Ematic 13.3" Laptop a4-9120 2.2ghz dual core $110

[JWade]

saw this, for $110 i think its a good deal.

• 13.3" 1920x1080 IPS Screen
• Radeon R5 Graphics
• AMD A4 A4-9120 Dual-Core Processor
• Wi-Fi 2.4 GHz
• Bluetooth 4.0
• Mini-HDMI®
• 1 USB-C Port
• Two (2) USB ports
• MicroSD Card Slot (supports up to 64GB)
• 0.3 MP Front Camera
• SR/2x1W Speaker
• 7.4V 5000mAh Battery
• 3.5mm Headphones Jack
• Windows 10

Robot or human?

www.walmart.com

 

[VirtualLarry]

Nice find! FHD display, 64GB eMMC (I presume) means that you won't have to worry about running out of space doing Windows Updates like you do on those lesser 32GB eMMC laptops, and 4GB of RAM is (barely) adequate for web-browsing and whatnot. (Don't expect to multi-task heavily with that rig, but perhaps the RAM can be upgraded? I upgraded my Dell Inspiron 11 3000 series, which was a A6-9220e/4GB/32GB eMMC, to 8GB DDR4.)

So yeah, GREAT laptop for the price (Assuming the quality is OK, I don't own one), would be even better if you can upgrade the RAM to 8GB.

I gave my mom that Lenovo that was available for $129 on BF-esque, A6-9220c, 4GB, 64GB eMMC, she hasn't complained at all about it, and she can actually do her own Windows Updates now, since with the 64GB eMMC, it needs a lot less hand-holding to manage space.

This one sounds much in the same vein, but CHEAPER!

Edit: AMD's Stoney Ridge APUs are really "Going Places" in budget laptops. Really amazing to see, that they can put together a whole laptop with 4GB RAM and 64GB storage, and a decent little "dual-core" (single-module) APU, for $110.

 

[JWade]

i cant find if its emmc or not, and any info on the ram other than its ddr4.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Anyone else snag one of these? I noticed that they're still in-stock. Either they've got quite a few of these, or they really suck, and I missed that fact.

One of the reviews claims that the APU is only a Radeon R3, not an R5, and only 1.5Ghz, rather than 2.5Ghz.

I was hopeful, because I have a Dell with an A6-9220e (6W TDP), and this A4-9120 (15W TDP), I thought would have more thermal headroom, so it could go faster for longer.

The Dell is kind of sluggish, and it only has 32GB eMMC storage, so Windows Updates and especially Upgrades are a royal PITA.

This deal has 64GB eMMC, which should give a lot more breathing room, and a real (IPS? Supposedly...) 1080P screen, whereas, I have to use VSR on the Dell to get 1080. (*Then again, maybe the drivers on this laptop are doctored, and the screen is really 768P, and is just "tweaked" to run VSR @ 1080P. I hope not, though.)

The one(s) that I ordered, are just for browsing, nothing major, no gaming, hopefully they are OK for watching 1080P YouTube. One of the reviews commented that it had trouble with even that. (C'mon, Brazos way back when could do 1080P H.264.)

Edit: Regard the R3 versus R5 graphics on the APU. The box pictures (last one), if you zoom in, clearly show "R5" printed on the box. So, unless they've changed the specs and the box... I hope that it should be OK.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Well, they arrived! Some good news, and some bad news.

First, the good news. These laptops, come with an easily accessible M.2 slot on the bottom side. Just take out two screws, and remove the panel. There's an adjustable back-stop, for various-sized M.2 SSDs. It might also be keyed for a PCI-E one, but I didn't have one handy to test. (Or rather, I had one, but the heatsink would have been facing downward, and it wouldn't be able to latch down in that position without ripping the heatsink off.)

I used one of my several Team Group MS30 SATA M.2 128GB SSDs that I picked up at Newegg a few months ago for $17.99 +tax.

Installed it, booted to BIOS after powering-on, showed up as "SATA1". (BIOS showed six SATA ports! This seems to be a decidedly wide-open and non-gimped BIOS, a bit of fresh air for a laptop.)

