GPD Win (x86 Computer / Palmtop)


have played with mine most of the day today, my first impression is its built really well. feels solid, looks good, small and has a nice screen. i like the game controls,

the keyboard is too small for my liking. I wish they got rid of the set of keys on the right and just made the keys bigger.

The win gets disproportionally hot for how powerful it is.it shouldn't be generating this much heat doing simple windows things. I have a 8 inch windows tablet and doing the same things with passive cooling stays at room temp. i dont know what is wrong but it doesnt seem right. the fan even on the high setting seems ineffective at keeping it comfortable. i hope the pyra does better given it only has passive cooling.

im going to look at underclocking i think, it has more power than i need, and I want to extend the battery and cool this thing down.

doesnt have much/any bloatware, so thats nice

going to start working on getting a good linux port working

edit: set cpu cap to 95% ~1500mhz and it stops turboboost and have turned off the fan. So far so good, nice and warm, but no longer hot to the touch, will monitor battery life
 
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According to DHL mine has been delivered yesterday to someone with no name with a signature that doesn't look like mine. I'll ask the neighbors this evening, I hope it's their signature and not the delivery guy's.
 
Despite having it a few days, I haven't used mine in vengence (just been to busy during the day and evenings). However over all it is a really nice piece of kit. Personally I would have been happier if they removed the extra keys from the right (or positioned them elsewhere), and made the keyboard bigger/more central. In terms of typing I am basically finding there is a learning curve for me, I am used to using certain thumbs/fingers on certain keys, but because the keyboard on this is to one side, it actually makes sense to use different thumbs/fingers. I have started making an active effort to do this (in particular using a sensible shift button) and immediately it is feeling way better. My gut feeling is with a bit of use, the keyboard will generally be fine, and you'll end up not thinking about it too much. This doesn't mean the Pyra keyboard won't be "better", it just means I feel that with time the keyboard won't be a stick point with the GPD-WIN.

There is something quite surreal about having a Windows machine in this form factor, I run Steam in big picture mode and have access to loads of games, many of them run directly on the hardware, and so far my use case has been in the office, or at home, in both cases there are desktop machines with Steam games on, so I can stream them onto the GPD-WIN and play the latest/greatest on the small form factor. Can alt-tab out, adjust volume, browse pages, well I can just do anything really, no waiting for people to make specific ports, can use Skype or any other program I want, so yes, it is a nice feeling. The mono sound is honestly a bit weird, I mean it is fine, I understand why it is done like it, but it stood out ot me right away. Of course headphones work as expected.

I somehow feel basic Windows stuff can feel a bit slow, i.e. Steam takes quite a while to load up, some webpages seem to struggle a bit, obviously I didn't expect it to be 12 core X 4GHz performance, but I did expect perhaps a little better on that side (although maybe a few tweaks will help).

Soon after getting the device, I allowed it to do a Windows update, left it over night, came in and it was stuck on some percentage (34% maybe?), from doing a Google search, at this point the device should have rebooted, not sure what happened, anyway, cycled the power, the updated continued and finished and all was well.

I think the build quality is very good, anyone who doesn't own one who is commented I would question, I say this not in a mean way, but in terms of I feel the device is a lot more impressive in real life than a photo. It is comfortable in my hands and games play nicely on it. The DPAD certainly doesn't feel amazing, sort of slidey/spongey, but that said, I was doing a lot of gestures (for fighting games, RIGHT, LEFT, BUTTON, etc.) and it always did what I expected. The triggers feel a bit cheap to me, like quite light/clicky (hard to explain), but have always performed as required.

So bottom line, Q/A:

Was it worth it? For me, 100% yes, for what I paid, I am very happy with it as a little toy.

Will it replace my Pandora? Honestly, the answer is probably yes, I love my Pandora, it is in mint condition and has been looked after incredibly well, however it is a bit long in the tooth now!

Has buying the GPD-WIN made an impact on whether I will buy a Pyra or not? Possibly? I was on the fence before (wasn't sure I could justify the money given how much I anticipated using it), in some respects the GPD-WIN means I don't need a Pyra, but in other respects having one cool little handheld has made me want to get another cool little handheld.

Does the GPD-WIN have decent performance? Well yes and no, it plays a lot of games, but a large number of games it 'plays' really aren't at a frame rate I'd be happy playing at. So I think you need to be a little careful about expectations about what you can play on the device if you like decent frame rates (I appreciate some people are happy with variable 15-30 FPS, but that isn't really me on the whole).

Is the GPD-WIN better or wose than the Pyra? Ha ha ha, of course I can't answer this! If you are on the fence just go and buy both, sure it means paying more money, but just forget about that, beg, borrow, steal, get both devices, enjoy them, live happy, die poor!
 
As an update, set the CPU to 90% CPU max, 1.5ghz. Temps have been fantastic, battery is excellent, after using all day with emails and web browsing it says I still have 9 hours of juice left having only used 20%.

This is the battery life I was expecting out of a cherry trail device =) I'm very happy.

