Cube i7 Book Review (In-Depth) With Benchmarks, Gaming, Thermals & Remix OS Test

It looks very similar to the i7 stylus, but it does have a new keyboard dock, a new chipset, which is now the Intel skylake core, m36 wife. 30 has the same four gigabytes of RAM 64 gigabyte SSD. It also has wireless AC now, which is really good to see the dual band wireless coming into these flagship tablets. We were missing that last year and it also has a USB 3.1 type C port that first showed up in the cube I 9, so there’s now moved over to the i7 book here. Just to show you on the side we have decent for charging a micro, USB 3 port that’s, the type C port and a micro SD card slot, which I can confirm, supports up to 128 gigabytes SSDs. So the ball of it isn’t too bad. The keyboard is metal, and it only reclines here about a hundred and twenty degrees which isn’t the greatest but it’s a definite step up from the fixed keyboard that the i7 stylus has and along the back. It is made out of a alloy here. That is quite easy to scratch, and we do have these speakers on the right side. Only unfortunately, cube did not update that design on the keyboard dog. We have USB 2 port Seether side and the top along here is plastic for improved reception. Therefore, the wireless AC, which does have dual antennas, is a rare, 5 megapixel camera and on the front, a front facing 2 megapixel camera.

So let’s have a look at the tablet now and greater detail. So the keyboard is a revised new dock. That is a transformer style. We get some little rubber feet here to help keep the screen from rubbing up against the keyboard here and the keyboard is very rigid, I’m pushing down quite hard there and there is no flex one to ever. There’S, no bounce, there’s, good travel on the keys, you get approximately 1.3 millimeters of travel and I find they are spaced out nicely. We do have a button right here to disable the trackpad. Now the trackpad is still small and I find it often end up triggering the windows minimized at the top there, and I find that to be quite annoying. Unfortunately, there is no settings there to be able to disable that which is unfortunate. Hopefully, that will come later on with driver updates, but there is a workaround that you can actually do a bit of a hack to the registry to disable gestures and the tablet it’s very easy to dock it. Just clips on magnets help pull it into place and it will dock and, like so there’s a nice little gap there. They can touch the Windows Home button and there’s a little tiny haptic feedback motor in there. It will give a small vibration to once. You push the windows button there. Now you can flip it around and also dock it in which is a little harder.

When you do that, you can use it in what’s called like a presentation mode, so you can hold it up like that and watch a movie on it, for example, as a stand, and because it has that tin pin Pogo port design, you can still use the Usb 2 ports either side and even the trackpad, which is unusual so the screen it uses as a Samsung, 1080p screen and it’s the same screen that was used in the i7 stylist and also the Microsoft Surface, pro 2 very good screen in terms of brightness. Well, it gets up to 419 Lux, which is quite bright, you’ll, be able to make it out in the shade outdoors, and sunlight still will struggle a little there with the reflections being the fact that this is a non laminated display. There is a small gap between the digitizer glass and the IPS below, but it’s, not so obvious, like in other models. Blacks are good whites, a good the calibration on the screen. I find to be excellent accuracy as well and how fluid the screen is with the vocal tech digitizer that has on there is excellent and no problems at all with it. Now it does support a work on stylus and you can get this as an optional extras. You do have an eraser tip on one end and then the other tips on the end. Now the tips of the stylus is that they do include eye plastic, so they don’t have a rubber into them, so they don’t feel as good as a note 4 or 5 stylus, for example.

That does have rubber on the end, but you can still use their being Wacom. You can actually get away with using a note, 5 stylus or any other welcome, stylus, so I’m going to go into one note right here now and just give you a quick demonstration of the palm rejection, so here I’m going to try and write how low. So you can see now 2 hovers is a little icon there. Just to let you know they are hovering where your pointer is the accuracy of the pointer, isn’t bad at all. You see what happened, then, how it just went down, because the edge of my palm just touched around here, so the palm projection tends to only work just in the middle. So if I move my finger here, you can see that not moving or scrolling around on the page as soon as I move the stylus to about here and to the edges then I’m allowed to do that now. This apparently is a problem with Windows 10 and something to do with the drive, support and the way that Windows 10 is configured because they they want you to about to swipe, still left and right to get access to the charm. So software only hopefully is this problem and it is hopefully going to be fixable, but I can’t be certain about that so riding on it. If you’re in the middle there used to be a little bit careful with your palms.

