Buy the GPD Win Mini 2025 here: https://joeysrh.link/WG_GPDWINMINI2025
What is the GPD Win Mini 2025?
The one problem with gaming laptops, is that they require just too much stuff.
You have your laptop, let’s pretend this is a gaming laptop and not just a random laptop I own, and it’s usually big, bulky, heavy, then you need a mouse because you can’t play many games just by using a keyboard and then other games you need a controller for then you need a cable to charge that controller and probably a case for it too and it all just becomes a lot.
Or, you can just buy a GPD Win Mini 2025, which is a clamshell gaming laptop with built in controls and the power to play quite a bit. Plus it’s sexy in white.
GPD is a rare company in the hardware space that has designs and products that have no competition or virtually none. I’ve had a bunch of their products by now – there’s the GPD Win 4 that we actually just looked at a month or so ago, has a nice slide up keyboard, is a super small form factor with a 6” screen and has mostly the same internals as the GPD Win Mini that we’ll talk about today, they also have a bigger version of the Win Mini called the Win Max 2, with a 10” screen, bigger keyboard and mostly the same internals as today as well.
But, my favorite of all the GPD products is the GPD Win Mini, and my white whale version of it has always been the white colored one, all puns intended.
Specs & how to buy
The Win Mini 2025 is stacked with specs – there’s an AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX370 processor inside of here with the AMD Radeon 890M GPU, this model here has 32GB of LPDDR5x 7500 MT/s RAM and 2TB of M.2 storage on a 2280 NVME, 7” native landscape display that’s also 1080p 120hz with variable refresh rate, USB4 40gbps port for eGPU support along with USB-C, USB-A and a microSD card slot, and we have WiFi 6E with Bluetooth 5.3 with a 45wh battery.
On the controls front, we have hall effect joysticks, analog triggers, rumble motors, L4 and R4 buttons and so on.
They basically stuff an entire mini PC into a handheld here and it just works. The HX370 is currently the fastest processor that you can get in one of these handhelds, and handles a lot of newer triple AAA’s nicely in a lot of scenarios which we’ll look at later.
You can grab one of these right off whatgeek’s website, using my code JOEY12 for 12% off and they have full worldwide shipping as well. They’re a pretty great third party reseller with a bunch of handhelds, including GPD’s other handhelds. Link in the description.
2025 vs. 2024
There’s a few differences to this years Win Mini over last years. They increased the width by 2mm on each side and the thickness by 1mm, the M.2 SSD is now a 2280 which is much better and they’ve added an amplifier to enhance audio quality since they did move the speakers to the front side instead of where they were before which was front facing near the controls. They’ve also updated the cooling on the device and moved the gaming switch to the left side.
Cooling is better
Not major changes, however I did find the cooling to be a lot better this year at higher TDP’s. The trade off is the fan is still quite loud in those scenarios, so better cooling, but same loud fan. I will say, I think they could have done a better job on the cooling or at the very least included a thermal pad or something for the SSD. The right side of the device gets noticeably hotter than the left, which is due to the SSD and so I personally opened it up and threw on a thermal pad to help lower the temps, took about five minutes and was really easy.
Overall though, this is just a much better Win Mini.
It’s so small & comfort
One thing that I think rarely comes through in video form when watching the Win Mini is just how small it is. There’s likely a lot of you that just got a new Retroid Pocket Flip 2 in and this is bigger than that of course, but not by an insane margin. For those of you with an Odin 2 Portal, it’s essentially just a bit bigger than the screen part of it. I could keep going and so on, but it’s a super small clamshell.
I’m actually a fan of the ergonomics of the Win Mini, you’d think with the blocky nature and the fact that it’s just a small laptop that it wouldn’t be that comfortable to hold – but surprisingly, it’s a lot better than you’d expect. The layout of the buttons, dpad and sticks make it super easy to use and also use the back of it without any real compromises. The only part that sometimes bothers me is the little hard rubber stoppers for the lid as they can dig into your palm sometimes.
Keyboard usage
There’s really two ways to use the device – with the controls and without. So for example, navigating a desktop OS or doing anything besides gaming and you’d be using a lot of the trackpad, the keyboard and so on. The keyboard can be a cramped experience at times, I tend to use it more for quick passwords, shortcuts, that sort of thing rather than writing out full sentences and emails and it works out nicely for that.
There was a time while playing with this where I was trying to create hotkeys for an emulator and ran out of ways to do combinations with the controls and it was a lightbulb moment for me where I was like, why am I trying to stuff hotkeys into controls when I have a full keyboard right here to use?
