Ninkear A15 Plus Review

After a detailed material with analysis and tests of the N14 Pro, Ninkear offered to send me their next model – the A15 Plus, which is built on the time-tested Ryzen 5700U platform. Perhaps, if you go to any online marketplace now, you can find hundreds of different offers of laptops based on the “red” platform, and even among them, models from Ninkear have something to stand out! Is it worth taking the A15 Plus for 60,000 rubles? Find out in today's review article!

Unboxing

Perhaps I can’t help but note my gratitude to Ninkear for the gift of the N14 Pro ultrabook: the device helps me a lot, taking into account the fact that we are going to implement an automotive-themed project (which in turn requires frequent exposure to the street), to have such a portable The gadget is at least convenient.

After the last review, the guys from Ninkear said that they liked my style of writing reviews, and especially that I pay attention to such an important aspect for many developers as the speed of clean builds of complex projects with tens of thousands of lines of code. Therefore, when I was offered to test another of their laptops based on the “red” platform, I agreed 🙂

The device came to me in a well-sealed box, inside of which there were two more small boxes: the first with a power supply, a wired mouse (the N14 Pro had a wireless one), and also a branded mousepad. The ultrabook is well packaged; in general, there is no doubt that it will arrive normally and the delivery service will not break it.

The design of the laptop resembles, first of all, technology from the well-known apple company. Perhaps this is some kind of trend in recent years, but it would be hard to call it bad – the ultrabook is very thin, almost entirely metal, and overall gives off a certain premium feel. The case is very similar to that of the N14 Pro, but our current model is much thinner – which can be written down as both pros (very compact) and cons (you need to be careful if the device needs to be thrown into a backpack or car).

Opening the laptop, we see a hefty touchpad with multi-touch support (that is, the ability to do operations a la zoom) and a very comfortable keyboard, which, by the way, is very similar to the one in the N14 Pro. Apparently, Ninkear did not reinvent the wheel and used one of the generic keyboards that can be easily found in China and ordered by part number. Small, but still a plus for maintainability! In addition, the keyboard has an adjustable LED backlight for working in the dark. It's a small thing, but nice.

Only one small nuance may upset some readers – this is a combined power button with a common keyboard. I personally also miss these tactile individual buttons a little, but alas, trends dictate their own rules!

Otherwise, the device does not cause any complaints in terms of appearance and, in general, is very resistant to scratches and other things typical for devices that are actively used in portable mode. Let's find out what's under the hood of the device!

Performance

As mentioned earlier, the ultrabook is built on the basis of a fairly current and proven Ryzen 7 5700U platform. Unlike the N14 Pro, which is built on a platform from Intel, the A15 Plus has significantly higher performance, primarily in 3D graphics: it’s hard to argue that the Radeon family GPU is much faster than the Iris XE in our time. Let's check out the detailed specifications of the A15 Plus:

CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 5700U with 8 cores/16 threads and a frequency of up to 4.3 GHz based on Zen 2 architecture, released on 7nm tech. process. The processor was released in 2021 and received 8 MB of L3 cache (shared), 512 KB of L2 cache (for each core separately), and also has a very “cold” disposition in the form of a TDP of 15W.
GPU: Radeon 512SP based on the GCN 5.1 (Vega II) architecture, which runs at up to 1.750MHz and uses some of the RAM as VRAM. The accelerator supports DX12, OGL 4.6, Vulkan 1.3 and SM 6.7. Almost all the latest standards!
RAM and SSD: 32GB DDR4 at 3200MHz. SSD – NVMe 1TB.
Battery: 57Wh. The manufacturer promises about 10 hours of battery life in normal mode (of course, if the processor uses 100% uptime, the battery will run out faster).
Display: 15.6″ matrix with a resolution of 1920×1080, made using IPS technology with a brightness of 400Nits. Its quality is quite good, although for some the brightness may seem too low.
Interfaces: 2x USB 3.0, MicroSD, 3.5mm headphone jack, as well as HDMI and full Type-C (both data transfer and charging), as well as Wi-Fi 2.4GHz/5.0GHz.
OS: Windows 11 Home.
Price: 63,000 rubles at the time of writing, or $675!

In my subjective opinion, the characteristics are very, very good for such a price range! I remember laptops for the same money in 2012-2013 (the same Samsung RV series), which offered very basic characteristics for the same money. And now, here, you can buy a very vigorous laptop not only for the office and surfing the Internet, but also for more serious work tasks!

Unlike the N14 Pro, the A15 Plus has virtually no UEFI settings. According to Ninkear, in almost all of their laptops they don’t even hide a debug mode in the release versions of the UEFI firmware, which gives access to the UART. Needless to say, if a device writes logs to the UART, diagnosing a non-working device is much easier?

Let's move on to the benchmarks. Everything here is classic: CPU-Z, GPU-Z, Furmark, and AIDA64. We start with CPU-Z, which provides more detailed information about our processor. The benchmark scores 510.9 parrots in single-threaded mode and 3596.9 parrots in multi-threaded mode – quite good, this is the level.

GPU-Z confirms our information about the GPU, and Furmark 2 produces ~12 FPS on a donut in FHD (this is a relatively normal result for embedding, FurMark is a very heavy benchmark). Well, we will test the gaming potential in a separate section of our review!

In AIDA64, I tested the CPU using two benchmarks: CPU Queen to calculate the performance of the ALU, and FPU Julia to test the floating point coprocessor. The result is very, very decent, on par with the desktop i7-7800K.

In everyday tasks, the device performs wonderfully: there are no problems when surfing pages, thanks to 32GB of fast DDR4 memory, the device can keep a couple of browsers open in parallel with several tabs and a parallel running video on YouTube, as well as some working software. Of course, the device is also suitable for the office, or, for example, diagnosing cars (relatively modern ones).