Rightmark power management is a windows utility that gives you access to the CPU throttle settings that don't appear to be exposed through windows power management. I will link it once I get home from work.

https://sourceforge.net/projects/rightmark/

 
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SNESFAN said:
As an update, set the CPU to 90% CPU max, 1.5ghz. Temps have been fantastic, battery is excellent, after using all day with emails and web browsing it says I still have 9 hours of juice left having only used 20%.

This is the battery life I was expecting out of a cherry trail device =) I'm very happy.

Rightmark power management is a windows utility that gives you access to the CPU throttle settings that don't appear to be exposed through windows power management. I will link it once I get home from work.
Click to expand...

So you used Rightmark to set CPU to 90% rather than BIOS ?
 
yea, i didnt see a way to turn off turboboost in the bios and the only throttle was thermal and i dont like the idea of thermal throttle. hard set caps are more stable regardless, less stutters etc
 
Based on feedback from those that have them, especially @Rockthesmurf, I will make sure to recommend this to those I know that are strictly Windows users, that don't mind so much where or how it was made, and that want a pocketable gaming handheld. It is good to hear that it gets decent battery life and not too hot with a little tweaking.

There is someone I will be telling to check it out first thing in the morning. If they get one I can try it out myself, and eventually do a side by side comparison between the Pyra and the Win.
 
The mystery signature on the certificate of delivery was my neighbor's. So now instead of staying unopened in my neighbor's appartment, it stays unopened in mine. Hopefully I'll have time to try it this week-end.
 
ElPoco said:
The mystery signature on the certificate of delivery was my neighbor's. So now instead of staying unopened in my neighbor's appartment, it stays unopened in mine. Hopefully I'll have time to try it this week-end.
Click to expand...

How did it get delivered to your neighbour, and why did he sign for it?
 
Because the employees of delivery services get blamed if they come back from their rounds with too many undelivered packages, but they also get blamed if they don't get a signature for a delivery and the client complains for not getting his package. So what many of them do is either sign themselves, if they're able to put the package in a quite secure place, or give it to a neighbor and have him sign.
They're not supposed to do it, but they won't get blamed for it.
 
SNESFAN said:
have played with mine most of the day today, my first impression is its built really well. feels solid, looks good, small and has a nice screen. i like the game controls,

the keyboard is too small for my liking. I wish they got rid of the set of keys on the right and just made the keys bigger.

The win gets disproportionally hot for how powerful it is.it shouldn't be generating this much heat doing simple windows things. I have a 8 inch windows tablet and doing the same things with passive cooling stays at room temp. i dont know what is wrong but it doesnt seem right. the fan even on the high setting seems ineffective at keeping it comfortable. i hope the pyra does better given it only has passive cooling.

im going to look at underclocking i think, it has more power than i need, and I want to extend the battery and cool this thing down.

doesnt have much/any bloatware, so thats nice

going to start working on getting a good linux port working

edit: set cpu cap to 95% ~1500mhz and it stops turboboost and have turned off the fan. So far so good, nice and warm, but no longer hot to the touch, will monitor battery life
Click to expand...
That's great! I'd it possible to make profil to use in several cases?
 
I don't know, but I think rightmark is open source so I think you could and tie hotkeys or something

Edit not sure if open source, but maybe put a feature request in?
 
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ElPoco said:
So what many of them do is either sign themselves, if they're able to put the package in a quite secure place, or give it to a neighbor and have him sign.
Click to expand...
Jesus. Thank the Great Maker for COD options.
 
I had a few hours to test it on Saturday, until the battery went down and I realized I don't know where my international adapter is, and that none of my USB charger had more than 2.0A output.

Build quality seems good enough.
Even though I expected as much it's still impressive to see a Pandora-sized device booting Windows.
Using Windows on the device is ok, in "mouse mode" the DPAD is bound to WASD and you have to use the four buttons for up/down/left/right keys, with my habit of using the Pandora with A/B mouse it took me a while to adjust.
Out of the box, the graphic driver crashed quite a bit. I updated the driver and got no crash since then, I also disabled the orientation sensor since I don't plan on using it and it seemed like it could cause crashes.
Most of my time was spent updating and installing stuff, I was able to play a bit of Spacechem (readable/playable enough, I was afraid the screen would be too small for some UI elements), Double Dragon Neon and Advent Rising.

The latter revealed two problems with the device: the first is that it started in "portrait" mode and there was no way to have it display correctly using either the game's settings or the display settings. I guess it has to do with the screen being a portrait screen by default (just like on the Pyra). I had to use an unofficial patch to have the game displayed windowed (and using some trick I was able to get the window to act as if fullscreen).
The second problem is that in order for the gaming controls to be handled as a gamepad by the game, I have to switch to Direct Input mode before starting, and then if I want to use the mouse to navigate the menus, I have to switch to mouse mode and back again to direct input mode to resume playing. But I guess that if the game is completely controllable from the gamepad it should be ok.

All in all, it seems like a neat device, but counter-intuitively, it seems a bit more fiddly than the Pandora. That's probably because I got my Pandora long after the system was stable and everything neatly packaged and accessible with PNDManager, and also because all PND-packaged software is adapted for it while most windows software wasn't made with something like the GPD Win in mind.

Will it replace my Pandora? It's too early to say, the Pandora still has some advantages.
 
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