Review of the laptop Prestigio SmartBook 141 C4: you will not be distracted from your studies

The Prestigio brand belongs to the large international holding ASBIS, which was founded thirty years ago in Belarus and is now headquartered in Limassol, Cyprus. The holding distributes both finished IT products and components for assemblers and system integrators in Central and Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Africa. The holding’s partners include such large companies as Apple, Intel, AMD, Microsoft, Samsung, Seagate Technology, Western Digital, Toshiba, Dell, Acer and Hitachi. In addition, the holding has two own trademarks Prestigio and Canyon. The second mainly specializes in various kinds of accessories, but the production “geography” of the first brand is much more interesting.

Under the Prestigio brand, a very wide and diverse range of products is currently being produced. These are various kinds of mobile devices (tablets, smartphones, smart speakers, batteries, keyboards), and laptops with monoblocks, and TVs, and even navigators with DVRs. All these products have one feature that is important for some consumers: they are available to the vast majority of users because their cost is very low. At the same time, it is important to note that Prestigio strives to produce products with an optimal combination of quality and cost, and quality is in the first place here. This is exactly what the developers conceived to make the new laptop Prestigio SmartBook 141 C4, designed for schoolchildren and students.

Let’s find out what is installed in it and for what tasks such a model can be suitable.

 

⇡#Packaging

Prestigio SmartBook 141 C4 comes in a compact cardboard box with the logo of the manufacturer and the name of the laptop model on the front side.

On the back of the box there is a sticker with detailed information about the laptop configuration and a list of interfaces.

Also, one more sticker, only now from the end of the box, you can determine the production date and color of the laptop.

The laptop comes with a power adapter, a quick guide with a warranty, screws for attaching the drive, and a soft cloth.

In addition, in the box there was an envelope-envelope made of thick fabric resembling felt, with two pretty buttons.

The Prestigio SmartBook 141 C4 is manufactured in China and comes with a one-year warranty. The recommended price of this laptop model is $500, but we found it in several online stores for a lower price of about $400.

 

⇡#Specifications

⇡#Design and ergonomics body

Prestigio SmartBook 141 C4 looks modest and neat. A small silver-colored rectangle (sometimes also dark gray) with rounded corners measures 334.0 × 220.5 × 19.9 mm and weighs just over 1.4 kilograms.

All panels are plastic and non-marking, and on the cover there is the name of the manufacturing company from chrome symbols.

On the base of the laptop, which is completely devoid of any ventilation grilles, you can find the model name, the name of the processor manufacturer, the serial number label and some on-duty pictograms.

A holographic sticker informing the user about Windows preinstalled on the laptop is also present here.

To prevent the laptop from slipping on the surface, four round rubber feet were placed on the base of the case.

Towards the front end, the laptop body tapers, giving the impression that it is thinner than the 19.9 mm stated in the specifications. In front, apart from a small notch, which is needed to make it easier to open the lid with a display, there is nothing else. By the way, to open the display, the base has to be held with the second hand.

Echoes the front and rear ends – no connectors or at least ventilation holes.

All ports are displayed on the side ends of the laptop case. These include a power adapter connector, a USB 3.0 Type-A port, a mini-HDMI video output, a USB 3.0 Type-C port, a combo mini-jack for headphones or a microphone, a microSD card reader, and a USB 2.0 port.

Overall, for a laptop at an ultra-budget price level, very good.

In general, the Prestigio SmartBook 141 C4 looks decent and is of high quality, we have no complaints about its appearance.

Display angle is 135 degrees, it is securely fixed in any position.

⇡#Input Devices

Prestigio SmartBook 141 C4 is equipped with a membrane-type keyboard without a numeric keypad. But there is an additional column with the Home, PgUp, PgDn and End buttons.

Above them is the laptop power button.

The alphanumeric keys are 15.5 x 15.5 mm, the function keys are 13.5 x 9.5 mm, and both Shift and Enter are larger.