If you are a fan of GNU/Linux, then there are some problems with this – specifically on the A15 Plus, the latest release of Ubuntu worked with jambs: in the system itself, the keyboard buttons stuck for 1-2 seconds (most likely a “sluggish” bug). Everything is fine with Radeon drivers now (considering that AMD willingly shares specs and documentation for old video chips), the system supports almost all devices (I haven’t checked the cooling management).

Let's move on to the profile tests of the ultrabook, because the article is positioned as a review specifically for developers!

For the developer

As in the case of the review of the N14 Pro, we will conduct tests in several cases: compiling Android projects and working in Android-Studio, compiling .NET projects and using VS Community, as well as assembling hefty C++ projects with hundreds thousands of lines of source code! As a highlight, we will measure the compilation time of the latest Linux kernel for our device!

We start with Android Studio, which works very quickly, despite the general gluttony of the IDE from Google and JetBrains. There are no inconveniences during development; the layout and code editor works fine. Build time for my YouTube client project for Android 2.2 excluding Gradle refresh – 9 seconds.

Let's move on to .NET. Here I'm using VS2022 Community Edition, and I'm building my own homemade shooter using my own 3D engine. The game is small – only about 3 thousand lines of code, which can be assembled on the Ryzen 5700U in less than a second! Very, very smart! The IDE is fast and well optimized.

Let's build the big, cool Urho3D engine from source code as part of a C++ compilation test. Again, the compiler is VC2022 and the build time is only 55 seconds. This is in twice faster than the project build time on the N14 Pro (most likely due to the much faster SSD and Ryzen, which is good friends with parallel compilers). Intellisense works instantly.

Initially, I wanted to test the compilation time of the Linux kernel, but alas. Although, of course, you can scold me in the comments for the fact that a real Linux user assembles the kernel without these XTerms of yours, right in a regular text terminal!

Let's play

It's time to play! I installed several games, although it’s still worth considering that these are integrated graphics and there’s no point in running a fictitious cyberpunk game on it. So I've gone through a few of my favorite games from past years, which, however, can still load relatively budget and mid-budget laptops! Please note that all tests were carried out in portable mode for honesty.

We start with Black Mesa. The game produces an unstable 30 FPS at medium graphics settings in FHD. Despite the fact that BM runs on Source, the guys from Crowbar Collective forked one of the engine branches and significantly rewrote the renderer, which is why the game is able to load many fast desktop cards of previous years.

But with Fallout 4 the situation is more complicated. At medium settings in FHD and anti-aliasing disabled, the game barely manages 15 frames when in densely populated locations with presumably large overdraft.

GTA 5 laptop runs at relatively stable cinematic 24-30 FPS on “standard” graphics settings. Not as good as I would like, but overall ok.

Under the hood

Let's take the device apart and find out what's inside! As I said in the N14 Pro review, Ninkear laptops are very easy to disassemble: just unscrew the screws and unclip the tray clips. After this, the device board appears before us.

It’s very nice that the battery can be disconnected without completely disassembling the device – this is useful if you need to put the laptop on a shelf for a long time and you don’t want to let the battery go into a deep discharge.

The cooling system is made in the form of one large cooler, from which there are two heat pipes: one for the processor, the other for the hub.

And here we have the processor and hub:

The battery consists of several series-connected cans with a total capacity of 5Ah:

Otherwise, the ultrabook is designed very competently and is easy to maintain. Many readers will be able to easily disassemble it and clean it from dust and blockages. No messing around with the keyboard!

Conclusion

This is the review we got for the A15 Plus. Do you think the device is fast enough? Worth buying? Personally, in my opinion, yes, the ultrabook has a good price/quality balance and offers good performance for little money. At the same time, it is easy to maintain.

Pros of the device:

Fast “corn”: The ultrabook is perfect for working and performing most tasks. From the office to the assembly of heavy projects with complex assembly systems.
Good display: FHD IPS matrix is a balanced choice that allows you to not overload the not-so-fast installation, reduce the end-user costs of the device and at the same time please the user with good color rendition and excellent viewing angles.
Large amount of RAM: Thanks to 32GB of RAM, it is possible to run many programs simultaneously. But there is a minus to this – the memory is single-channel, albeit fast.
Silence: The Ultrabook is inaudible at all. It is extremely quiet even at 100% load and not to say that it is hot.
Good case: Structurally, the device does not cause any complaints. Nothing creaks or plays, everything is done at a decent level. The metal materials of the case leave a pleasant impression of the device.

Minuses:

Sound: The sound quality from the device's speakers is not very good. Not to say that it is completely bad, but the N14 Pro performs better in this regard. In any case, the problem is solved by connecting external speakers; fortunately, the A15 Plus left a 3.5mm jack.
The current version of Ubuntu does not work out of the box: Well, here some readers will say that I’m not a fool, a fool would patch the sluggish one for this platform and make the keyboard work normally. But at the end of the day, most readers of this review expect normal performance out of the box.
Low GPU performance: It’s hard to blame Ninkear here, but so far the situation on the embedded market has not changed much: in the 2000s, you could only play releases from 5-10 years ago on IGP, what now. But overall, why not replay the classics? 🙂

Is the A15 Plus right for you?

Office work and surfing: Easy! The laptop will cope with the tasks of surfing and office use without any problems.
Development: Thanks to the fast 5700U processor, the device quickly assembles large projects into 16 threads and provides a pleasant experience in the IDE even with many open large files.
Games: If you're a fan of games from the early to mid-2010s, why not?

Thanks to Ninkear for providing the device! You can purchase the device at official website companies with fast delivery throughout Russia, or to Yandex.Market.