The Aspire 5 also has 2gb of VRam due to it having 8gb of ram, while the Motile M141 in it's stock configuration only has 512mb, to use less of the 4gbs
Super impressed for what I got for the price, even including having to pay an import fee to Canada and tax/conversion. Though, keep an eye out on the Biwin SSD, all of a sudden I got a boot loop with Windows error checking it, you probably want a better NVMe drive in there anyways (both slots support it).
I'm pretty sure Walmart does do a price guarantee at least for 2 weeks after your purchase and with a receipt. I bought a monitor at Walmart and the price dropped about 2 weeks later and I went in exactly 14 days after my purchase and they refunded me the difference. Maybe online purchases are different though.
I bought this laptop for work and other task and really the single channel isn't a big deal guys, Its only a big deal if ur a gamer, I dont game on my laptop.
I have both the Acer and the Motile and have been pleased with both. When you compare the single channel to dual channel do both machines have 4gb of ram or did you add a second 4gb in the second channel of the Acer? If you did how much of the improvement is due to the additional 4gb of ram in the Acer. I am not a gamer and I have not noticed any difference in speed between the two for what I do--web surfing, youtube videos etc. Good review. I can always expect an unbiased review from you. Keep up the good work.
I think gaming is really where you’ll notice the most difference as the performance differences are readily apparent to the user. Video editing, etc would be slightly slower but not necessarily noticeable.
I have one and like it. The only bad thing about it is that the keyboard sticks up a little too high, so when you close the lid, it mashes the keys. Because I hold it on the sides, that means I almost always mash the Caps Lock key. Pretty disappointing design oversight, but other than that, it's not bad.
Great review on the Motile M141! I bought exactly the same model, M141, that Lon reviewed but in black. I got lucky and bought it when it was on sale for $199. I really wanted a decent, yet affordable laptop specifically to install and use Linux distros. I had done enough research to justify upgrading the wifi chip to an Intel AX200 ($18). The wifi that it came with had terrible throughput speeds. In my tests, transfer speed with original wifi was 5.5mb/sec vs 33.5mb/sec with the Intel AX200 so definitely worth the $18 upgrade. The second and last upgrade was the RAM. I figured 4GB did not seem adequate enough to me. I ended up going with 16GB just because the upgrade cost ($53) wasn't that bad at the time. In retrospect, I probably should have stuck with 8GB because it would have been enough. The upgrade costs pushed the total costs over $250. Having 16GB of RAM is fine but imo, probably too much for this class of laptop and for the purpose of how I intend to use it. I didn't care to add any more upgrades, 128GB for storage is fine. I have no intentions to store any more data than I need to and I can always map network drives or add cloud storage. It's a great banger of a laptop to mess with. I'm not crazy about the keyboard. Battery life is decent with light-to-normal use of around 4-5 hours. It's a bargain for the price and have zero regrets on the purchase and upgrades. I would highly recommend the M141 at no more than $250 price point and the M142 (Ryzen 5) for no more than $350-375 if it can be had that that price. I would suggest the need to upgrade the Wifi card as it is TERRIBLE with what it comes with. It was not that easy of a process for me since I found it very difficult to re-attach the antenna so this may discourage people who are uncomfortable in opening the laptop and working on it to risk any potential damage to internal components. People can get by with 4GB of RAM but this was the easiest of the upgrades I did. I've currently settled on using Linux Mint OS and use it pretty much daily. Look to Reddit on r/motile or r/motilelinux for more user experiences.
Nice to see an actual M141 benchmark, as most people cover the M142. And also, apparently it supports streaming HDR video, I don't think it's actual HDR
For audio output, did you choose THX or Realtek? Ive this problem when i hear sound at first when i enter chatroom or watch youtube, then after some minutes, the sound is gone. Any solutions?
Yes I did a video on all of the things you can do with one of these Ryzens on my channel. 1080p is decent provided you’re not doing anything too crazy.
Lucky I got mine good deal for 300 bucks was 700 that's not with the single channel memory I'ld be looking for dual at that price still all those ports is nice can do blender (with patience ) is way faster then my fx vision labtop I payed 800 for new
I'm glad we're out of the era of 32gb eMMC laptops being the norm at the $200 price point but this is still a stretch to recommend. At least the Vega 3 is usable for something...
Wished this laptop was available to buy in Europe... especially for the great price. For my usage, single channel isn't that big of a deal, I imagine it's a big deal with you do video/gaming only, right?
Hey Lon i bought one of these a few weeks back and i opened the back to see what was inside, and i noticed that the heatsink over the cpu was removable so i'm wondering if that means it might be upgradable as well?
It might be interesting with these ryzen laptops to see how they do as a plex server with HW transcoding. I know AMD isn't "officially" supported, but that it does work with the desktop APUs under Windows, so might be an alternative for those that want to have a laptop and plex server together and not buy a separate NUC for their server. I know a bunch of people use busted/old laptops for utility type servers. Especially since the CPU power on even a Ryzen 3 is better than the NUC Jxxx CPUs at least. Just an idea for interesting channel content.
So if I strictly wanted this for some light league of legends/team fight tactics and PS4 remote play and maybe some older emulators, would this be alright? and would I see issues with the above after upgrading the ram?
Get the next tier model with 8 GB RAM and 256 GB NVME M.2 SSD, with the Ryzen 5 3500U SoC, or the same equivalent of the Acer Aspire 15. It has dual channel RAM, and a 2.5 inch HDD slot, both of which this doesn't and has a slightly bigger screen at 15.6 inches. Streaming of outside hardware like consoles, should run fine even on lower end laptops than this one, because the load is natively run on the hardware, and this is just streaming that load. League runs on toasters, so you're good.
I have this. Don't get any Adrenaline software higher than Adrenaline 22.3.1, games run horrible any higher. Also, disable automatic driver updates as Windows will force download newer drivers and fuck up the computer.
They don't have a price match guarantee? WHat's stopping you from returning your order and getting a prepaid label, and then ordering another one right after at the $249?
Trying to decide. The $999 MacBook Air or this. My needs are very basic, typing word documents and zoom meetings for language classes. I do everything else on my 11 inch IPad Pro.
I bought the Motile14 just a couple of weeks ago and upgraded the RAM and added a NVME drive to it to replace my aging MacBook Air. But I can't get over the Audio of the Motile. I find it pretty horrid. It's very tinny and extremely quiet compared to my 2012 MBA. And that doesn't have great Audio either. The Display is very dim indeed, but besides it's a decent laptop. Still, I just wrote this from my MacBook Air :(
The MacBook Air was more than $1,000 when it launched in 2012, of course it is going to sound better and have a better screen! It isn't even in a comparable price bracket!
Dear brother, is there this laptop in France and how much is it priced in the currency €€€€ Euro please tell me please and I will subscribe to your channel?( M142)
It's not a bad system but I can't get over the name: "Motile" is the kind of work you only hear on medical shows and crime dramas. Still, thanks for a good review - and an even better warning about WalMart.
Only having a single channel ram slot is akin to hiring movers but only ones with one arm. It's inexcusable and anyone looking to do anything other than email and browsing should not buy this. I'm not trying to be insensitive to our disabled family out there for the record.
I like the computer and all but whoever is thinking of buying this computer keep in mind that it freezes often and it shuts itself off randomly. Buyer beware.
Often 4GB of RAM just isn't good enough for Windows 10 and really you need at least 8GB to be more stable. Unless you already plan on replacing the 4GB stick with an 8GB, I would suggest getting the 8GB Ryzen 5 version: M142. It is almost double the price, but more powerful and includes more RAM in the box.