Plugged in a Win10 64-bit 1909 UEFI USB installer, and booted to BIOS, selected the "BIOS Override boot" option for the USB stick, and installed Win10 64-bit. Note at this point, that the manual indicates Win10 "S Mode", which means that we'll have to escape that later on to get to "normal" Win10 mode.

The bad news. Short power cord (like two feet), and in the BIOS, it showed an A4-9120e with R3 graphics, and NOT an A4-9120 (15W TDP) with R5 graphics.

And I just got a setup error, OOBEREGION, had to "Retry". I wonder about these Team SSDs, I had some serious issues trying to get them to work with USB3.0 M.2 SATA SSD adapters, they wouldn't work right. Not sure if I got a bad batch of SSDs, or it was the cheap Chinese enclosures, or what.

Edit: Finally got it installed and booting off of my 128GB SATA M.2 (Team Group MS30) SSD.

Had some issues with the OOBE, had to tell it I didn't have internet, and then create a local user. I created one, went through selecting (rather, de-selecting) all of the advertising ID and voice-recognition and location data and stuff, and then clicked "Accept", and instead of following through with creating the user and booting, it looped back around in the OOBE to selecting a country and keyboard layout. So I did it again, with a user2, and same thing. So I powered-off, powered-on, was at the end of the OOBE, then it worked.

Not sure if that is because there's something funny about the BIOS/UEFI (serial and the like not "tattooed", since I didn't go through the original OOBE on the eMMC partition), or just glitches, because the laptop was REALLY HOT, from both charging, and running flat-out doing Setup tasks, and these Team Group MS30 SSDs not being the most reliable.

Anyways, this is the first laptop that I've ever felt, might actually be too slow to utilize 4GB of RAM. According to Task Manager, it has a base clock of 1.5Ghz, but run at 0.95Ghz most of the time. (Walmart page claimed 2.5Ghz.) Seems passively-cooled, no fan. Probably just an adapted Atom chassis.

Hoping that when Windows Updates finally finish, and AMD drivers get installed, that there might be some custom power-management / power plan settings that get loaded, ALA "Ryzen Power Plan" (although this is Stoney Ridge). I already clicked on the battery icon in SysTray, and clicked on "Max Performance".

Edit: At least, it does appear to be a "real" 1080P display (But ship / Win10 defaults to 150% scaling, so you wouldn't know it out-of-the-box), and it has a real SATA M.2 slot, which is an upgrade plus. Also, when I installed my own copy of Win10 to the SSD, it showed up as "Windows 10", and not "Windows 10 S". It doesn't appear to be in "S Mode" after all, thank goodness.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Been running @ 53% utilization (maxed) @0.80Ghz. I think that this laptop is SLOWER than an E-300. At least, it almost feels that way. At least theExcavator core has 64-bit native support and lots of opcodes set support.

The 1080P screen I was able to kick up to 1440P thanks to VSR. Still very readable.

 

[VirtualLarry]

So, all in all, after purchasing and having used this laptop for nearly two days thus far, I'm going to give it two stars out of five. One of those stars, is for coming with a 1080P display, and an access panel for a "live" M.2 SATA SSD bay, and the the other star is simply because it boots up and connects to the internet.

Other than that, this laptop is scraping the bottom of the barrel craptop. But I guess, what would you expect for $110 from Walmart.

It has some possibility, and the factory OEM OS image is decent and functional, more so than my attempts to do a fresh install on a 128GB M.2 SATA SSD.

I manageed to boot the factory image on the eMMC, and then copy the Drivers and DriverStore directories over to my SATA SSD, and then boot the SATA SSD install, and then go to Device Manager, and click on the SD Storage Controller with the Code10, and it installed a more-specific driver, and I updated the High Definition Audio Device driver, which updated to Realtek.

Still can't get AMD drivers to install for this A4-9120e w/R3. Not sure if AMD considers the R3 to be "below" what their drivers support. Keep getting a "Code 182: Unsupported/not-detected AMD GPU".

The factory install is running 19.10.30 drivers, but I can't seem to find those anywhere, and the factory install auto-installed the "Radeon Settings Lite" control panel from the store, which allowed me to turn on 2560x1440P res using VSR on the factory drivers. I want to do the same thing on my SSD install, but the LIte control panel is not installing from MS store. (Yes, I logged in.)

