First Look At Chuwi Hi12 Internals From Tear Down

Edit:  1st Feb 2017. Thanks to Yoni for sending me these photos of the insides of the Hi12 keyboard dock.

Thanks to Matthew from the Forum, we have our first look at the Chuwi Hi12 internals. I haven’t gotten around to opening up mine for a teardown with all the tablets I have stacked up to review. But we can see now and as I thought, Chuwi used a rather large thermal pad to transfer heat away from the Atom X5 Z8300 and RAM and onto the rear metal housing. Cube did a similar thing with the i7 Stylus and it’s rather effective. I would like to see all Chinese tablet manufacturers do this. How much is a thermal pad like this? 10 cents cost to reduce temps and throttling?

So this was the reason my Hi12 never throttled once or went over 75 degrees during normal use. Even running a ridiculous simultaneous Intel CPU burn and Fur mark test I wasn’t even able to my Hi12 to go over 79 degrees. Most Atom Cherry Trails, at least the first models, always hit 85 degrees and throttle. Hell, even my Microsoft Surface 3 did.

Well done Chuwi, now if you could just fix my Chuwi Hi8 Pro power issues!

Poor Matt’s Hi12 wasn’t so lucky and the display DOA, a suspected display ribbon cable issue for poor assembly line quality control? Remember it’s a bit of a lottery at times. What I call the Chinese Tablet Lottery.