Key travel is 1.3mm. Clicking on them is silent, typing (by the standards of laptops) is convenient. There is also a dim white backlight, adjustable in two levels and automatically turning off after 20 seconds of inactivity.

On top of the function keys, the power indicators and NumLock with CapsLock are displayed. On the same panel, at the same distance from each other, there are holes for the built-in microphones.

The touchpad in the laptop is two-button, with support for simultaneous touch with four fingers. Its dimensions are 114.5 × 74 mm.

Note that the surface of the touchpad is rough, so you will have to get used to working with it.

The top bezel of the display houses a 0.3 megapixel (640 × 480) webcam.

The quality of shooting can hardly be called satisfactory, but in budget models, as a rule, there are no better cameras.

 

⇡#Display

Prestigio SmartBook 141 C4 is equipped with a 14-inch IPS-matrix with Full HD resolution (1920 × 1080 pixels). According to the MonInfo report, the matrix was released in 2017 and is labeled CMN14D4. An IPS-matrix in a laptop for that kind of money is already good news: at least its viewing angles and image stability will be better than its TN counterparts in devices from the same price range. At the same time, it’s definitely not worth waiting for any fine-tuning – such matrices are put in laptops of a completely different class.

We tested the ultrabook display with X-Rite i1 Display Pro and Argyll CMS software with DispcalGUI GUI. All measurements were taken prior to display calibration.

It should not be surprising that in fact the Argyll test was not passed on any key parameter, and the DeltaE deviation in relation to the white point was 6.12 units, with a norm of no more than 2. At the same time, in terms of color temperature, the display is close to the reference 6500 K in everything range, and even keeps it pretty stable.

With the gamma curve, the situation is not so rosy – light shades are very underexposed.

At the same time, the curves of individual colors leave hope for the possibility of comfortable work behind such a display.

Calibration almost failed to fix the main parameters of the display – to work with color, at least the width of the color range is not enough here, and there is nowhere to get it from.

As for the brightness of the display, the maximum value reaches 214 nits, and the minimum is 11 nits. The brightness curve on the graph is very close to a straight line.

The uniformity of the display backlight is also not the most ideal: problems are visible throughout the lower third of the display and half of the upper edge.

We repeat, at such a cost of the laptop itself, we did not expect anything better. But there was a chance to get worse: it’s good that there is still an IPS-matrix, and not TN, as is most often the case in laptops of this class.

 

⇡#Internal device and accessories

We were unable to remove the bottom cover from the Prestigio SmartBook 141 C4: we unscrewed all the screws, opened the latches, but somewhere in the central part the panel was very tightly glued, so we will disassemble its hardware configuration using information -diagnostic utilities. AIDA64 Extreme will provide us with summary information, and we will evaluate each component separately using other programs.

The motherboard is based on the AMD K15 IMC chipset and has BIOS version 0.30.5 dated August 3, 2020.

As a central processor, a modest dual-core AMD A4-9120e (Stoney Ridge with Excavator microarchitecture), made according to the 28-nm process technology, is installed here.

Its base frequency is 1.5 GHz, and in turbo mode it can increase up to 2.2 GHz. The TDP level of this processor is only 15 watts.

The laptop has four gigabytes of DDR4 RAM. The laptop specifications list a memory frequency of 2.133 GHz, but according to several diagnostic utilities, the actual memory frequency was only 1.866 GHz.

The memory works in single-channel mode with the main timings 13-13-13-30-43 CR1.

The bandwidth of such memory is low, and the latency is above 119 ns. We will demonstrate its results in more detail in the section with tests.

The graphics in the Prestigio SmartBook 141 C4 is handled by the AMD Radeon R3 core built into the processor, which borrows 256 MB from the RAM.

The laptop doesn’t have a separate drive, so it’s not surprising that CrystalDiskInfo didn’t detect it.

It is replaced by 64 GB of eMMC memory (like a “flash drive”), also soldered on the board. The performance of such a drive is also low.