 

[VirtualLarry]

Just some notes, if you do a fresh install. You'll need the drivers out of the windows\system32\driverstore directory:
SD storage controller
Radeon 3 Graphics
Realtek High Definition Audio
Realtek RTL8723B USB2.0 802.11n network adapter

The wifi one is crucial. The OOBE MS driver from 2018 won't connect. The driver from driverestore is 2019, and connects fine.

Don't forget to install the chipset drivers from AMD first, as well.

Other than the fact that APU graphics drivers from AMD don't seem to want to install (other than the OOBE ones), and I can't seem to get an AMD control panel app to enable VSR 1440P on this 1080P(actual) screen, this thing is starting to grow on me a little. Fairly lightweight, decent 1080P screen, and when you're not running the blasted updates, the APU seems to clock higher than 0.80Ghz.(Due to being passively-cooled.)

I guess I might raise the rating (with SATA SSD installed, to three, maybe 3.5 stars.) Battery life is not the greatest, andtakes some time to charge. YouTube plays mostly OK @ 480P, but it seems that it doesn't handle 1080P with the R3, at least, not VP9 codec.

 

[VirtualLarry]

I said screw it, after trying one of those "Driver Pack" apps, from an apparently Russian programmer, and watching it chew 100% CPU cycles for three hours and not even get to the reboot phase, for installing two drivers. (Lord knows what was really going on with that program...)
I made a Linux Mint 19.3 Cinnamon 64-bit install USB using Rufus on another PC, and blew away my struggling Win10 installation on the 128GB M.2 SATA SSD, and installed Linux.

Had the same sorts of wifi and audio issues that I had with Win10, apparently the internal USB2.0 wifi is garbage, and the audio constatly cut out, like it was defective.

I used a wired Type-C generic ASIX88179 ethernet dongle to get Linux installed. Thanks to a friend I installed a Comfast 8821CU-based dongle, and it's working in wifi AC mode. Using a cheaper Bluetooth stereo speaker for audio output. (Haven't tried the headphone jack.)

This laptop runs SO much better on Linux Mint 19.3 than on Win10! Four stars! (Battery life seems a bit less than on Win10, but seems a lot snappier overall.)

 

[Macgyversite]

Amazing that the little $85 HP Win 10 tablet runs better ???

 

[VirtualLarry]

Price increase to $199.

Edit: Back down to $129.

 

[VirtualLarry]

These laptop APUs do not decode VP9 in hardware, so YouTube, especially using the new Picture-in-picture mode of Firefox 86.x, is really choopy. It gets better if you use the Add-on "h264ify".

 

[SamirD]

I wonder if this will run win 7 better. I'd run firefox esr 52 for videos--even my p4's can play video using that.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Edit: At least, it does appear to be a "real" 1080P display (But ship / Win10 defaults to 150% scaling, so you wouldn't know it out-of-the-box), and it has a real SATA M.2 slot, which is an upgrade plus. Also, when I installed my own copy of Win10 to the SSD, it showed up as "Windows 10", and not "Windows 10 S". It doesn't appear to be in "S Mode" after all, thank goodness.

My ematic 13.3" A4-9120e laptop, that I had put a TeamGroup 128GB SATA M.2 SSD into, and a fresh copy of 2004 on, was stuck looping upgrades of 20H2, which would fail, revert, and then come down Windows Update again. What a PITA.

So I tried wiping the SSD, and somehow the eMMC install got correupted too, so right now, both are wiped. Win10 21H1 USB installer, wouldn't boot from 16 and 32GB Adata UV128 drives, but will boot off of a TeamGroup 8GB USB2.0 drive, except, it goes to spinny-circle, sits there for like 5 minutes, then BSODs with DRIVER_PNP_WATCHDOG, and meanwhile, CapsLk won't toggle the LED.

So at this point, it seems that the 21H1 installer (from MCT) is incompatible with this laptop.

Downloaded Linux Mint 20.2 Cinnamon, burned to USB with rufus, binga-banga-boom, in less thn 15 minutes I had Linux installed, updated, and running, off of the internal emmc.

 

[SamirD]

How's it doing running linux? Faster than windows? What do you get on www.speed-battle.com?