In order to thanks our previous supporters who purchased a WIN Max 1035 G7 version, we took the decision to offer the possibility of straight away buying a new motherboard rather than only offering the option of buying the whole device again. If you feel comfortable enough to proceed by yourself for the motherboard swapping, we will gladly sell you a motherboard which would be cheaper than buying a new device.

GPD will provide the following parts:

1. A tutorial video for replacing the motherboard disassembly and installation.

2. An USB drive with built-in system firmware.

3. A screw driver.

4. A pack of thermal conductive silicone grease.

Please note that even with complete and detailed tutorial videos and tools, risks are remaining, especially dismantling and replacing the motherboard for those who lack experience in this field. If you are inexperienced or risk averse, please consider seriouly before choosing this option.

Please pay much attention:The motherboard is a PCBA component packaging technology. Replacing the motherboard is equivalent to replacing the SoC and LPDDR. However, the motherboard does not include SSD. Because SSD is replaceable, the price of the motherboard does not include SSD.

“Handheld x Gaming Laptop” is a concept offered by GPD whom is the sole practitioner. It has been proved at several instances that the WIN Max is an excellent choice for users wanting a versatile large-screen handheld device. Not only the concept of an all in one device enables it to be used to play games but also to be used as a fully fledge laptop for office work, but users’ needs are endless!

In example, for users focusing on productivity, the Win MAX AMD Ryzen 7 4800U version will be a more suitable device. After all, performances of the 8C/16T during parallel multitasking processing is obviously better, especially when the program requires compiling.

When 16 threads are fully unlocked , the performance is comparable to the Intel Xeon E5-2630 v3, meanwhile the power consumption is only 1/4 of the latter. On the other hand for high core performance based softwares, the Intel Core i7-1195G7 have to be prioritized. Meanwhile many programs require multi-threads when compiling, some others requires for each single core to run at its highest speed, the higher the efficiency is, the higher the performance is, especially for gaming.

In order to meet the requirements of most users, we made a sensible upgrade to the WIN Max: the new version will be called WIN Max 2021 and not only there is Intel versions; the i7-1195G7; but we also provide an AMD Ryzen 7 4800U upgrade for the first time in GPD’s story, the world’s first handheld gaming laptop with an AMD processor.

Customers who purchased older WIN Max (1035G7) can buy the newest motherboard through this crowdfunding campaign and switch with the older one in order to upgrade their WIN Max into in a more powerful device.

As a product focusing  on gaming, the WIN Max needs to be robust and durable. As such, we’ve decided to design it with a lid made of CNC magnesium-aluminum alloy and a main body made of LG-DOW 121H aviation-grade anti-shock ABS synthetic resin. The device features 1.3mm shell thickness with high-temperature resistance and compliant to the V-0 grade fire protection specification, 109R Rockwell hardness, 26000kg / cm2 bending resistance, which results with an intact rate of 92% in 5m drop tests.

The bottom shell has arc-shaped edges, the hollowed-out air inlet area accounts for up to 49.7% of the surface, and the 3mm high foot pads help the air intake at the bottom to improve the airflow.

Trigger buttons L1/L2, R1/R2 are distributed on each sides at the back meanwhile the interfaces are gathered in the center: 2×Thunderbolt 4 (2×USB 3.2 Gen2 Type C for the 4800U version), 2×USB 3.2 Gen1 Type-A, HDMI, 9 heat air outlets at the rear.

