With the recent launch of the uber-powerful GPD Win 5, how are two of their older machines holding up? Let’s find out.
Welcome to Esk Computers, I’m Scott and today on the desk of Esk I admit that I have a bit of a problem with handheld devices. Primarily, where to store them, and this is after having sold the likes of the Open Pandora and my patient zero for this nonsense, the venerable GP32. Who else remembers smart media cards? I am an old man.
Anyway, my idea for this video was to chart how GPD’s Windows handhelds have improved from the low powered 2016 original, through it’s Steam Deck adjacent Win 3 of 2021, and their most recent absolute unit the GPD Win 5, with the integrated 8060 graphics that should be more powerful than a lot of the discrete graphics we’ve seen on the channel. But, with high power comes a high price tag that is way beyond what I can scrape together. Maybe we can revisit it in a decade or so.
So, we’re going to look at the models that mere mortals can afford, with the original Win going for about £160 on eBay, and the Win 3 varying between £200 and £300. Although neither pop up very frequently, to be fair, so that’s very changeable. Let’s take a look at their first outing.
The OG GPD Win has a clamshell design that if memory serves is roughly the same size as the original versions of the Nintendo DS or 3DS, although a bit bulkier than my DS Lite. It opens to reveal a 5.5 inch, 720p touch screen. It’s a decent IPS, and because it’s so small the 1280 by 720 resolution looks sharp on it. Unfortunately because it’s so small it’s difficult to use as a Windows desktop, particularly as my eyesight continues to degrade. Have I mentioned I am an old man?
Looking down, we see that this is clearly for teh gamerz, with dual analogue sticks, or I suppose sliders might be closer to the mark, a serviceable d-pad, four face buttons that are joined by digital shoulder buttons and triggers, start and select buttons, and a keyboard.
In the keyboard’s defense, I’m not sure there’s a much better way to execute this idea given the space available. By having to comply with the laws of physics, this is by nature cramped and only suitable for poking at. To further defend it, that’s all it was ever intended for, entering passwords and naming your character and whatnot, it’s not supposed to be a primary control method, or for typing out a novel. So I suppose it does what it needs to to, even if it is awful. Better than a Xbox Chat pad, I guess.
Thankfully it’s a bit better as a joypad – not as good as a proper controller of course, but this also has to fit a computer in the same footprint. The d-pad, buttons and triggers are all fine, a little spongy for my tastes and all have been improved on in further iterations. The sticks take a bit of getting used to, but if you could live with the PlayStation Portable’s analogue implementation then this is a good bit better. The sticks are not clickable, and are instead assigned to these L3 and R3 buttons, which can be a bit of a pain in some games.
Completing the external survey, there’s a USB-C port that also charges the 6700mAh battery, a USB 3 Type A port, mini HDMI output, a micro SD expansion slot, and a combined 3.5mm headphone and mic jack that saves you from the integrated speaker that’s not great even considering it’s diminutive size. There’s also a fan control switch on the back, allowing a choice of silent, loud, and unbearable. It’s the pitch, more than the volume that annoys.
This switch is a critical innovation from GPD. It essentially swaps between the controller acting as, well, a controller, and emulating a mouse. It’s not a perfect solution, as of course you can be nowhere near as accurate on a joystick as you can with a mouse, but it’s just about good enough to allow navigating Windows without resorting to the touchscreen, which is not much better for general use given how small the touch targets are on the 5.5″ screen. Maybe that Windows 8 UI doesn’t seem like such a bad idea after all.
This is powered by an Intel Atom x7-Z8750, a four core, non-hyperthreaded part that draws two, count ’em, two Watts, while bursting up to 2.56GHz from its base of 1.6GHz. That processor has the legendary, or legendarily bad Intel HD integrated graphics, which will clock between 200 and 600 MHz. Combined with 4GB of LPDDR3-1600 RAM, and 64GB of slow eMMC this is obviously not a performance powerhouse, now or then.
The flip side of not being too powerful is that the battery life can be better, I’d replaced the battery in this back in 2019 so it’s probably degraded by now, but it still gets about an hour and a half to two hours of battery life at a heavy load, which isn’t too bad.
