GPD WIN Max pre-order price will make you think twice

GPD has long been making gaming handhelds that no one else would even dare imagine selling and it sells them to much success anyway. It has recently dived head-on into an extremely niche mini laptop market but now it’s going back to its roots, or at least to some of it. The GPD WIN Max is practically the culmination of its voyages, offering a small gaming laptop for the price of a gaming laptop but with one missing feature of a gaming laptop.

The biggest question that people will have about this latest curiosity will most likely be “why?”. For GPD, the reason is simple and it boils down to its core business of creating gaming handhelds. Its old GPD WIN 2 was just too weak with its Intel Core m3 processor and its keyboard was too small for games that needed keyboard and mouse input.

GPD’s solution was to throw almost everything and the kitchen sink into the GPD WIN Max. The new Intel Core i5-1035G7 definitely sounds overkill for the size but also barely enough for a gaming PC. The 8-inch size, on the other hand, affords a bigger keyboard, though you’ll still need a mouse because a touchpad is a terrible input device for many PC games.

Naturally, there are compromises here and there, like limiting the screen resolution to 1280×800 HD. The biggest miss for a gaming laptop is, of course, the lack of even a mobile graphics chip. While the Thunderbolt 3 port would allow for connected an eGPU, that’s another purchase that could easily cost as much as the mini laptop.

As for that price, the Indiegogo pre-order puts a single GPD WIN Max at 6,038 HKD, roughly $780. The normal retail price is 6,860 HKD, around $890. At that point, some PC gamers might opt for a more decent gaming laptop with an NVIDIA or AMD GPU for nearly the same price, even if it means they won’t be able to hold it up like a handheld.