And that’s really the major benefit to the Win Mini over the Win 4 for example or other devices – you have a keyboard, right in front of you, it doesn’t involve sliding a screen up to access, or an extra accessory – no it’s right there, and it doesn’t get in the way of using the device as a normal gaming device, but you can use the keyboard when and if you want to. It’s a nice hybrid model that works exceptionally well.
Bazzite & Windows
A great benefit to the Win Mini is it is compatible with multiple operating systems and I personally partitioned by 2TB drive to use about 400GB for Windows and the rest is all for Bazzite which runs great. My Windows usage is mostly for Moonlight streaming, Emulation, Plex, connecting to a TV to watch or stream some things and so on with the rare Gamepass game like Doom the Dark Ages for example, but I’m mostly otherwise in Bazzite for all my gaming since I’ve pretty much moved my entire gaming library to Steam at this point. One thing that currently does not work on either operating system is L4 and R4 – GPD has yet to update the controller firmware and so we’re kind of waiting for those to work as they’re super useful as extra hotkeys especially in Bazzite.
Performance is great
Taking a look at some performance and there’s a few newer games that I wanted to check out with uncapped TDP, so a maximum of 30w. Expedition 33 is a game that I’ve been enamored with, currently in new game plus and wanted to see how well it’d play on the HX370 processor and it does quite well, low graphics preset, XeSS on Balanced and we don’t drop below 30 and usually 35-40 FPS.
For Doom the Dark Ages, another new release, and it’s actually very similar to Expedition 33 – above 30FPS with FSR on Performance, typically 35 to 40 and it’s pretty decent I’d say. Dropping to 720p for both games would likely get you above 40 always and you’d have a much better experience.
I’m not an Elden Ring player, so I’m right here at the start, but we’re within the 40s range here and likely could get a nice bump dropping down to 720p if you’d like – that’s good advice across the board if you’re looking to get a bit more performance out of some games, but overall pretty impressive here.
Assassin’s Creed Shadows is in a similar way to Elden Ring, we’re in the 30s and 40s, but stable framerate which matters more in my opinion. It’d be one thing if the frametimes were jumping all around, but we have nice stable gameplay.
Black Myth Wukong plays super well on here, typically in the 50’s at 1080p and really no issues at all. One day I’ll actually finish this game and make it past this area that I’ve been stuck in for a year.
I threw on the Steam Deck preset and Cyberpunk plays at a steady 30FPS throughout, at least in the beginning parts, but there’s lots of optimization you can do here if you want an even better framerate and experience.
I think the general takeaway performance wise is that the Win Mini packs a punch and can honestly play most of whatever you want. For me, that’s just been Fantasy Life at low TDP’s because that game is awesome and so much fun, but if you want to push it – you can push it.
Battery Life
When it comes to battery life, this is one of the parts that gets a bit compromised when looking at a device of this size because it’s hard to stuff a large battery inside of it for a lot of reasons. But, thanks to the HX370 processor, this is the first year where it feels like you can get a lot done with a lower TDP. The HX370, at an 18w TDP as I’ve tested in previous videos, matches what an ASUS ROG Ally X does at 28 watts. That’s a nice savings of 10w’s in TDP which translates to battery life too.
So if we look at low TDP gaming, like a 10w TDP assuming you’re actually using 10w total, you’d see roughly about 4 to 4 and a half hours of battery.
At 15 or 18w, which would be the highest you should go, depending on the game, you’d see roughly 2 and a half hours of battery, but usually less as the device will use more TDP than that for total power.
Battery life continues to be most of these devices achilles heel in a lot of ways, especially the smaller ones that can’t stuff a 70w or 80w battery inside.
Jack of all trades
Wrapping up the quick look for today and honestly, the GPD Win Mini 2025 is one of those devices that just sticks with you. It’s unique in the market, it’s compact and portable and it’s a jack of all trades in so many different situations for gaming, and being a laptop and so on.
It just has awesome versatility, especially with the built in keyboard – gaming device, travel laptop, docked to a TV to watch shows or movies and so on – it’s one of the rare devices that works well for strategy games too since it’s just a small laptop.
It’s an awesome device to have as a single x86 type handheld, that you can then compliment with something like an Odin 2 Portal for example, or the Retroid Pocket Classic or Mini, to get the best of all worlds – Windows, Linux and Android all in just two devices. You don’t need more than that.
What do you think about the GPD Win Mini 2025? It’s been around for a long time now, keeps getting updates year after year and I love seeing it get better as well.
