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Ninkear YBOOK 15 is a lightweight, budget Windows 11 Pro laptop with a 15.6" touchscreen display that can be used as a tablet. In its class, it is one of the most affordable devices. The laptop is focused primarily on multimedia content consumption and office use, the main emphasis in this model is on the capabilities associated with the form factor used, rather than on a high level of computing power. This review analyzes the performance of the Ninkear YBook 15 compared to the slim convertible Dell XPS 13 9365 2-in-1 (2017), and also establishes some characteristics not declared by the manufacturer.
Specifications
Type of execution - convertible laptop;
Dimensions – 358×233×23 mm;
Weight – 1666 g;
Display – 15.6", IPS, 1920×1080, 56% sRGB (measured), multi-touch sensor (up to 10 touches) without pen support;
Keyboard – backlit and NumPad;
CPU – AMD Ryzen 3 3250U (TDP 15W, 2 cores/4 threads; base frequency 2.6 GHz, maximum frequency 3.5 GHz, L1-L2-L3 cache 128 Kb/core – 512 Kb/core – 4 Mb, critical T 105°C, lithography 14 nm, year of release – 2023);
GPU (integrated) – AMD RX Vega 3 (GCN 5.0 architecture, 192 pipelines, frequency 300-1200 MHz, TDP up to 15 W, lithography 14 nm, year of release – 2019);
RAM – 2 DDR4 slots, up to 64GB total (2×32GB), in 1×16GB DDR4 2400MHz no-name configuration – single-channel mode;
Storage – 1×M.2 2280 slot for SATA III SSD (NVMe not supported), in 1×512GB SSD no-name configuration;
I/O Ports – 1×USB Type C (data transfer only), 1×USB 3.0, 2×USB 2.0, 1×HDMI, 1×1.0G LAN, 1×3.5 mm Audio Jack, 1xDC-in Jack;
Wireless – WiFi 5, Bluetooth 4.2;
Camera – 0.9 MP 16:9 1280×720, video 720p 30 fps, FOV~80°;
Cooling – active, fan with copper radiator and one heat pipe;
Power supply – 38 Wh battery (7.6 V 5000 mAh – 1-4 hours of battery life), 45 W AC adapter (15 V 3 A);
Sensors – accelerometer;
Operating system – Windows 11 Pro;
Manufactured in China, Shenzhen Ninkear Technology Co., Ltd;
Model and Design
Ninkear YBOOK 15 laptop comes in a simple cardboard box with sheets of foam. The delivery set includes not only a laptop, a charger, a user manual and a warranty card (the manufacturer's warranty is up to 1 year), but also, suddenly, a branded wired mouse and pad. This is for users who are not used to working with a touchpad.
The laptop's body is made entirely of gray plastic, like many other office models, such as the Dell Latitude 5540. The corporate logo is applied only on the top cover. The laptop has a very low weight of 1.67 kg and a thin body despite the presence of active cooling. You can also note the small thickness of the display bezels, the presence of a full-fledged keyboard with NumPad and F-keys.
The keyboard of this laptop has a white LED backlight with two levels of brightness, which is not yet present in every top-end solution - in my Dell Precision 7540 in almost the maximum configuration, for example, a keyboard without backlighting. And this is very convenient for working without lighting. The keyboard itself has very comfortable, in my opinion, keys with a fairly large travel, a clear and pleasant click - this is very great for office work. But there is also an unpleasant trifle: the right Shift key has a truncated length in favor of the location of full-fledged arrow keys. This is not the best compromise, although it is widespread in modern laptops, since when typing, you can easily make a mistake by pressing the up arrow instead of Shift. In the same Dell Precision 7540, this nuance was taken into account by placing the arrow block a little lower, thereby freeing up space for a full-fledged long Shift key, and in the Dell Latitude 5540, they simply halved the up and down arrows vertically, which is also not a very good solution.
Ninkear YBOOK 15 has a large (137×88mm) touchpad with multi-touch and gesture support. In addition, the touchpad is equipped with two buttons located in the bottom half of the panel. The right mouse button corresponds to the lower right area of the touchpad, but the left mouse button is pressed both when interacting with the left side of the touchpad and with the middle of the right half of the panel. The touch panel of the laptop has a pleasant coating to the touch, it is comfortable to use it.
