Hi 5pin,
Battery life is highly dependent on what you’re doing. The battery is very small, but of course so is the device. If you’re watching a local video with a realatively dim screen, or doing some basic text editing locally, you’ll get 4-5 hours of life. If you’re web browsing with average brightness, somewhere between 2-4 hours of battery life. If you’re really stressing the system and have brightness high, especially with these new air cooled devices, then you won’t make it much over 1 hour.
Display resolution doesn’t make enough difference to battery life on laptops, only to performance. The screen backlight is the battery killer.
The Intel N100 and N5100 are almost the same chips under the hood. N5100 has slower clock speeds and support for DDR4 only. The N100 achieves faster clock speeds (with more power consumption) and uses DDR4 or DDR5. The GPU is identical between both chips, and the lithography is still 10nm (note that Intel renamed 10nm to “Intel 7”).
So ultimately, doing like-for-like basic tasks won’t heed any advantage on either machine. If you’re wanting to stress the CPU with high-res video decoding or gaming, then the N100 will offer a bit more performance but will use more power.
Speaking of power, Chuwi have configured the N100 to have 15w PL1 (28 second turbo) and 10w PL2 (short-term sustained). After 180 seconds, you’ll then drop to 8w sustained. The BIOS is totally locked down, save for boot override options, so we can’t change anything in there. However, ThrottleStop will allow us to unlock PL4, for example to 15w, and we can up PL2 to 15w too, for a long-term 15w sustained power draw.
Thermals aren’t a problem and the fan can keep up with 15w sustained with the CPU staying mid-70C. The fan is PWM controlled, so it will ramp up and down with system load and temperature. It’ll stop if the CPU is below 50C, and spins somewhere between 50-55C. Even at full fan speed, it’s barely audible.
The 2023 models have USB PD enabled on both USB-C ports now. The included Chuwi adapter is still non-PD 12v 2a and only works on the first port. There’s no 45w fast charging at all - that’s an outright lie. With a 100w PD charger connected, the maximum power consumption from the wall while charging & stressing the CPU is 28w. So, probably 12v 2a (24w) “and a little bit”.
Using a 22.5w 12v USB power bank on the first USB-C port doesn’t work. On the second port, there is audible “coil whine” sounds, as if the mosfets are struggling. Using a higher powered 45w, 65w or 100w power bank (or plug) doesn’t result in as loud a whine, but it’s always there while plugged in.
The N100 is a budget chip, crippled by Intel with its single channel memory and such. You won’t find any high-end features from the Evo line like instant wake. Nonetheless, resume from sleep takes 1-2 seconds maximum, ready by the time you get the lid up and your fingers to the keyboard. Apart from the LPDDR5 RAM, the chipset and board layout is the same, so you’ll see the same low levels of power drain. I’d say roughly 10-15% drain per 24 hours in sleep - or of course 0% when shut down entirely.
The picture on the Aliexpress store suggests it could be $239 though, maybe there will be a sale. The GemiBook with the N100 is about $280 with tax.
