This is a question I get a lot, how come the Intel Apollo Lake Celeron N3450 performance in XYZ laptop is so much better at gaming then ABC laptop? Well, in this video I investigate as to why this is, that some N3450’s play LoL or Counter Strike with 50 to 60FPS and others below 30 FPS. Long story short: It’s all down to the manufacturer’s bios settings.
Now we can understand why some manufacturers don’t give us fully unlocked bios. Some users might change the wrong setting and brick their notebooks. Other notebooks don’t really have a decent heatsink, and if the power limits were tweaked will overheat.
So as of date, the T-Bao Tbook and Onda Xiaoma series seem to be the only Apollo Lake laptops from China with unlocked power limits, fully pushing the N3450/N4200 Intel Apollo Lakes. Offering up to double the GPU performance in games like CounterStrike Global Offensive.
I hope the Tbook4 and Onda Xiaoma 31 Pro (N4200) I have ordered for review also have unlocked bio settings ready to be tweaked for maximum performance. And before you feel buyers remorse setting in, note these gains are only on the Intel 500 HD integrated GPU. CPU performance is more or less the same on all models…So if you don’t plan to game, then really this doesn’t affect you.