CHUWI MiniBook X N150 vs U300 (feat. Omarchy)
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I put two CHUWI MiniBook X laptops side by side: an N150 model and a U300 model. They have the same shape and thickness, right down to the keyboard and ports. With the screens off, they’re hard to tell apart.
I installed Omarchy Linux on both. I was curious how much faster the different CPU would make the U300, but once I turned them on, something else caught my eye first: the screen.
The more I used them, the more I leaned toward the U300. It was brighter, and the browser felt a little snappier. Then, toward the end of filming, its display glitched. Turning it off and back on gets the display working again, so I’ve decided to keep using the U300.
The same wallpaper looks different
The U300’s screen was a little brighter. On the N150, though, the red sunset in the Omarchy wallpaper looked richer. Side by side, the U300 looked a little washed out.[1]
For color alone, I think it comes down to taste. I’ll be using this outdoors too, so I preferred the brighter screen. I didn’t measure brightness with a meter, though. This is just how the two looked next to each other, and exposure and reflections also affect the photos.
Turning down the brightness revealed another difference
When I filmed the N150’s screen at lower brightness, I could see flickering in the camera image. That prompted me to check the backlight settings. The PWM frequencies I found in the firmware’s panel settings and registers were 200Hz for the N150 and 20,000Hz for the U300.
PWM controls brightness by switching the backlight on and off very quickly. Here, 20,000Hz is the frequency of that signal, not a claim that the screen refreshes 20,000 times a second. Both displays were set to run at about 50Hz during this comparison.
| Item | N150 | U300 |
|---|---|---|
| Backlight PWM setting | 200Hz | 20,000Hz |
| Display refresh rate during comparison | About 50Hz | About 50Hz |
These are settings I read, not measurements of the actual light waveform with a sensor. They don’t let me say that the U300 never flickers or is better for your eyes.
Does that snappier feel show up in the numbers?
The N150 has 4 cores and 4 threads; the U300 has 5 cores and 6 threads. I wanted more than a subjective comparison, so I ran some CPU benchmarks too. These results came from the one unit of each model I own, tested on 2026-09-15.
| Test | N150 | U300 | U300 / N150 |
|---|---|---|---|
| sysbench single-thread | 1,115.54 events/s | 1,383.26 events/s | 1.24× |
| sysbench all threads | 3,084.26 events/s | 5,830.77 events/s | 1.89× |
| 7-Zip overall | 13,447 MIPS | 28,423 MIPS | 2.11× |
Higher is better. sysbench measures CPU computation throughput in events/s; 7-Zip gives a combined compression and decompression score in MIPS.
The gap was about 24% with a single thread and about 89% with all threads. The 7-Zip score was a little more than double. That doesn’t mean every program runs twice as fast, but the difference I felt wasn’t just in my head.
Similar scrolling, faster calculations
I also timed how long it took the browser to create and sort a 1,000,000-item array. The U300 took about 44% less time. Scrolling a local test page, on the other hand, gave 50fps on both.
| Test | N150 | U300 |
|---|---|---|
| Create and sort a 1,000,000-item array Lower is better | 611.4ms | 340.2ms |
| Scroll a local page | 50fps | 50fps |
With the displays running at about 50Hz, scrolling landed around that limit on both. Matching at 50fps doesn’t mean they’re equally fast at the calculations behind the scenes. Still, the recorded Chrome versions, window sizes, and scaling settings differed. It’s more accurate to say this was the difference between the two devices as I was using them, rather than a CPU comparison with every condition matched.
4K playback was harder to pin down. From 1 minute 43 seconds into the video, I tried playing the same clip on both. One was initially at 720p, so I switched it to 4K, and I also tried changing the power mode. At times one looked smooth while the other stuttered. I didn’t match the codecs or buffer state, or count dropped frames, so I don’t want to draw a conclusion about 4K playback from this scene alone.
I tried local speech recognition too
It didn’t get much time in the video, but there was also a fairly large gap in local speech recognition with Whisper. I processed the same 33.288-second synthetic speech clip using the Vulkan backend.
| Whisper model | N150 | U300 |
|---|---|---|
| small | 18.36s | 10.10s |
| medium | 53.71s | 28.31s |
| large-v3 | 100.24s | 51.51s |
Transcription time excluding model loading. Lower is better. Each entry is the final single run for that model and device.
The difference is easy to see with medium. Transcribing the 33-second clip took 53.71 seconds on the N150 and 28.31 seconds on the U300. Including model loading, the totals were 55.29 seconds and 29.32 seconds respectively. That’s a welcome difference if you want to do dictation locally.
This is separate from the cloud dictation I normally use. I only checked the processing time for one synthetic speech clip, not Korean recognition accuracy or latency in a real-time conversation.
The battery numbers aren’t enough to choose by
During filming, the power readings showed 10W on one device and 3W on the other. Those numbers suggested a big difference in battery life, but the battery percentages seemed to fall at a similar rate.
I didn’t match the brightness and workload and run both batteries down, so I don’t know which one actually lasts longer.
I was leaning toward the U300, but…
Up to this point, I thought I’d pick the U300 given the choice. I’ll be using it outdoors, so I liked the brighter screen, and it was faster too. I said as much in the video.
Then, while I was filming some extra footage, the U300’s display ended up like this. I hadn’t encountered this on the N150. It happened again after I briefly stopped recording and logged in.[1]
The glitch and its recurrence appear from 2 minutes 59 seconds. Turning the laptop off and back on restores the display when it glitches. I don’t know whether the cause is the hardware, Omarchy, or a driver.
So which would I choose?
On brightness and speed alone, I’d still choose the U300. They may look identical, but once I turned them on and used them, I could feel the difference. Tasks that needed some computation also meant less waiting.
The screen does glitch occasionally, but turning the laptop off and back on gets it working again. I’m going to keep using the slightly faster U300 and let the N150 go.
Measurement notes
- I compared the one N150 and one U300 I own on 2026-09-15. Panels from other production batches, or results under Windows, may differ.
- The system records for the CPU tests show Omarchy 4.0.3-1, AC power, and performance mode. Each sysbench run lasted 10 seconds with a prime-number upper limit of 20,000; 7-Zip used all threads. The initial system load was not the same.
- These are not averages of multiple independent measurements. I replaced some entries with retest results and did not record the system state afresh each time.
- Browser versions, window sizes, and scaling settings differed. Screen brightness, color, and 4K playback are visual impressions; the PWM values came from firmware settings and registers.
To see the screens in motion, watch the comparison video.