Onbook 11 Pro / Xiaoma 11 SSD Install

[Alexander]

Does this tablet has similar heat problems like the Mix Plus? And how is the RAM? It is soldered on the board right?

[Anonymous]

Yeah, I hope my keyboard issue is a one off issue.

The tablet can get pretty hot under full load, but not dangerous to the touch and as far as I can tell does not throttle performance significantly.

Got my M.2 SSD today, will try to pop it open and plug it in this evening.  I’ll try to take some pictures of the process for others.

[Jose Antonio Hernandez Castillo]

Have you installed the ssd? What size is the m2 slot? How is the general performance? Thanks

[Italo Loureiro]

Jose Antonio Hernandez Castillo wrote:

Have you installed the ssd? What size is the m2 slot? How is the general performance? Thanks

Any news?

[Anonymous]

Sorry,

been busy.

Install was extremely easy.  There are 2 small philips heads screws on the bottom of the tablet, and then I used a little plastic spudger to start prying the plastic clips away from the tablet.  The circuit board, battery and all associated components are all attached to the screen on the front, so you don’t have to worry about glue or ribbon cables tearing.  The aluminum shell pulls completely away from the rest of the components and can very easily be snapped back into place.  I started at the bottom but if I had to do it again I might have started at the top, as the dock connector does not pass through the cutout in the aluminum frame very easily.  I had to bend it slightly out of the way which has left some marks on the tablet.

The 2242 m.2 SATA SSD (I got kingspec 256GB pretty cheaply off aliexpress) installed easily and was immediately recognized by both windows and the bios.  I tried to clone the eMMC drive, but I screwed up and had to reinstall windows, oh well, NBD.

SSD performance seems pretty good, although I’m not sure how it compares to a more modern NVMe SSD, but for a budget living-room tablet I can’t really complain too much.  Synthetic benchmarks seem to indicate it’s at least 3-4 times faster than the eMMC, but I didn’t feel the everyday performance of the machine has improved all that much, especially given its status as a casual browsing tablet.  Attached are some benchmarks:

 

[Alexander]

I installed a Transcend SSD 256gb with similar performance like yours. How easy is the reinstallation of Windows? Are there any unique drivers? Where to download them? Especially for the docking keyboard?

 

I doubt that you could use a modern NVMe SSD with it, because the M2 port would need 4 PCI-E Lanes to reach 2.5gb/s writing speed and mobile CPU/SoCs are not known to support as many as laptop and desktop CPUs.

The performance of the tablet is better than my older Core i3 laptop with a dedicated graphic 🙂

[Chris G]

I have NVMe SSD;s in my PC and I tried, they don’t even fit in it. All of the Apollo lakes are SATA only I think. Maybe the Gemini Lake will bring NVMe to the lower end tablets and laptops.

Chris | Admin
Please support us and help keep TechTablets online. Affiliate revenue is used to pay for the server, studio apartment (Techtablets HQ) and buy new tech to review. Without it, this site would be dead.
Next up for review:
Ordered and waiting for my: BMAX S15 & Teclast F6 Plus
Currently testing: LG G8X & Redmi K30

[Chris G]

Juli, those speeds are very good for this type of drive. Overall Windows performance is the same, but you do notice when opening large 4k video files or loading Photoshop, installing apps it’s a lot faster.

Chris | Admin
Please support us and help keep TechTablets online. Affiliate revenue is used to pay for the server, studio apartment (Techtablets HQ) and buy new tech to review. Without it, this site would be dead.
Next up for review:
Ordered and waiting for my: BMAX S15 & Teclast F6 Plus
Currently testing: LG G8X & Redmi K30

[Anonymous]

Alexander, installing windows was a piece of cake.  It’s a just a PC really, with a normal bios, so you just select the boot drive like any normal desktop.  All drivers were detected correctly with the exception of the touch screen driver.  This one would immediately bluescreen windows if I tried to update through windows update.  I had to download the driver pack from the chinese onda.cn site.  It sketches me out to run potentially malware ridden software, but the silead touchscreen driver seem to be legit.  If you have trouble getting the drivers without a baidu account let me know, and I can post them up on dropbox or something.

Chris, I haven’t done anything that strenuous with it yet, I’m pretty much just using it as a living room browsing tablet.  The right side does it pretty damn hot if you’re pushing it hard, I can’t imagine the tablet would be too useful for gaming, I think it would probably throttle pretty hard.  But that’s kind of what you get when you shove an i3 equivalent into the form factor of a fanless atom CPU.

I kind of wish it was a little bit smaller, as I liked the form factor of my surface RT a little bit better, but I imagine those design constraints are chosen more by the battery size than anything else.

[Alexander]

Installing for me is no problem too but like you I have the problem with the silead driver. No matter if I download it from the official microsoft driver “catalogue”, using auto update or special update tools it bluescreens everytime. First I thought it had to do with the difference between Pro and Home, then I tried windows 10 versions  1703 and 1607. No matter what, maybe they aren’t licensed. Windows is a bitch in that regard.

You would be my hero if you could give me the official Onda drivers. And maybe a manual how you got them to run. I use a Windows 10 Pro 64bit german.

[Alexander]

Core M3 processors should support nvme. Even Skylake does it. There are two types of M2 ports B and M. Key B only supports 2 PCI-E Lanes and SATA, Key M supports 4 PCI-e Lanes and SATA. NVMe only makes sense with the Key M because more lanes. The kind of M2 port should be written on the port itself or next to it on the mainboard as far as I know.

The Microsoft Surface Pro with Kaby Lake Core m3 uses a M2 port with a NVMe SSD

[Jose Antonio Hernandez Castillo]

Dear Alexander.

 

What you said in your previous comment about NVMe and the PCI keys is interesting. Could you tell me your sources?  Thanks in advance

[Jose Antonio Hernandez Castillo]

Ok, i found the information about the m.2 key m for PCI x4 NVMe (so many codes haha) and Alex is right. I just would like to know how to identify the kind of M.2 slot in a motherboard. As you mentioned it could be in the MoBo, but maybe not. And about the support of theses NVMe, maybe skylake and kabylake support it but it is also a matter of chipsets. So maybe this tablet can accept it but the problem is the size. There are not NVMe with 2260 as far i know.

[Alexander]

NVMe won’t work in the obook 11 pro. The M2 port is key B. If you look on your M2 SSD or into the M2 port and the notch is 6 contacts from the left side then it is key B or B key however the right spelling is. When the notch is 5 contacts from the right side then it is key M.

Picture is taken from the english M2 Port Wikipedia article

<- P.S.: Interesting feature for posting

[Alexander]

My sources say that the information about what type of port you have should be written next to the port on the mainboard or directly on the port itself.

My Asus mainboard(Desktop PC) has “4x PCI-E” written next to it so it is a M key port. “2x PCI-E” would be B key port. I use a Transcend MTS400 SSD that Chris recommended and it is more than fast enough. I have the 256gb version and it has 520mb read and up to 450mb write. And it is a M2 Key B+M SSD.

[Author]

Posts