• The world’s first Handheld Game Laptop based on AMD Ryzen™ 7 4800U.
• Intel Core™ i7-1195G7 version is also available, the single-core performance exceeds desktop flagship i9-10900K ones.
• Iris Xe iGPU, with baffling performances that surpasses MX350.
• Placed on a desk, it is the world smallest gaming notebook, held with both hands, it becomes a gaming handheld.
• Newly designed gamepad, unibody D-pad, recessed  analog sticks with non-slip coating, support L3/R3 functions.
• Many recent AAA grade games can be enjoyed with medium settings and run up to 60 frames per seconde.
• 800P 8-inch H-IPS screen for a balanced gaming experience.
• Dual-channel LPDDR4x memory with a frequency up to 4266MHz, 16Gb capacity, for a read/write speeds of over 60GB/s.
• 1TB M.2 NVMe 2280 SSD, 4th generation PCIe bus technology, doubled read and write speed compared to the previous generation, even surpassing Thunderbolt 4 speed.
• Brand new dual Thunderbolt 4 ports doubling the minimum bandwidth and natively supporting USB 4. Used with an external eGPU, it can greatly increase gaming performances and help to maximize game settings, allowing aswell to reach higher framerate up to 300%.
• HDMI 2.0b high-definition digital interface, supports HDR and 4K/60Hz video output.
• 3×5000mAh / 57Wh high-capacity polymer lithium battery, with an average use life of 5 hours.
• Adjustable three level TDP:  20W, 25W, and 28W.
• PC-grade twin turbofan + dual heat pipe cooling solution, large air displacement side blowing design, 9-hole high-speed cooling channel.
• 65W super fast charge, based on PD 2.0 fast charge protocol, can charge mobile phones, tablets, notebooks, and other devices at the same time.

WIN 3 users should have a good understanding of Intel Tiger Lake UP3’s performances while gaming. Not only WIN Max 2021 has an Intel Tiger Lake UP3 version, but it has an AMD Ryzen 7 4800U version aswell. What are the performance difference between this two types of processor in game? The following table depicts the frame rate value in low settings at the 1280×800 resolution in several games:

*Note

Testing environment: i7-1195G7 / R7 4800U, 16GB LPDDR4x 4266, 1TB NVMe SSD, 1280×800, Windows 10 Home 20H2. The previous games are from low to medium settings.

It can be seen that on i7-1195G7 WIN Max 2021 based, game frame rate is generally much higher, thanks to the Intel Iris Xe GFX core!

WIN Max 2021 has an 8-inch H-IPS panel, the 5th generation Corning Gorilla Glass screen. The display area is 133% larger than the previous generation, with 90% DCI-P3 wide color gamut, DC Dimming, flickerless, 500-nits brightness. The pixel density is twice higher than a 24-inch/1080P display, and the horizontal viewing angle is as high as 178°. It supports 10-point touch, the default resolution is 1280×800, which perfectly supports old games with 1024×768 resolution (4:3).

Is it true that the higher the resolution, the better? Let’s talk about the misconception around high resolution screens!

With an 8-inch screen with only a physical resolution of 1280×800, game visual quality and experience are better! Reducing the resolution in order to get higher frame rate in game will cause the visual quality to be rougher and fuzzier. Please find as example the following screenshots comparison:

Figure 1. With a physical resolution of 1280×800, the overall visual quality is sharp.

Figure 2. Reducing resolution from 2560×1600 to 1280×800, the image quality is getting rough and fuzzy, there are jagged lines on the screen, and the pixels are grainy.

Do not be fooled by high resolution, the current gen of integrated graphics module aren’t enough performant yet and the result is still remaining the same as before: high resolution = low FPS, low resolution = high FPS.

Taking Cyberpunk 2077 as an example, you can see frame rate performance at different resolutions:

As you can see from the previous table, when the resolution is 2560×1600, Cyberpunk 2077 has only 8 frames per second, the game is unplayable!

In terms of analog joysticks, WIN Max 2021 adopts a sink-in design and Xinput API , similarly to the Xbox 360 controller. The ultra-durable dual 3D joysticks produced by Japan Alps offers L3 / R3 functions (on a 360 ° rotation use) by being pressed down. In terms of use  lifespawn, the potentiometer and center stack of the joystick can be used for 2 million and 5 million spins respectively. To avoid finger-slipping during gaming, the joysticks have curved rocker caps made of hard materials with strong resistance (the right joystick is in the same position as on the GPD WIN).

In terms of  D-pad, WIN Max 2021 uses an unibody one with split arrow keys like on the PS4 controller to facilitate subtle precise movement. The ABXY buttons are still made with double symbole inner printing, with appropriate spacing between the buttons that facilitates comfortable use without miss-press.