I find that, if you do put example OneNote here in in full screen, then you’re able to write a little faster here so I’m just going to do another test again. How I supposed write, how are you, but you see there – my palm was touching. If you write right in the middle there, it isn’t ideal and not really that practical so does running Windows 10, and that is of course, 64 bit. We have full access to all of the 4 gigabytes of RAM that it has on there and windows activated without any problems and just to show the end device manager that the disk drive that it has is a 64 gigabyte Drive. You get approximately 46 gigabytes free on it when you first boot it up and the wireless here we have a wireless AC from Intel, which is something that is new to these tablets. Nobody ever only had single band on there, so we are finally staying to see in 2016, it’s well overdue. Dual band AC and in the chipset is the Intel dual band: wireless AC, 3 165, which performs quite well and we’ll, get on to benchmarks now and just show you how fast that actually is here. We have the benchmark, so I thought the first one of the first ones are to show you here is the Geekbench 3 score now that’s, not a bad score for the chipset and the the wireless speeds lar. So the range I found is good excellent.

I can go downstairs furthest away from my realtor and be able to pick up and get good speeds now testing this same location. With my desktop, I get approximately the same speeds more or less about the same. It all depends on the the network load. Unfortunately, because I’m connected up, you can see here via orange, and that is actually just a 4G connection that it’s the fastest I can get where I am located, so that can fluctuate a little bit, but all in all, the speeds are excellent, really good, and I Haven’T had any problems at all with it, bluetooth as well. It works really good, so some of the other benchmarks around, for example, I start Xtreme 1.2 I’m going to quickly go through these club. Get one point: one here is I’ve storm. One point two score: now: I haven’t tried to cheat or anything to get these really good scores. But what I have done is let the tablet cool down and I have been running it into high performance mode. So I let it cool down between the benchmarks, because the more you run this benchmark. If I was to keep repeating 3dmark 11 over and over again, those scores will just keep going lower and lower and lower, as the tablet starts to heat up and later it. Well, it’s a little bit random too, because here you can see, I’ve got a really crazy squad for the chipset. Okay compete to your desktop.

This is a horrible score, but for a family’s tablet, it’s quite good, also PC, mark 7 score, also very good, and the pass mark score gets. Where are we eighteen hundred and forty five and lastly, 3d mark 11, a performance score of 1051, which is very low compared to your gaming desktop, but for this chipset, not bad at all, temperatures is what I want to show you now. So this is really the Achilles heel of this tablet, because, although you get that really really good those performance there, you can see well, this is what happened so it got up to a 97 degrees on the GPU and the CPU package there. That was actually the CPU cores got up to 93. It didn’t trigger any thermal throttling so cube of allowed to you to basically get this as hot as you want, but as fast as you want really, you can see it’s very fast. Now temperatures only happen when you actually put the tablet in performance mode and you disable any power saving features on the GPU there’s a sitting and the Intel GPA there that you can put onto extended gaming extend a better life for gaming. If you disabled that, then this is the the scores you get that I just showed you. It increases the 3d performance drastically, but that is the problem how hot it gets so definitely a candidate for my thermal model. I think to help improve the thermals on it.

