So it’s in finally after a few shipping issues the Heimai 7 Nvidia GTX 1650 Chinese gaming laptop from MaiBenBen. Never heard of them? Neither had I, this laptop I picked up for $644 on sale from Aliexpress. The deal seemed too good to be true, 144hz refresh rate screen, 256GB Samsung PM981 NVME, 8GB of DDR4 2666Mhz RAM (1 slot used, one free) Wireless AC , backlit RGB keyboard and room for another 2280 SSD plus 2.5” HDD or SSD.
So what’s the catch? Well it ships with no OS installed advoiding the Microsoft licensing fees but it’s easy to install Windows 10 and the CPU is only a dual core Pentium Gold G5420 (3.8Ghz max 2 cores 4 threads). The good news is unlike most gaming laptops this CPU can be upgraded as it sports an LGA 1151 socket that will take 9th Gen Coffee Lake CPUs now I wish more manufactures would do this! Below is the hands-on first review of this laptop with more to follow soon.
The shipping however from MaiBenBen the official seller was nothing short of a nightmare, they first had it sent with a carrier that couldn’t take large batteries so it was returned to them. Then to make up for lost time they send it DHL Express against my wishes so I ended up having to pay 180 euros on top.
At least the laptop itself is good, everything but the GPU is upgradable. The CPU is the expected weakness but doesn’t feel slow for normal Windows tasks but it owes seem to be limiting the potential of the Nvidia GTX 1650 with 4GB of DDR5. The GPU is great, much faster than a last Gen GTX 1050 Ti. The build overall is good and the keyboard feels great. The touchpad however has poor feedback on those two hardware mouse buttons. They lack a decent feel and click to them.