The main feature of the laptop is, of course, the tablet mode with a touch screen. The display can be rotated 180° and the keyboard automatically turns off, and the system switches to tablet mode and automatically sets the desired display orientation. The screen supports up to 10 touches at a time, but does not support pen input, which greatly limits the functionality of the model: without a pen, the laptop is not suitable for, for example, working with an electronic whiteboard (teaching), drawing. In addition, the display of the Ninkear YBOOK 15 has a rim, which may not be very convenient when working with touchscreen. It is also worth noting that the hinges in the Ninkear YBOOK 15 are not all-metal and the durability of the mechanism as a whole is questionable. In my Dell XPS 9365 2-in-1, for example, the touchscreen cables frayed over time, but the metal hinges still work well after many years. However, tablet mode itself can be useful, especially if you don't need to switch all the time – for example, if the laptop is used as a kind of touchscreen "terminal".
Ninkear YBOOK 15 has a large (137×88mm) touchpad with multi-touch and gesture support. In addition, the touchpad is equipped with two buttons located in the bottom half of the panel. The right mouse button corresponds to the lower right area of the touchpad, but the left mouse button is pressed both when interacting with the left side of the touchpad and with the middle of the right half of the panel. The touch panel of the laptop has a pleasant coating to the touch, it is comfortable to use it.
The main feature of the laptop is, of course, the tablet mode with a touch screen. The display can be rotated 180° and the keyboard automatically turns off, and the system switches to tablet mode and automatically sets the desired display orientation. The screen supports up to 10 touches at a time, but does not support pen input, which greatly limits the functionality of the model: without a pen, the laptop is not suitable for, for example, working with an electronic whiteboard (teaching), drawing. In addition, the display of the Ninkear YBOOK 15 has a rim, which may not be very convenient when working with touchscreen. It is also worth noting that the hinges in the Ninkear YBOOK 15 are not all-metal and the durability of the mechanism as a whole is questionable. In my Dell XPS 9365 2-in-1, for example, the touchscreen cables frayed over time, but the metal hinges still work well after many years. However, tablet mode itself can be useful, especially if you don't need to switch all the time – for example, if the laptop is used as a kind of touchscreen "terminal".
The Ninkear YBOOK 15 is equipped with a 15.5" IPS display with a Full HD resolution of 1920×1080 pixels. Viewing angles and contrast are typical for inexpensive matrices, without complaints. The manufacturer does not provide information about the color gamut of the matrix used, and therefore I took measurements using the OceanOptics spectrometer USB4000 and calculated in accordance with the CIE 1931 standard for the color characteristics of the monitor. As you might expect, the laptop does not present any miracles in this regard: the matrix has a coverage of only 56% of the sRGB color space. For photo processing, for example, it is not recommended to use such a display, although it is not so important for office work and entertainment. For example, in a similar class and much more expensive laptop Dell Latitude 5540, the screen is almost the same.
On the display frame on top there is a peephole of a simple 0.9 MP web camera. Its quality is sufficient for the user's physiognomy to be recognized at a video conference, but no more.
The Ninkear YBOOK 15 power adapter is quite small and has a power of only 45 watts, it is connected to the laptop through an old-fashioned circular connector, which is located on the left side of the case. There is also one Type C connector for data transfer (not suitable for charging), one and only USB 3.0 connector and an HDMI port. On the right are a 3.5 mm audio jack, a LAN port and two low-speed USB 2.0 jacks. There is also a power button for the device - just a button, without fingerprint scanners and other things. It's good that it was not placed on the laptop keyboard, where there is a risk of accidentally pressing it when typing. There are only air vents on the back of the case. I probably lacked a card reader for SD or microSD cards – it is not difficult to install it, and the benefits of it are significant.
To service the laptop (cleaning the cooling system, replacing the thermal paste), it is enough to remove the bottom cover, which is attached with latches and 14 screws with a regular Phillips head. One of the screws is hidden under a round sticker in the middle, and two more are hidden under the rubber feet next to the screen hinges. The legs themselves are held on glue and after disassembling the laptop, they will have to be glued again. This approach to attaching the lid was an unpleasant surprise - all other laptops that I had a chance to use did not have this. They say that such a solution is by no means uncommon for cheap models.