The L1 / L2 R1 / R2 buttons have highly-reliable Panasonic micro switches, with mechanical service life reaching 10 million use and electrical service life reaching 100,000 times, aswell as an operating temperature of -54 ~ 177 degrees Celsius.

Select, Xbox, Start buttons are located near the top left hinge to facilitate operation with left thumb. Clicking the Xbox button while streaming an Xbox game can turn on / off the joystick and activate functions such  as “home screen”, “long press to turn off”, “screen capture”, “snap to position”.

Online gamers love good keyboards aswell and WIN 2’s pan-shaped keyboard can’t meet their requirements due to problems such as narrow pitches, short key stroke and lack of tactile feedback. In order to adress those problems, we decided to use a scissor-shaped membrane keyboard for WIN Max 2021 design, for which we purposely increased the screen frame to be able to fit it.

Especially because of the two sets of keys;”QWER” and “ASDF”, which are most commonly used by players; main keys size can’t be reduced in order to achieve desktop-level tactile feedback. Under these circumstances, WIN Max 2021 adopts a standard “QWERTY” chiclet-style full keyboard layout with backlight, making it easy to transform the machine into a perfect mini-gaming laptop by connecting an external mouse.

Whenever you  don’t have an external mouse but you want to play games requiring one, just turn the “mouse / joystick” switch on the side of machine, it would immediately turn the joystick into a track point and L1 / R1 as mouse click left / right, allowing you to use the machine as a handheld, making it fit for more usage scenarios than gaming only.

Even without the mouse / joystick switch function, WIN Max 2021 also has a built-in touchpad, which supports gestures  up to three-fingers and  mouse click operations.

Whether for gaming or office work on the go or at fixed locations, WIN Max’s built-in handle + touchpad can be used  for many use, anywhere, any time.

To improve thermal performance, WIN Max 2021 adopts a PC-grade cooling solution with  high-power twin turbo fans + dual heat pipes, high-displacement side-blowing design, 9-hole ultra-short-distance ventilation highly efficient which is 8 times stronger than WIN 2’s heatsink.

The BIOS can dynamically adjust the fan speed from 2700 ~ 6300 RPM based on the internal temperature from 20 ℃ to ~ 80 ℃, 70℃ being the second temperature threshold triggering the increase of fan speed.

At the same time, the BIOS also contains three TDP schemes (15W, 20W, 25W)  which can be customised, allowing gamers to choose what match the most their needs and offers the ability to achieve best energy efficiency ratio and heat dissipation effect depengind their applications.

Under single-core performance test, i7-1195G7 performs outstandingly well, surpassing the desktop flagship i9-10900K, resulting in better gaming performance. Under multi-core performance test, R7 4800U has obvious advantages. After all, with 8C/16T,  each core full-speed being able to reach 3.2GHz, multi-task parallel processing surpasses Intel Xeon processor E5-2630 v3.

For a productivity tool, the higher the score of multi-core performance is, the better. We used PCMark 10 for the benchmark test and got the following scores:

From basic function tests to productivity and digital creation, the R7 4800U scores are far ahead, while the gaming score is pulled down. However, the overall score is still the highest.

Gamers know that the MX100 to MX400 series launched by Nvidia are unique, carrying the important task of enhancing the graphical aspects of games for thin and light notebooks. The current generation of Intel iGPU is usually compared with the NVIDIA MX series. The picture below shows the benchmark test for the two GPU on 3DMark against the MX350. The Intel Iris Xe GPU wins with 768 shaders.

One of the criteria for evaluating the performance for a GPU is the floating-point computing capability, which includes half-precision (FP16), single-precision (FP32), and double-precision (FP64). The following table is a comparison of floating-point operations on the three mobile graphics cards:

Intel Iris Xe iGPU’s performance is the strongest; AMD Radeon Vega 8’s half-precision and single-precision floating-point computing capabilities also surpass the MX350.

WIN Max’s excellent heat dissipation design enables the TDP to stabilize at the peak level for a long while under high power consumption, giving full play to the 86GB/s memory bandwidth advantage of LPDDR4x 4266 under dual channels. The following table is the memory benchmark test done with a TDP of 35W power consumption:

* The three scores represent read, write, and copy speed during the test, the corresponding products are all dual-channel.