Windows itself is part of the problem with this machine, and it’s also the same for the Win 3. Even stripped back and debloated, it takes up a fair amount of computing resource to run, and even with GPD’s accommodations, it just isn’t designed to be used with a control pad. I’m probably not doing it any favours with a stripped back Windows 11 install, but it’s not running any worse than the default Windows 10 install.
Given all that, it’s almost surprising that it can do anything, really, but it has its moments. I will spare both you and me the usual suite of modern games performance testing, obviously that’s well beyond it. I did manage in the past to complete a playthrough of Fallout 3 at the lowest settings possible and a bit of help from HiAlgo Boost, which kinda filled the gap LSFG does these days. It’s hardly the optimal way to play, but it is possible. Without it, as seen here it’s bouncing about between 30 odd fps in smaller maps like Megaton, or twenty odd outside in the Capital Wastelands.
In fact I think for a certain kind of nerd – and if you’re watching this, YouTube thinks you are a nerd, sorry – most of the fun to be had with this was optimising and feature cutting games to within an inch of their life to get them running in a halfway playable state. It’s at least in part how The Phawx made his mark on youtube.
It would be more comfortable with older games, although unfortunately the age of the games this can play well coincide with those that are old enough to be a complete pain to get working under modern versions of Windows. Here’s Deus Ex, refusing point blank to fun in fullscreen mode, but at least it’s playable if you squint at it. The Win’s not helped by this non-standard screen that’s designed for phone use, so it natively defaults to being portrait orientation, not horizontal. For example here’s Max Payne, whose intro videos work as expected but the game’s tilted sideways and cropped. A lot of the time that’s fixable by finding modified old versions of DirectX DLLs, but it’s a lot of tinkering and certainly worlds away from a console like experience, even if you can still find them amongst the bitrot of dead links.
Where it can still provide value is the realms of 2D games, the vast bulk of which will run well, and to a degree the emulation of earlier, less demanding consoles. I have played a great deal of Spelunky on this little gadget, and it’s able to emulate all of the classic 16-bit systems up to the Neo Geo without missing a beat.
It’s also happy enough with original PlayStation emulation, but beyond that’s a bit of a struggle. It also makes for a passable Steam Link device for remote play.
Of course this is a Windows machine and can do the usual Windows-y things like web browsing and office tasks, and it handles that okay if you’re patient, but it’s only practical if you hook it up to an external monitor, keyboard and mouse which kinda defeats the purpose of a portable machine.
Now, I liked, and continue to like, this machine enough that I’ve not considered selling it since buying it from new for £235 back in 2017. However, I can’t really give you much of a use case for it in Space Year 2026. They don’t show up on eBay often enough to establish an average price but there’s a few sold recently at £160, and I think you’re going to have some very clear use cases and a need for this form factor or Windows for that to be a good value proposition.
Anything this can emulate can be done better by a dedicated emulation handheld, or your phone with a USB controller, and a good amount of the 2D and indie games that work well have Switch, Android or iOS versions by this point. Indeed, if you have a higher end phone from the past couple of years it can probably emulate Windows better than this runs it natively.
The OG GPD Win was a reasonably priced novelty item for inveterate hobbyist tinkerers to experiment with, and I’ve certainly had my money’s worth from it. However in 2026, this is relegated to sitting on a shelf as a piece of nostalgia, and I can’t see much use for it apart from as a historical curio for appreciators of this little corner of handheld PCs.
GPD continued experimenting, with a direct sequel in the similarly styled and low powered Win 2, while expanding the line into the more laptop or netbook styled, but still diminutive Win Max. The GPD Win 3 released in 2021, with this faster i7 model costing $900 at launch, although I didn’t get mine until October 2024, used, by which point it was apparently going for £220. It’s a very different beast, which you can see just by looking at it.
Externals first, and clearly this is no longer a clamshell, and takes what I guess the youth of today would call a Nintendo Switch format. While the screen remains at 5.5 inches and 720p, this one slides. Doing so reveals where that keyboard’s been hiding. This is an, I assume, flat capacitive grid that takes up less internal volume than the OG Win’s membrane setup, and has a little more space to play with. Which should make it better, but the complete lack of feedback makes this an awful typing experience. But again, it’s for passwords and naming your character, not writing War & Peace.
