| Name | Ninkear S14 |
| Network | -- |
| Firmware | Windows 11 Home |
| Screen | 14", 2240x1400 dots, 16:10, IPS, 40-60 Hz, 400 nits, 100% sRGB |
| Chipset | AMD Ryzen 5 7535H, 6 nm, 35-54W 6 cores, 12 threads, 6 x 3.3-4.55 GHz GPU: AMD Radeon 660M, 0.4-1.9 GHz |
| RAM | 16GB LPDDR5 |
| CPU | 1024GB NVMe PCI-E 3.0 |
| Interfaces | 2 x USB Type-C 3.2 1 x HDMI 2.1 (4K@60fps) 1 x USB Type-A 3.0 1 x USB Type-C 3.0 1 x 3.5mm Audio |
| Camera | 0.9 MP, video recording 720p@30fps |
| Keyboard | Membrane with monochromatic illumination without a digital unit |
| Battery | 60 Wh |
| Charging | USB Type-C, 65W |
| Wireless Interfaces | Wi-Fi 6.0, Bluetooth 5.3 |
| NFC | N.A |
| Biometrics | Fingerprint Scanner |
| Sound | 2 speakers, 1 microphone |
| Water protection | Not declared |
| Dimensions and weight | 312.9 x 222.5 x 15.95 mm; 1.1 kg |
Let's take a break from the novelties of the mobile market for a while and pay attention to larger brothers - laptops! Today we review something very light and airy, well, almost white chocolate - Ninkear S14! The compact from Ninkear promises to be interesting, so let's open the box as soon as possible...
We have already praised Ninkear a thousand times for the care of packaging (they even stick films on touchpads!), and now we will also praise it for its sense of taste: look how this time the laptop came to us! A white and orange box on a magnet that fits a laptop, USB-C charging, documentation and gift stickers! A nice little bonus. Which, by the way, does not exclude the standard bonus in the form of a mouse and a pad, lying in a separate box!
The warranty, by the way, is among the pieces of paper in place - although Ninkear does not sell in retail, but this does not deprive you of the opportunity to get warranty service. So do not think that buying a laptop from the marketplace, you are taking a risk. Ninkear is not at all embarrassed to accept under warranty.
The laptop itself is silver "steel" and is made of aluminum and plastic. Due to this, by the way, it was possible to achieve a weight of only 1.1 kg. Maybe it will even fit into a woman's bag - we did not check.
We open the lid (180° opening by the way) and we see a fairly standard keyboard without a tumpad, a small plastic touchpad with a dedicated fingerprint and, which, by the way, we constantly forget to praise - the hinge base in the center, and not on the edges of the laptop. we have often encountered such a problem as cracking and breaking of plastic hinge covers on budget cars, and here Ninkear do the right thing, hiding the fasteners under one common part.
The keyboard looks according to the "steel" style of the case: the buttons are chopped, as if it were plate armor. The keyboard is membrane and with a two-level switchable backlight. During the day, it will be weak, but at night it works perfectly. It turns off on its own after 35 seconds of inactivity of the keys, so the witnesses of the battery-eating illumination have nothing to get to the bottom of. We suddenly have pleasant feelings from the keyboard: I'm not a big fan of budget keyboards for their philosophy of "if only it works", but here the membrane was implemented very well. It does not stagger, does not knock and in principle looks very... Solid, as if. Well, we like this rectangular design, we like it very much.
We have no complaints about the touchpad, but the fingerprint sometimes refused to let me in. In my opinion, he was given little space, here we would like to have more.
Let's go through the interfaces: on the left we see two USB-C 3.2 and HDMI 2.1 for displaying the picture on an external monitor. USB-C in the middle of the row still accepts charging. On the right side we have USB-A 3.0, another USB-C and a 3.5 mm jack. We can say that it is not enough, but if you take into account the class of the device, the ultra-compact can hold even less, believe me. Although yes, we personally lacked one more USB-A Old Believer, sorry.
Screen and sound
Well, let's check the screen right away. The standard scheme in the black frame and the camera on top is already noticeable, but there are pluses in every aspect. The bezels are thin, the 0.9 MP camera, although obviously budget, closes (hello paranoids), and the screen itself is very large in terms of resolution: 2240 by 1400 pixels! we may have already seen 2K at 14", but not in the segment up to 80k. True, the brightness here is average, 400 nits according to the passport (I measured up to 394), but it is very enough when working indoors. And it does not distort colors - 100% sRGB coating.
A very interesting picture of hertz: the Windows control panel sees in addition to 60 Hz also a 40 Hz mode! we don't know about you, but this is the first time we have seen such a regime. we also found CRT boxes at 50 Hz, and even there we already saw this very frame rate. At IPS 40 Hz, of course, they do not flicker, but you can still clearly see the intermittent animations and even a small trail from the mouse. No one forces you to sit on it, but if you need to achieve maximum autonomy for long-term printing (study, office, working with text on a trip), you can turn it on. We like this opportunity to save money.