Due to the integrated PCIe 4.0 bus specification, the bus bandwidth is doubled. The WIN Max with a built-in Intel processor perfectly supports PCIe Gen 4 SSD and is backward compatible with PCIe Gen 3 SSD. The theoretical read and write peak is as high as 7.877GB/s. The system’s virtual memory’s speed is doubled at the same time, and the game’s smoothness is greatly improved.

The following table shows the read/write test of WIN Max and WIN 3 with PCIe Gen4 SSD built-in, and compared with Surface Pro 7. It can be seen that the sequential read of Samsung 980 Pro 500GB exceeds 5000MB/s, and the sequential write is over 3300MB/s. The read speed even exceeds Thunderbolt 4!

* Test software: AS SSD Benchmark;

* Test environment: 1195G7 / 1165G7, LPDDR4x 4266, Samsung 980 PRO 500GB;

* Different versions of the AS SSD benchmark test  may give different results , and the heat dissipation will severely affect the read/write speed;

* The standard configuration of  mass-produced SSD is PCIe Gen3. If you want to meet the speed of the SSD in the chart, please purchase and replace it with a PCIe Gen4 one by yourself.

On the other hand, AMD’s WIN Max 2021 is also designed to be compatible with PCIe Gen4 SSD. However the R7 4800U has PCIe 3.0 bus specification, you can still buy PCIe Gen4 SSD and enjoy the peak speed of 3.938GB/s (due to the PCIe 3.0×4 interface bandwidth limit, theoretical throughput upper limit is 3.938GB/s).

*Note

WIN Max 2021 only supports M.2 NVMe 2280 SSD single-sided device layout, such as Samsung 980 PRO, while Lenovo NGFF SL700 isn’t compatible. Please note the distinction when replacing the SSD. Since the design is compatible with PCIe Gen4 SSD protocol, WIN Max 2021 will no longer support M.2 SATA3 2280 SSD with AHCI protocol.

Since the design is compatible with PCIe Gen4 SSD protocol, WIN Max 2021 will no longer support M.2 SATA3 2280 SSD of AHCI protocol.

Another highlight of WIN Max 2021 is the integration of dual Thunderbolt 4 interfaces (the 4800U version of WIN Max 2021 is dual Type C and does not support Thunderbolt 4). Through the external graphics dock, whether it is using the internal display or an external monitor, the number of frame per second during gaming can be improved by over 300%.

In addition, Thunderbolt 4 natively supports USB4, HDMI, DisplayPort, RJ-45 network port, audio port, charging, and other protocols, and is backward compatible with early USB 3.x, 2.x, and 1.x devices.

*Note

eGFX device is a standard defined by Intel, which includes a complete set of external graphics solutions, including power supply, motherboard, graphics card, interface, etc. The eGPU term only represents the graphics card. At present, retail platforms do not call eGFX uniformly. There are eGPU, graphics card dock, external graphics card box, external graphics card dock, etc., which refer to eGFX. When connecting to an external graphics dock, the frame rate depends on the performance of the external graphics card.

In addition to external eGFX devices, the Thunderbolt 4 interface of WIN Max 2021 supports power adapters based on PD 2.0 / 3.0 protocol and 15V or 20V voltage, which is very scalable. For instance:

1. Any PD 2.0 / 3.0 protocol power bank or adapter with a charging voltage of 15V or 20V on the market can charge WIN Max 2021.

2. Through the Thunderbolt 4 interface, while outputting high-definition video signals to any monitor, the monitor can charge WIN Max 2021 at the same time!

3. Through Thunderbolt 4 interface, WIN Max 2021 supports connecting 2 4K monitors or 1 8K monitor output.

4. PCIe Gen 4 SSD, external mobile hard disk or USB4 flash disk can be connected to a Thunderbolt 4 docking station to provide convenience for professional photographers, in  exemple in order to transfer large files such as m2ts video files!