By removing the bottom cover, you can replace the SSD drive (only SATA is supported; NVMe is NOT supported), RAM bars, batteries, and cooling system maintenance. The storage and RAM in this laptop are no-named: they literally do not have the manufacturer's marking. It's good that they have the ability to be replaced, and not soldered on the board. Since the laptop has 1 stick of DDR4 RAM for 16 GB, the memory works in single-channel mode. Some performance increase can be obtained if you add another similar bar or replace this one with two paired ones. The cooling fan is similar to the one found in the Ninkear M7 mini PC. There is only one processor heat pipe. There is no heatsink on the SSD. The cooling system is not particularly productive, but it should be suitable for the processor used.
System performance and stability: Comparison with Dell XPS 9365
The Ninkear YBOOK 15 laptop is equipped with an energy-efficient AMD Ryzen 3 3250U dual-core processor with an RX Vega 3 graphics chip. Despite the fact that this processor was released in 2023, in fact, this solution was obsolete even then due to the 14 nm process used, the old Zen architecture and the banal small number of physical cores. In fact, this processor is equivalent to the old Intel Core i5-7200U from 2017, although the graphics component used is still better and corresponds to about Intel UHD Graphics 630. Most likely, the processor in this laptop is running in 25W TDP mode (set to "Automatic" in the BIOS), while 512 MB of RAM is allocated for video memory.
Immediately after turning on the laptop, the system consumes 2.4 GB of RAM out of the available 15.5 GB. As you can see in the Task Manager, the laptop processor has different modes of operation when powered by the mains and from the battery, and the power supply schemes configured in the OS do not pay much attention to the behavior. When running on battery, the responsiveness of the system is not good enough even without load, when powered by the mains, the interface becomes much smoother. With this in mind, the performance of the laptop was evaluated both on mains power and on battery power. Synthetic tests Cinebench R23, Furmark 1 and CrystalMark v. 8.0.6 were used - downloaded from official resources. Paired tests were performed in comparison with the laptop Dell XPS 9365 (Intel Core M5-7Y54 1.2-3.2 GHz, 2 cores 4 threads, TDP 4.5 W - passively cooled, 8 GB RAM, Intel HD 615 graphics, SSD NVMe 256 GB).
The Ninkear YBook 15 SSD provides a typical SATA SSD read-write speed. It's still much better than HDDs. In office usage, the difference between SATA and NVMe drives is hardly felt.
When powered by a single-threaded battery, the CPU frequency oscillates between 0.9 and 3.2 GHz, with the fan not working at full capacity, and the responsiveness of the system is significantly reduced. In this test, the device scores 518 points, which corresponds to the level of 2011 processors of the Intel Core i5-2520M (Sandy Bridge) type.
When tested in multi-threaded mode, the processor quickly dropped the frequency from 3.3 GHz to a stable 2.6 GHz. At the same time, the laptop fan also worked quite quietly. The result was 1606 points, which is also in line with older mobile processors like the Intel Core i5-2520M (Sandy Bridge).
The GPU, running on battery without CPU load, runs at a frequency of 0.7 GHz MHz and provides performance at the level of older graphics cards such as the AMD 8750M (2013) - 6 fps in Furmark at a resolution of 1920×1080. With a single-threaded load, the frame rate drops to 4 fps, the core frequency begins to oscillate in the range of 0.45-0.7 GHz. In the case of a full load on the CPU and GPU in Furmark, the framerate drops to 3 fps, and the video core frequency drops to 0.47 GHz. Cinebench test results are also reduced by 20%.
Such results are frustrating, to say the least, since they obviously do not correspond to the real capabilities of the processor and cooling system installed in the laptop. The problem lies in the extremely clumsy configuration of the CPU power management and the operating mode of the cooling system, as it was in the Ninkear M7 mini PC. Moreover, if in the M7 this could be fixed by changing the BIOS settings, in this laptop the same settings are no longer the same.
The situation is a little better when testing a laptop powered by the mains. For example, in single-threaded testing, the result is 632 points, which already corresponds to Core i5-4200M processors (Haswell, 2014). The CPU frequency during testing is consistently kept at around 3 GHz.