So performance in general is very quick. This happens to be, I think, the fastest coin 3 that I have tested today. It is very quick, very snappy everything pops up, quick scrolling. This is Chrome, Chrome’s handle this quite well, and the fact that we do have a full SSD that also helps we’ve got no restricted even C drives like the atom tablets, and it just goes so quick multitasking handles it really well everything there so I’ll show you. Lastly, the speeds of the internal storage you’ll see here that there nothing wonderful, but definitely quicker than your average atom tablet, a lot quicker up to 5 times here on the reads and the rights not bad at all the four K’s. This is a external there’s, a USB 3 Drive and if what you have to use the adapter to use the USB 3 port, as well as the type C port you’re going to need adapters there, but it does get an offer, full speeds and all of the Ports, external ports and the USB 2 puts on the the keyboard dock will power external hard drives and the micro SD card slot, I noticed, was only functioning and working and around USB 2 speeds, so not as fast as it could be. This card that card that I tested out is a samsung, 128 gigabyte Pro Plus card. It does detect it as well the system so a quick 4k test here in edge. You can see that that is set to 4k and it dropped only one frame and it has about 10 seconds there of buffer.

So very good, no problems with that I’m going to try this same test here now in chrome and Chrome, isn’t, very good. At streaming 4k, if you try this on the atom, it just really grinds to a halt. You only get about five frames per second, so that’s on HD and I’ll. Put that now to 2160 fullscreen enable the stats and have a look now so it’s still buffering and no dropped frames, though, which is a surprise like ever got one drop frame, that’s, not too bad, so even in Chrome, it’s streaming, this quite fine, quite smooth. Okay, ten dropped frames. Now it is dropping frames, it’s a lot better than the atom tablets mentioned in the beginning of the video that it does have a USB 3.1 type C port on it right here, and I have used a variety of hubs on there and they all work. And you can actually charge your via the type C port right here. I have an Evolver 75 watt charger and this outputs up to 12 or 12 volts 3 amps, and that is enough to actually charge it and use it. So you can pretty much use this as a 1 port docking solution, because with this a UK hub that I have a type C happy, we have HDMI out and there is the input there for charging, as well as for USB 3 ports and it’s working. Just fine, I did notice, though, that sometimes the output with HDMI has been a little bit flaky with this.

Sometimes there’s been a bit of a flicker, but whereas, when I’ve used a straight type C port to HDMI, that has worked fine and falsely the HDMI out. So not really too sure what is up with that. It could be something to do with this hub and another type of hub. That I’ve tried here, also worked, which is just a standard type CN for charging HDMI out and one USB 3 port. That also works. So, with all the ports on the left hand side here, it seems it cube. The designers didn’t have room to put the speakers on either. Side, unfortunately, is exactly the same layout as the i7 stylus. So you have the 2 speakers here, I’m going to do a little quick test now, so I put the volume up to 100 and what I’ve listened to, how it sounds now: listen to a quick sample of music. I would rate these speakers as below average. They just aren’t really loud enough. So if you’re in a noisy environment and perhaps you’re playing an audio track there of someone talking, you might struggle to actually hear them. Good thing is, of course we do have a 3.5 millimeter headphone jack. It supports microphones and the output, unlike the speakers, is loud and very clear: there’s no static on there. So how is the battery life? Unfortunately? It’S? Not wonderful! You can get around four and a half to five hours with 50 screen, brightness and surfing the web, watching some YouTube videos, which is what I’ve been doing here.

You can see that I have been running it since 99 and almost one hour and it’s now at approximately 80, so every 30 minutes of use you lose about 10 battery. There best case scenario that you can put it into flight mode. You could dim it down to 25 brightness and just watch movies. Then I think you can squeeze around six hours out of it. So synthetic benchmarks are one thing: let’s see how it performs with a proper game benchmark and some gaming tears. So, first up I’m, going to test out a Resident, Evil, 5 benchmark assembly run the fixed benchmark and DirectX 9 and see how it performs so I’m just going to go with the default settings that it first booted up with. You can see along here as well. The frames per second memory use and, most importantly, to the temperature so I’m going to run the fixed benchmark. All right so here is the result, almost 24 frames per second ac ranking, which isn’t brilliant. If you compare that to a gaming PC but it’s, not actually too bad for a fanless core in tablet, so this is Counter Strike. Global Offensive running in 720p. Lower settings show you them very quickly here so everything’s on low 720p. So it runs. I must warn you that I am very bad at this game, so we see it’s hopping around 6070 frames per second, which isn’t bad at all and I died so it’s tipping down to about 40 the lowest there.