In general, we liked the screen, but what about the sound? With it, everything is simple - two speakers in the table on the sides of the case. The speakers, to be honest, are quite quiet and here the laptop still gives up to other possible competitors. But we assume that people will take it not for the sound, but for a good display and compactness. And at worst, there is Bluetooth and a 3.5 mm jack - use it!
Disassembly and hardware
It's time to disassemble the laptop and inspect the engine compartment!
The lid is held by 9 screws unscrewed with a PH000 or 00 cue ball. The length of the screws is unequal, so do not confuse when reassembling. Remove the lid and see... A very compact board, on which everything is soldered except for the wireless communication module and the native 1 TB SSD. Need more memory or need to be replaced? Change. But as for the RAM, which is 16 GB, we can't say the same: memory chips of 4 GB each are soldered around the processor and cannot be quickly replaced. By the way, the percentage is red - AMD Ryzen 5 7535H for 6 cores and 12 threads. A worthy stone, and in general, we have a lot of respect for AMD solutions for their versatility in application.
Cooling goes through two heat pipes to one cooler, which does not make noise or irritate during operation. Well, a 60 Wh battery of three sections completes this picture - a very good and capacious battery for its class. And, of course, live speakers - here they are, on the sides of the battery.
As for the layout, we can say that it is neat and fits quite firmly. There are no superfluous wires anywhere, nothing overlaps each other, and there is enough cooling, although it is just one cooler. The era of hot AMD is long over, so our brain operation Ryzen 5 is not boiling space.
Tests and Gaming
Let's now run our build on tests.
CPU-Z gives the processor a score of 456.6 for a single core and 3567.5 for Multi Thread mode.
3DMark in the Steel Nomad Light graphics (for embeds we use only the Light version) gave a score of 1317 points, writing us a commendable "good". But we won't play the conditional Battlefield 5 anymore. "Processor Profile" rates thread efficiency at 4029 points and 644 points per thread. The frequency graph seems to be smooth, but everything tends to show a frequency drop, although the processor quickly returns to its "combat mode" above 3.0 GHz.
GeekBench 6 showed a parrot result of 1401 thread points per core and 5607 points for all cores.
SuperPosition at 720p gives a score of 8320 points with an average frame value of 62fps. However, 1080p no longer allows us to rise: 2471 points in 1080p medium mode and an average value of 18 fps.
CineBench 24 rates the performance per core at 82 points, putting the processor in 5th place. However, MultiCore already drops us to 9th place, giving us 440 points.
Now let's put our parrot values to the test!
Counter Strike 2 at the minimum settings seems to be happy to show us quite decent almost 90 fps in the average value on the benchmark map. But there is a nuance in the form of small jams, which we personally noticed. The result for the built-in is excellent, but the friezes will have to be removed by reducing the resolution from the native 2240x1400 to 1600x1000. Then the average value of the frame rises as well.
WarThunder at minimum settings in native resolution pleases with 60 frames. But when the car explodes, there is a microfreeze at the test site. We think this is eliminated over time, when after one or two battles all the necessary models are loaded into the cache. But if 60 frames are not enough - lower the resolution to 800p and roll to 90-120! Also an option, although super soapy.
Today We will make a digression from the already boring GTA V and go to DiRT Rally - also the 15th year of release, after all. And in native resolution at medium settings, but without improved fog, we get a very playable 60-80 frames. Well, isn't it a fairy tale? However, we could not turn on the fog: the drop is catastrophic, up to 10-20 frames. So we drive in the mud without fog. But it's still beautiful!
Battery Autonomy
And finally, let's measure the autonomy of the S14. As we mentioned in the teardown, the battery here is 60 Wh, and the laptop is charged from a 65W USB-C unit.
Half-hour usage scenarios at 70% brightness and 40% volume produce the following values:
- Work in a text editor/surfing the Internet – 9%
- Video viewing 1440p@60fps – 4%
- Playing Dirt Rally – 27%
A little more than five and a half hours of work, watching videos up to half a day and almost two hours of playing. The values are not bad, but we would like to tighten up the autonomy when working with text and the Internet - after all, we take a working solution. But this is no problem: we set the backlight to low or turn it off completely, the screen - to 40 Hz and already spend less, only up to 5% in half an hour.
But what about charging? It is quite fast - We got it for 50% in just 31 minutes, and it took 1 hour and 20 minutes to fully charge. If we are not surprised here in terms of full charging, then the quick recharge pleased me. You can even have time to charge in one pair, why not.
Conclusions
Ninkear is getting better and better at mastering new classes of laptops and PCs, and we hope they continue to evolve in breadth. The S14 model offers almost everything that a compact laptop can offer for its money: it is both light and stylish, and it has some kind of performance. As a study or work solution, Ninkear is still ideal, but now incredible lightness has been added to the list of advantages.
Of course, there were some nuances here – the speakers, as for me, are really inferior even to their classmates, but not in quality, but in sound volume. The fingerprint was given a small platform, and with my rather neat thin index finger we sometimes confused it. But these are such trifles... That we didn't spit on them while we was using the S14. In the budget segment of compacts, it should definitely become an imba, and if you need something so small, but reliable, we can recommend you this model.