this is a mobile quad-core processor and a tiny game PC so we're probably gonna get good performance I think it will be playable but this is really sort of a very extreme example of what this PC is technically capable of because of the Thunderbolt port so something I haven't actually realized this actually does a good job of cooling it we sit at three point three gigahertz really consistently while the fans a little bit loud it actually isn't bad so as far as Red Dead goes we're just gonna go full out right so we are setting it to the quality setting so it's pretty much maxed out at 4k the only thing is we don't have MSAA or anything but were already taking advantage of their taa there's a couple of meetings of medium settings in here and by a couple I mean there's one so why don't we run the benchmark and see what this is capable of I anticipate we're probably gonna be looking at sub 60fps ultra oh yeah 40 fps that being said that looks nice yeah we're pegging the CPU our GPU is it 300 right nope sorry 3,800 percent so at three thousand percent GPU usage that's pretty solid yeah we're looking at like 40 fps which is perfectly reasonable considering that this is a modern triple-a game 4k full Ultra settings I mean if this was in a dedicated desktop with a Kerr real sort of gaming CPU we probably wouldn't be looking at that much more performance probably like 60 fps or so but this is really impressive the fact that we're taking advantage of thunderbolt with this tiny little gaming PC means that theoretically you can get a lot more performance if you want there's a thing with the GPD when max is that there are a couple of ways of looking at this on one hand you're looking at a sort of handheld gaming PC with the controller built in and when you look at it like that there's a lot going for it now if you are also wanting to use this as say your computer a lot of the compromises are much more difficult to deal with I mean I still even after a week have not gotten used to this sort of weird arrangement of the number row and the function keys it's very much sort of like the bare basics for what you would expect out of PC but if you're looking for at a laptop replacement unless you're a very specific kind of person this is not it you really need to think about this as a handheld gaming PC first and everything else second and by that metric there is a lot going for it