But I would definitely consider this one to be playable. Half life 2 Lost Coast running in 1080p. High settings it’s just managing to get around 24 frames per second I’ll quickly. Show you the settings, so you see model details on high texture, detail, high and shader high and trine. Only a footing is the only thing I just turned down, so it seems playable at 1080p anyway, this game next title is call of duty. Modern warfare, 3. Show you the video settings, so those are the settings I’m going to use here. You can across the lower this down to 720p. It’Ll probably run a better, but the moment it’s 30 frames per second you and the last game I’m going to test out is League of Legends and just the southerners rift map with one bottom, a side to an opposition. This is the normal test. I do on these tablets, okay, so the game has just started, but already over 100 frames per second 1080p on medium settings there so that’s not bad at all, very good, so this game is going to be 100 playable. I think and moving around the map is very fluid and smooth, as you can see, and the framerate is great temperatures getting a little warm now, I’m to almost 90 degrees, 89 degrees at the moment. So now, with a bit more on the screen, the framerate is still about 90 frames per second, very good results there. So let’s have a look at the temperatures, so looking in intel extreme tuning utility, we can see that it gets up there.

You can see peaking at actually 97 degrees, so that is really too warm, but most the time it stayed around 90 gaming. Now I don’t have the best conditions here, because I do have the tablet laying flat down on the table so it’s not dissipating as much heat as it probably could. But we see there that in terms of power limit throttling or thermal throttling, nothing there. So there was actually power limit throttling happening. Sorry, you can see there so that bar at the top so does limiting the power a little there. So thermals let’s have a look now with my thermal probe just after gaming and see how hot it is getting so 45 degrees on the front of the glass and on the rear. I can feel just before that it’s starting to get quite hot, and that is around 45 as well, so very want to the touch actually up to 40 6.4 there. But bit out of mind, as I just mentioned, that it has been against the table for a tablet, the cameras take an okay photo. So we’ve got a rear five megapixel camera with autofocus. You can take macro shots of text. For example, the front facing camera is okay, quality, it’s good enough for Skype and it’s. Just a couple of samples here, it’s a little grainy this outdoor shot, but you probably be honestly better off using your mobile phone to take any decent photos. But if you did have no other camera with you, then you could get away with us taking some photo of some text or notes a quick look at remix running on it.

I can confirm that the wireless is working now. The copy that I downloaded, the ISO image is one that has some additional things added to it additional drivers. This is from XDA forums, and you see here that the touch is working and the battery seems to be detected. Sound I’m, not too sure about. I haven’t actually had any sound coming out of the speakers yet, and Wireless connect up to a wireless is just fine. So in the stylus you can see is also working, so that is an added bonus there, so good to see that it can run remix. But I installed it on the micro SD card slot, so it’s a little slow, not running at the full speed, and you probably have to try to find a way to install it on the hard drive. Now I did try the hard drive install, but it didn’t come up with the operating system selector at the beginning, so I do think there will be a way to run. Definitely dual boot on this tablet, so you’ll be able to run Windows 10 and remix, which is really good. So after using the i7 book now for a week, I can confirm that the performance of it is exceptional. It is probably one of the fastest core m3s that I have tested to date, but it does come at a cost of those very high temperatures that it can reach. When you push it hard gaming or benchmarking or doing any tasks demanding for long periods, it will get hot to the touch and it reaches temperatures that really shouldn’t be happening and this kind of form factor without any fans.

The keyboard is great to type on the wireless AC performance is very good. I find the screens good. The Wacom stylus support is an additional bonus, but there is a slight problem with the palm rejection. It doesn’t seem to work on the outer edges of the screen. Despite those cons there, I still find this probably has to be one of the best two and ones you can get out of China and definitely one of the best with the stylus support.