In multi-threaded testing, the core frequency is also set to 3 GHz, the laptop scores 1742 points, which roughly corresponds to the Intel Core i5-6200U (Skylake, 2015). This result can be called the most expected, since the Ryzen 3 3250U is similar in technical characteristics to the Core i5-6200U or i5-7200U. Why the result was worse than this level in single-threaded mode is unclear.
In the absence of other load, the graphics core is capable of running at speeds up to 1.07 GHz and provides 6 fps in Furmark. Simultaneous load on the GPU and CPU in single-threaded mode leads to a strong decrease in system responsiveness and fluctuations in the CPU frequency in the range of 2-2.7 GHz, with the test score being reduced by 20%. In similar testing in multi-threaded mode, the CPU frequency drops to a stable 2.4 GHz, and the test score drops by 25%. It is important to note that the laptop fan never runs noisily, that is, at the maximum allowable rpm.
The observed phenomena also indicate a discrepancy between the operating mode of the cooling system and the power scheme of the processor, determined at the BIOS level, with the actual capabilities of the system. After all, it turns out that it is safe to say that the performance of the laptop is severely limited artificially.
Firstly, the limitations force the system to reset the CPU and GPU frequencies at 70-80°C, while the maximum operating temperature determined by AMD is 105°C – and for short-term (from several minutes to several hours) loads, this is the normal temperature mode of the processor. For compact electronics, the performance of which is usually limited by the efficiency of the cooling system, the difference of 25-35°C of the temperature limit is a huge value, on which the speed of the entire system greatly depends.
Secondly, the Ninkear Ybook 15 clearly has a strict limit on the speed of the cooling fan. Apparently, the manufacturer, as in the case of the Ninkear M7, wanted to achieve quiet operation of the device, but together with the artificial limitation of the SoC temperature limit, this had a catastrophic effect on the performance of the system as a whole. What's more, battery mode kicks in an even more aggressive power and temperature management circuit for the system, which ultimately destroys performance.
Thus, the observed problem with low speed is purely software in nature and, unfortunately, cannot be fixed in the OS or in the BIOS by the user himself. If the manufacturer wants to achieve low body temperatures and noise levels, then it is necessary to take care of an appropriate powerful PASSIVE cooling system - with several heat pipes and heat dissipators. Otherwise, it is necessary to at least abandon either low operating temperatures or low noise levels - and it is better not to clamp down on either one or the other as leading brands do. The user should decide for himself how his laptop should work, and not get an uncontestedly slow device of the level of a 2012 laptop. After all, who forbids the manufacturer to make ready-made adequate power/cooling schemes that can be switched in the OS itself or at least in the BIOS?
Now let's see how the Dell XPS 9365 works, which was originally designed with a passive cooling system. In terms of performance and responsiveness, it is far from ideal, but thanks to its stable operation, it has proven itself as a portable laptop for office work. I have used it and periodically use it even for photo processing. The Dell XPS 9365 processor - Intel Core M5-7Y54 - is generally at the same technological level as the Ryzen 3 3250U, but has a reduced base frequency and a much more primitive graphics core. This processor can reach a temperature of 99°C. The performance of the Dell XPS 9365 laptop does not depend on whether it is connected to the network or not.
In a single-threaded test, the processor first runs at 3 GHz, then it gradually drops to a stable 2.7 GHz. The result is 700 points, which is 10% higher than the Ninkear YBook 15, which is equipped with a more powerful CPU and an active cooling system.
Conclusion
The Ninkear YBook 15 has an interesting form factor with good performance for a budget laptop. The model can be especially convenient for office work thanks to a fairly comfortable display and a convenient keyboard with NumPad and backlit keys, or when used as a small-sized touch terminal for controlling an external device. Of course, the laptop also has entertainment such as simple games or watching videos. It's very nice that the Ninkear YBook 15 doesn't have any gross hardware flaws, which is rare for an inexpensive laptop. But the software part spoils the picture: the speed of the system is greatly reduced by the manufacturer with frankly ridiculous settings for power and cooling modes, which the user cannot change on his own. It remains to be hoped that there will be some kind of BIOS update that will solve the observed performance problems.