In addition to gaming, in industrial applications, WIN Max 2021 which is based on powerful processor performance and multi-interface input, is the best productivity tool. Particularly the AMD R7 4800U version of WIN Max with its 8C/16T multi-threaded parallel processing capability. Whether you are doing program compilation, IT operation, and maintenance, image design, or basic office editing, its high efficiency and level of productivity is baffling.

The WIN Max previously crowdfunded on Indiegogo was based on the Ice Lake processor. Not long after, Intel released the Tiger Lake processor which is offering big improvement over previous-gen iGPU performances, resulting in smoother games, thus offering enough power to access more AAA games, and satisfying more players who like to play PC games on large-screen handheld devices. Not only a handheld gaming laptop, the WIN Max has real assets as a productivity tool which often requires higher processor performance. To answer our followers demands, we have made a comprehensive upgrade to WIN Max and provided support for AMD embedded processors for the first time in our history.

The main reason for launching crowdfunding on Indiegogo is the cost regarding R&D and material procurement for WIN Max 2021, which is extremely high, especially because of the current component world-wide shortage. All the funds we raise will be invested in the mass production for this product. We believe that this product will touch a lot of players who love handheld computers, and it will be the first choice for Windows gaming handhelds for a long time. We hope that you can support this project and enjoy it. For the gameing which is our passion, let us march forward together!

We are a company specialized in handheld gaming devices and office equipment. We operate from Shenzhen, China under the brand name of GPD (GamePad Digital), which came from the company founder’s aspiration for making gaming products. GPD is committed to provide users with personalized products and services.

We want to thank all the GPD followers and even more those who choosed to support us during previous crowdfunding as it’s your continuous support that has enabled us to continuously launch better products. We also want to thank everybody who will participate in our crowdfunding project for the first time as mass production and launch of this product would never be possible without your trust and support.

A. Do the contributions listed for this project include tariffs incurred upon delivery to the users’ home countries such as VAT?

The contributions listed in the project page include international express freight (including additional charges for delivery to remote areas) but do not cover tariffs incurred when entering the destination countries. Generally, the VAT rate for delivery of products to EU countries and Japan is 21% and 10%, respectively; in the case of the United States, tariff is required to be paid for products valued at more than $800; other countries may impose even higher tariff rates.

B. What after-sales services are available for those participating in the crowdfunding campaign?

Users participating in crowdfunding enjoy the same warranty benefits as the purchasers of officially launched products. Any user who is dissatisfied with the product can return it within one week of reception, but shipping cost for delivery of the product to the user will be deducted from the refund upon successful return.

Please note that postage and packaging costs incurred for the return should be borne by the user. When returning the product, please use local postal courier. If you use other international logistics services, the returned product will incur a tariff equivalent to 20% to 30% of its value when entering China, for which GPD won’t be held responsible.

C. What if the crowdfunding target is not reached?

Even if the target amount is not reached, we will still send the products to those who have contributed to the project. At that time, we will find other financing channels to ensure the mass production of the final product. Players who love this product are advised to pay close attention to the latest updates on the project.

D. What if I didn’t get answers to my question?

If you do not get a response on time, please contact us as follows:

During the crowdfunding process, please report technical issues by sending an email to: Kendyz@gpd.hk

After the crowdfunding is over, you can get updates on product delivery by sending an email to: Kendyz@gpd.hk

After receiving the product, you can report quality problems or ask for return by sending an email to: Kendyz@gpd.hk

For inquiries about distribution or marketing cooperation, please contact us by emailing: Sales02@gpd.hk

For crowdfunding participants, please make sure to contact us through the email address indicated in your supporter’s note, and we will make sure to answer your questions.

1. We will ensure that delivery is made first to those who support us on Indiegogo.

2. Product specifications may change during the crowdfunding process for the purpose of making further improvements, in which case we will notify everyone as soon as possible on the “Update” section of our Indiegogo page.

3. We will make sure the product passes CE-RoHS, FCC, CCC, JATE, MIC and other international certifications.

4. We will try our best to make delivery at the agreed time. However, we might have to postpone delivery due to unpredictable supply chain problems or quality control issues, and please be patient if we do! Thank you for your understanding and support!