The Dayskay D-Book Pro is a $350ish full metal budget gaming laptop, it has a Celeron N3450, 6GB of RAM, 64GB eMMC, Wireless AC and a 2280 SSD slot. But the key feature that sets it apart from all the other N3450 laptops is its dedicated Nvidia 920M GPU with 2GB of DDR3 RAM.
After the failure that was my T-Book X8S Pro, its Nvidia 920M seemed to be crippled I was somewhat reluctant to try another Apollo Lake and dedicated GPU option. But the good thing was this was ordered before my X8S Pro arrived. The build of the D-Book Pro is a step over the cheap plastic feeling Tbook X8S Pro, the metal body gives it a more premium feel, but the touchpad is rather poor with very shallow buttons and poor accuracy.
Timecodes: 01:20 – Unboxing 02:15 – Design 03:52 – Internals 08:36 – Bios Power Limits 09:22 – Screen 10:15 – eMMC speeds 11:33 – Webcam 11:49 – Keyboard 12:13 – GPU-Z, Benchmarks 14:32 – 4k, General Performance 15:24 – Gaming:CSGO,RoTR,GTA V,LoL 19:51 – Thermals 20:13 – Fan Noise 20:46 – Speaker Test 21:13 – Battery Life 21:36 – Linux 21:50 – Final Words 22:34 – Pros & Cons
The keyboard is okay to type on but doesn’t give you a great feeling of confidence it will last. It has a bit of cheap feeling to it and I wonder just how it will hold up after a years use. The best part is the screen, a pleasant surprise here, an anti-glare matte coated 1080p IPS that is super bright, over 460 lux meaning it can be used in daylight and the colors and blacks look good.
Performance for an Apollo Lake Celeron N3450 is good, however not the fastest seen due to 1333Mhz clocked DDR3 RAM, but the RAM timings are tight enough that it doesn’t seem to affect performance. The dedicated GPU works with Nvidia’s Optimus display switching which works flawlessly switching between the integrated Intel 500 HD GPU and the Nvidia 940M for more demanding tasks like gaming.
Gaming wise the 940M with its 2GB of dedicated RAM is around 3 times more powerful than the Intel graphics normally used with this Celeron CPU. As a result games like Rise Of The Tomb Raider, Project Cars & GTA V run with playable FPS at 720p but with the lowest settings set. The CPU is the bottleneck of the laptop as expected and even at 100% running all cores at 2.2Ghz the little Celeron N3450 cannot keep up and limits the overall frame rate.
Some good news is that Nvidia 940M GPU can be overclocked, and in my testing, this could boost the GPU performance up to 36% which is an impressive feat, but again we can only go so far with that weak CPU. If Daysky used a Core M3-7Y30 then it would have yielded greater results. But ultimately pushed the price up towards the cheapest gaming laptops.
At the end of the day if your on a super strict budget and don’t mind gaming at 720p or even lower resolutions the D-Book Pro is an option, but really you’re better of with a laptop that has at least a Nvidia 10 series GPU, either the MX150 or Nvidia GT 1030, GTX1050 if possible.