In addition, more than half of it is already occupied by Windows 10 Pro installed on a laptop. However, the fact that the Prestigio SmartBook 141 C4 has a hatch on the base, under which there is a seat for a 2.5-inch drive, saves.

You can install a SATA SSD here, reinstall Windows on it – and thus significantly improve the performance of the disk subsystem.

There is no wired network adapter in the laptop, and the wireless one is implemented by the Intel Dual Band Wireless-AC 3165 controller.

It is 802.11ac certified and supports 2.4GHz and 5GHz bands.

An unidentified Realtek codec is responsible for the sound in the laptop, and the signal is output through two stereo speakers located at the front of the base of the laptop case.

Despite the budget class of this laptop model, the volume of the speakers is quite sufficient for a room of about 17 square meters, and at the maximum level nothing wheezes or whistles in the laptop.

⇡#Cooling system, efficiency and noise level

Cooling system Prestigio SmartBook 141 C4 passive type – inside the processor and memory installed copper plate-heat spreader with thermal pads. The laptop does not have any special operating modes – both from the mains and from the battery it works in exactly the same way.

To evaluate the efficiency of CPU cooling, we used the powerMAX utility (in AVX mode), and the monitoring parameters were read and displayed by the HWiNFO64 utility. Testing was conducted at an indoor temperature of approximately 24.5 degrees Celsius running the operating system Windows 10 Pro x64 with the latest available drivers and updates.

The result of the stress test is as follows.

Under load, the laptop processor always runs at 1.5 GHz until its temperature reaches 77 degrees Celsius. Further, the processor frequency is “cut off” to 1.1 GHz, and the temperature stabilizes at 65-66 degrees Celsius. At the same time, we note a noticeable heating of the base of the laptop – for example, holding it on your knees will be uncomfortable. However, during daily work with the Prestigio SmartBook 141 C4 you will not see such temperatures. The maximum that we managed to fix is ​​54 degrees Celsius on the processor. With all this, the laptop works absolutely silently.

 

⇡#Performance testing

The performance of the Prestigio SmartBook 141 C4 is rather modest, or rather, the most modest among the laptops we have tested recently. We simply have nothing to compare it with at present, and if we take the weakest model that I tested about a year ago – Honor MagicBook 14 (still on the old AMD Ryzen 5 3500U), which now costs about $ 700, then Prestigio SmartBook 141 C4 in similar tests, it is at least four times behind it, and in some tests, such as Cinebench, it is 30 times behind. Below are screenshots of individual benchmarks.

The overall impression of working with the Prestigio SmartBook 141 C4 can be summed up in two words: patience is needed. The laptop is unhurried, it is thoughtful, even when you just press the button to open the Start menu. The Microsoft Edge browser starts in 8-10 seconds, and each new tab has to wait 2 seconds. The same is true with office applications, although after loading them there is no discomfort at work. At the same time, you can open, for example, Word, Excel and a browser with a couple of tabs. Windows boot takes at least 90 seconds with a minimum of installed programs. There were reports on the Web that videos from Youtube in 1080p and full screen mode are not played on this laptop (only 720p), but we did not encounter such a problem – everything worked fine. The only inconvenience is a delay of 2-3 seconds when switching to Full HD mode.

In addition to performance tests, we conducted a flash test of the speed of the laptop’s USB ports. Testing was carried out by simply copying a single file from a 64 GB flash drive with a read speed of almost 200 MB / s. The results were rather unexpected.

Not a single port showed its specification speed, but Type-C surprised most of all with its modest 33.9 MB / s. We dare to assume that the point here, most likely, is not in the reduced bandwidth of the ports themselves, but in the performance of the laptop’s flash drive soldered on the board, and of the central processor to the heap.

 

⇡#Autonomous

The laptop comes with an adapter marked K-Q7D0122000E with a power of 24 W (12 V, 2.0 A).

