Today we are taking a look at the Kingbook K100 Laptop from Vastking. This 14-inch device tries to pack a lot of nice features into a small size and only costs $399.99.
Most of you probably know Vastking for their tablets and smartphone products, so in this review we will find out, if their latest laptop can keep up with their quality.
Table of Contents
Unboxing
After opening the box you will find the notebook, a quick-starter guide and a webcam spy protection, as well as a charger. The charger seems to be only sold with a US port.
So if you order this notebook in Europe, you will need an adapter. If pink is not your favorite color, don’t worry. There is also a space grey option.
Build Quality
The build quality is okay. At this price point, you just can’t expect the best of the best. The chassis flex is completely fine regarding this price.
I have seen far worse for more money. This notebook is entirely made out of plastic, and therefore feels really light.
The keyboard is giving away the low price point the most. It feels mushy, and the keystrokes really don’t feel satisfying if you are used to a better keyboard. The keys also feel quite different to each other, the sound of the keystrokes underlines that.
Luckily, the layout of the keyboard is quite standard, you even get full sized arrow keys. Overall, the keyboard could be better, but for that price it is decent enough.
Touchpad
The touchpad is surprisingly good. With its size of 12.5cm by 6.5cm it is really big for a 14-inch device. It uses the Microsoft precision touchpad driver, therefore multi finger gestures work really well.
The touchpad has a numpad printed on it, which you can activate by swiping down on the left side of the touchpad. You can do a right click by tapping with two fingers, or by pressing down on the right bottom area. Overall, the touchpad is really fun to use.
But if you are planning to use an external mouse with the notebook, you can deactivate the touchpad with one of the function keys on the keyboard.
Display
The 14” screen delivers an ok-looking picture quality with a resolution of 1920×1080 pixels. The bezels of the display are quite slim, which is nice.
Vastking claims a brightness of 220 nits, which is a little bit on the low end, compared to the typical 300 nits most notebooks have. Indoor, the screen brightness is completely fine, just don’t expect to use this laptop outdoors comfortably.
Vastking also claims a 72% coverage of the NTSC color space, which is a good value for that price point. The colors, just like the viewing angles, are quite good thanks to the IPS display. Unfortunately, I see quite a lot of screen bleeding while displaying dark images.
Performance
In this category, the Kingbook K100 really falls apart a bit. The Intel Celeron N4020 is a dual core SoC which was released at the end of 2019. It offers 2 cores, no hyperthreading and a core frequency of 1.1 up to 2.8 GHz.
It is only meant for light office work or web browsing. Doing anything else can bring the notebook to its limits, real multitasking is only partly possible.
For example, while setting up the notebook for this review, I installed all the available windows updates and maxed the device out at 100% for minutes.
The system become unresponsive; I couldn’t do anything else during that process. Here are some benchmark scores for better comparing the performance:
Intel Celeron N4020:
- Cinebench R15 (Multi Core): 144 Points
- Cinebench R15 (Single-Core): 79 Points
- Geekbench 5.3, 64bit (Multi-Core): 858
AMD Ryzen 3 3200U:
- Cinebench R15 (Multi Core): 335 Points
- Cinebench R15 (Single-Core): 128 Points
- Geekbench 5.3, 64bit (Multi-Core): 1661 Points
The AMD Ryzen 3 3200U chip is sold in notebooks in the same price range, but is almost two times as powerful. It’s the same story with the graphics card of both SoCs. If good performance for little money is your main concern, than this device is not for you.
If you only plan to use this notebook for some light web surfing and office activities, then you will be fine as long as you have some patience from time to time. One comfort point of the K100 is, that it never gets loud or hot while using.
The low performance is also probably the reason why the K100 uses Windows 10S, which is meant for lower end devices.
In this version you can only download programs via the Windows Store, and are you’re stuck with the Edge browser as a default. But, you can switch to a normal Window 10 version, if you wish to do so.
Ports
On the left side of the K1000 you will find a USB A Port, the charging port, a mini HDMI port as well as a USB type C port.
On the right side there is another USB A port, as well as a headphone jack and a micro SD slot. The USB C port unfortunately doesn’t support display port out or charging.
I find it kind of weird that Vastking didn’t go with a standard full size HDMI port. So you will need a special cable or an adapter for HDMI displays.
Battery
Vastking rates the runtime as up to 8h for this device. That seems accurate, if you are running the display on half brightness and don’t do any stressful work with the CPU.
That is a decent result. As the max brightness is already quite low, reducing it father down is only possible in a dim environment. Unfortunately, the K100 doesn’t support charging via USB C, so if you ever forget your charger, you are probably out of luck.
Also, as the CPU is so underpowered that a lot of basic tasks already max out the CPU and drain the battery unnecessary. Luckily, the charger is really light and easy to pack.
Summary
Some aspects of the Vastking KingBook K100 are really good considering the price point. The touchpad is really excellent. Its big, fun to use and the multi finger gestures work flawless. The amount of ports is decent and so is the battery runtime.
The IPS displays offers nice viewing angles but would clearly benefit from a brighter display. So far so good. Unfortunately, the performance leaves quite a lot to be desired. Some use cases won’t need any extra power though, and for those people this laptop could be a nice fitting device.