We get much better analog sticks, with L3/R3 clicks this time, and a more PlayStation styled d-pad which I don’t like as much, but still works well enough. The face buttons feel smaller and clickier, for want of a better term, and the L2/R2 triggers are now analogue so much more useful. There’s also two programmable buttons on the back grips, which I completely forgot about as they’re in, for me at least, an extremely awkward position that I just can’t stretch to when in normal use. It weighs about 600 grams, when added to this I think silicone grip case which I swing back and forward on whether it’s actually better than just going naked.
This fingerprint scanner appears to be incompatible with my hands, as I’ve never had much success with what ought to be a useful addition for logging on. We get a Type C port that’s Thunderbolt 4 compatible, and a Type A port. Thankfully we still have a 3.5mm headphone / mic combo jack, as the new dual speakers are better than the Win 1 but still not brilliant. Also returning is the microSD card slot, much appreciated although as this has a 1TB internal SSD it’s not needed quite so badly.
This model has the i7-1165G7, a 2.80 GHz four core, eight thread part that turbos up to 4.70 GHz, with a TDP of up to 28W although by default it’s limited to 20W, which can be tweaked up or down in the BIOS. So it’s roughly an order of magnitude faster than the Win 1, although at the cost of using an order of magnitude more power draw from the battery. That processor has the integrated Iris Xe Graphics G7 with 96EUs, and is paired with 16GB of LPDDR4x 4266MHz RAM.
It shipped with Windows 10, but I’ve since installed the GPD provided Windows 11 image from their site, for better or worse. Mostly worse. From reviews at the time of launch, battery life wasn’t amazing and my four year old one is even worse, getting something like 45 minutes of gameplay on more demanding titles before folding.
This iteration of the Win is modern enough and I think powerful enough to at least give the usual battery of tests a go, so let’s see if it can beat out my old laptop’s Ryzen 5 2500U / Vega 8 APU. I think it goes without saying that this, when hooked up to a keyboard, mouse and monitor can do all the usual office stuff, audio editing and photo editing with ease. This was a fairly high end laptop processor a few years ago, and a setup like this could pretty comfortably serve the vast bulk of people computing needs
Out of curiosity I ran that Davinci Resolve project render that I’ve been using as a test and it completes in 12 minutes 56 seconds, so approximately twice as fast as my laptop and about the same as the Mac Pro 2013, although editing without a larger external screen would be difficult.
Cinebench 2024 gets a pretty good Single core result of 79, much faster than the v4 Xeons we’ve looked at but not quite as strong as the Ryzen 5000 series chips. The multi-core result of 209 seems oddly low, but that’s what retesting yields. I think the power and cooling setup is limiting this.
In the synthetic graphics benchmarks, Time Spy gets 1291, Fire Strike scores 3889, and Superposition gets 1883 at 1080p High, which are results about 50, 80, and 90% faster than my laptop respectively, so that’s positive for the gaming tests.
I’m going to test the games plugged into power and a monitor at 1080p to directly compare with the beefier systems, then at the 720p native resolution of the screen to reflect some more real world performance. I should note a lot of these captures at 720p you’ll see look pretty good on the 5″ screen, and abysmal on a large 4K monitor, so bear that in mind.
Shadow of the Tomb Raider gets 15 average fps at 1080p High settings, but a playable 30 average fps at 720p Low.
Counter-Strike 2 can only reach 17 average fps at 1080p Very High, but again a very playable 49 average fps at 720p Low with High Shadows.
Cyberpunk 2077 won’t countenance running with raytracing of course, but gets 12 average fps at the unrealistic 1080p Ultra settings, and again some just about playable results at 720p with 30 average fps at Steam Deck settings, or 37 average fps at Low settings, with Ultra Performance XESS enabled.
In Unreal Engine 5 games, Marvel Rivals would not launch due to it claiming Direct X 12 wasn’t fully supported, although Black Myth Wukong had no such qualms. At 6 average fps at 1080p High, and No Framegen, perhaps it shouldn’t have bothered. Throwing the kitchen sink of trickery at it, we can get up to 22 average fps at 720p Low settings, 66% FSR resolution upscaling, and with Framegen, pushing up to 31 average fps if we drop to 33% resolution scaling, although it’s more impressionist painting than game at that point.