It is compact and lightweight (120 grams), and the cable is 145 cm long. In turn, the laptop itself has a lithium-ion battery with a capacity of 35.52 Wh (4800 mAh).

Despite the modest capacity of the built-in battery, the laptop takes a long time to charge. If during the charge it is closed (in sleep mode), then it will take at least 2.5 hours to fill up to the maximum. And if the laptop is operated at this time, then the battery fills up in at least 4.5 hours, or even more (if resource-intensive applications are launched).

In terms of battery life, we did not expect much from the Prestigio SmartBook 141 C4, but nevertheless, the laptop managed to hold out in office work emulation for a little more than 5 hours, in game mode (although we would not recommend trying to play on it) – three and a half hours and almost five hours when playing video in full screen mode.

In addition, the display brightness was fixed at 200 nits (95%), and network connections and sound were not turned off to create the most realistic laptop operating conditions. In general, normal results for such a battery, hardware configuration and 14-inch display. Let’s summarize.

 

⇡#Conclusion

The Prestigio SmartBook 141 C4 has one major advantage over many other laptop models – low cost. It’s hard to find another ~$450 laptop that has a 14-inch IPS screen that can handle basic learning tasks. These include creating and editing texts, working with spreadsheets or presentations, watching videos or surfing the Web – all this Prestigio SmartBook 141 C4 can and can do. Yes, the laptop is not fast, it requires some patience for any actions and operations, but it somehow copes with its tasks.

Among the advantages, we note the silent operation of the laptop, the ability to install a 2.5-inch SSD, a comfortable and silent keyboard, a card reader and a calm design, as well as an interesting envelope-case in the kit. The disadvantages, in addition to those already indicated, include a serious heating of the case in stress tests, a slow storage medium, slow USB ports, a touchpad that is not very pleasant to the touch, long charging and an average level of autonomy. However, perhaps, for this money, it is hardly possible to expect something more from a laptop, so the Prestigio SmartBook 141 C4 should still find its owners.

FAQ Prestigio smartbook 141 c4

Does the notebook PSB141C04CGP_DG have a slot for an HDD upgrade?

Yes, the PSB141C04CGP_DG notebook has a slot for a 2.5-inch HDD, allowing users to upgrade the internal storage for more space.

What type of USB ports are available on this notebook?

This notebook features both USB 2.0 and USB Type-C ports, offering a range of connectivity options for various devices and peripherals.

How does the backlit keyboard enhance the use of the notebook?

The backlit keyboard on the notebook improves visibility in low-light conditions, making it easier to type accurately and comfortably in various lighting environments.

Can the AMD A4-9120E CPU handle multimedia tasks effectively?

The AMD A4-9120E CPU in the notebook is capable of handling basic multimedia tasks, but its performance might be limited for more demanding applications.

What makes the 14.1-inch screen suitable for watching videos?

The 14.1-inch high-quality IPS screen provides clear and vivid visuals, making it suitable to comfortably watch videos and enjoy multimedia content.

Does this notebook include a microSD card slot?

Yes, this notebook includes a microSD card slot, allowing users to easily expand the internal memory with a microSD card.

How does the notebook serve as a portable medium for work and entertainment?

This notebook, with its compact 14.1-inch size and versatile connectivity options including USB Type-C, serves as a portable medium, ideal for both work and entertainment on-the-go.

What are the advantages of the notebook’s attractive price point?

The notebook’s attractive price point makes it an accessible option for users looking for a budget-friendly yet capable device for everyday use, study, or light multimedia tasks.

How can the notebook be considered the best assistant for users?

This notebook can be considered the best assistant for users who need a reliable, affordable, and portable device for everyday tasks, internet browsing, and multimedia consumption.

Is it possible to upgrade the internal memory of the notebook?

Yes, it is possible to upgrade the internal memory of the notebook, either by using the slot for a 2.5-inch HDD or through the microSD card slot, providing flexibility for users who need more storage space.