BMAX S13

Bmax S13 13.3 inch Full Sized Keyboard Notebook

31.7 cm wide by 21.5 cm deep and 2 cm thick. The new Full Sized Keyboard Notebook BMAX S13 is not the most compact of the 13 inches with fine borders that we have seen on the market but it remains in the space of the 12 inch of old generation. A size that rhymes with a weight also fairly contained 1.3 Kg.

For the rest, the BMMX S13 is the worthy big brother of the range of machines released recently by the brand. We find the components present in the BMAX Y13 in 13.3 inch and the BMAX X14 in 14 inch. That is to say a solid Celeron Gemini Lake N4000 accompanied by 8 GB of RAM and 128 GB of SSD storage on an M.2 2280 port accessible via a hatch.

The performances will therefore, a priori, be the same. We will find a machine capable of overcoming all classic office and multimedia tasks: Word processing, spreadsheet, local video playback or streaming. It will be able to manage web sessions with a lot of tabs, until it depletes the resources of 8 GB of on-board memory. But also a little more exotic jobs that will range from programming in Scratch to 3D design in Fusion 360 or Sketchup through the piloting of a 3D printer in Cura. The machine will also be able to control image editing software such as Photoshop, execute video editing1 or launch old or light games.

The downside of this BMAX S13 is clearly as always in a professional approach to its use since the duo N4000 / 8 GB of DDR4 sticks out its tongue a bit in case of intensive use. We can easily edit a holiday photo to remove an unsightly element from the background with it, but doing it on 50 different images during the day is clearly more problematic. The machine will not have the comfort offered by a more muscular machine under Intel Core or AMD Ryzen with 16 GB of RAM. Even problematic with 3D games, if the BMax S15 can display games in streaming, it will be unable to launch modern 3D itself convincingly.

This difference is easily explained in the asking price for this machine which is negotiated around $250 …

And for this price, there is still a solid machine with a 13 FullHD IPS screen with wide viewing angles of 178° and fine screen borders. The keyboard is a classic QWERTY which offers a numeric keypad and which exploits the entire available space. A very large touch pad of 4.7 inch diagonal uses, meanwhile, a good part of the front space of the machine. It manages the various gestures of Windows 10 which comes with the machine taking into account up to 4 fingers on its surface.

The BMAX S13 offers a basic 0.3 MP webcam for video conferencing as well as a built-in microphone. Stereo speakers are also available. Its connection is classic on this type of diagonal even if some choices are difficult to justify. We thus find a USB 3.0 Type-A port on each side of the machine, a 3.5 mm stereo audio jack port, a power jack port but also a MicroSDXC port and a MicroHDMI port. Why use these ports on a vehicle of this caliber? We are on a 13 inch solution with 2 cm thickness, the manufacturer instead of sliding a full-format HDMI port and a classic SDXC card reader. It is probably an economy of scale. I’m not sure there is a big difference in motherboard between all BMax laptops.

There could also have been an Ethernet port, but the least expensive solution is to adapt the solution used for the other models to a minimum. Also, you will have to settle for Wifi-5 and Bluetooth 5.0 to communicate with other machines. This is the price to pay to enjoy a 13 inch of this type at $259.99.

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