Assassin’s Creed Mirage can get 16 average fps at 1080p Low, but a sort of playable 29 average fps at 720p with Adaptive XESS upscaling.
Forza Horizon 5 did give me 22 average fps at 1080p Low settings, but then stopped working, and I couldn’t figure out why. C’est la vie.
Rounding off the usual suspects, Red Dead Redemption 2 at 720p low settings gave an entirely acceptable 48 average fps on the benchmark run. What all that proves is that while it’s clearly not intended to run some of the heaviest, most graphically demanding games, it’s got just enough horsepower to make an attempt, it the game engine can meet it half way. Not the optimal way to play for sure, but it’s arguably getting into PlayStation 4 power level territory.
Speaking of, I’ve not tested emulation capabilities this time round, but this is obviously capable of a wider range of emulation than the OG Win, handling PS2 easily enough, and takes a pretty good stab at PS3 and Nintendo Wii U / Switch games.
So, it’s a massive jump from the OG Win, but it’s still not going to be cranking out 120fps on the newest games. However let’s not underplay the improvement in capabilities. It’s gone from barely playing Fallout 3 to easily handling Fallout 4. A console generational improvement. There’s a huge amount of gaming than can be done on this. Such as Fallout 4, here running at 720p Low settings and getting around 54 average FPS
Throwing some more appropriate games at it, all of these being at the 720p native resolution of the screen, here’s Batman Arkham City at Medium settings holding 60 average fps.
Mass Effect, the original release, at Highest settings gets 57 average fps, and I’m sure it could handle the more recent Legendary Edition well.
Here’s Skyrim, again the original release, at high settings getting 59 average fps.
A remaster this time, with GTA V’s Enhanced edition at High settings getting 42 average fps, and I expect this could be tweaked if you need closer to 60, or you could of course go back to the Standard Edition.
Max Payne 3 was the only disappointment, at low settings only getting an average of 29 fps. I think this is because I wasn’t able to bump it out of DirectX 9 mode in to 11, and the Intel drivers don’t generally work so well with the older APIs. Probably fixable with more effort.
Street Fighter 5 has a Low Spec Mode which easily gives 60 fps at the cost of being as ugly as sin, so much better option is to use the High Settings, which also gets 60fps.
The Witcher 3 at Steam Deck settings gives us 56 average fps here out in the countryside, I expect framerate in the cities to drop a bit but this is still good performance.
I’ve most recently been using this to try and get into Baldur’s Gate 3, a demanding game that this doesn’t run amazingly well, but it’s also the sort of game that doesn’t demand high frame rates to enjoy and the convenience and flexibility that’s afforded by the portability more than outweighs some choppy graphics. At 720p Low, it’s getting 40-ish fps, with some extreme dips but it’s fine for this sort of game.
I’ve also been playing a lot of Black Mesa, which is still using the original Half-Life source engine if you can believe it. It looks pretty nice on the Win 3, this being 720p High settings, getting anywhere between 50 and 120 FPS depending on the map. This is kind of how I remember Half-Life looking through my rose-tinted memories, but Black Mesa is such a great visual overhaul.
In terms of value, there’s not enough of these on eBay to really give you a price guide, but the recently sold ones seem to be going for more like £300-ish used, and that’s getting into used LCD Steam Deck or Legion Go S territory, which are more powerful by virtue of being newer. SteamOS in particular is a better fit for a gaming machine in terms of usability, at the cost of not being able to play some games with the more aggressive anti-cheat software.
I’ll get to my thoughts on the Steam Deck in time, no doubt, but if I were to start downsizing these machines for whatever reason I’d be more likely to keep the Deck. But I’d definitely be sad about getting rid of this, and my main issue with both GPD devices is that my eyesight’s getting worse to the point that the 5.5″ screen is hard for me to use with any comfort.
Before this surrender to Father Time’s Ocular Assault I was very happy with this, and at £220 it was an absolute steal. If you have sharper eyes, and if can find one in that price range I’d jump on it. As for me, well, join me in my next video where I bolt an Xbox controller onto a 16″ laptop to create a Large Print Steam Deck for Bats, but until then, take care of yourself, and each other.