Teclast F15R Laptop Preview: A 14″ Thin CNC Metal Notebook Under $400

Teclast, a Chinese tablet, and notebook manufacturer have always provided some excellent budget-friendly products. The new Teclast F15R laptop is another recent addition to its notebook/laptop lineup featuring the same promising CNC metal quality, incredibly thin chassis, an almost frameless FHD display, and Quad-Core power-efficient performance. All these jaw-dropping highlights not for the lowest but competitive price tag under $400 in the 14-inches notebook lineup.

Let’s dive into the details of this product to know what’s Teclast F15R laptop offers for that much bucks:

Teclast F15R Laptop – Quality & Hardware Defining a Chinese Notebook

Design & Appearance

Starting with the design and appearance, which is the greatest highlight of the notebook, Teclast never disappoints us when it has the budget to make a laptop truly stunning. From stunning, I mean the premium and time-consuming metal CNC built of the Teclast F15R Laptop. You can feel the smoothness while holding it in your hand. It’s just pure metal.

The CNC cutting around the chassis borders, touchpad, and the keyboard section can be clearly seen. This CNC process matches the much famous Asus Zenbook, showing an accurate and clean process.

The new hinge design brings some freshness to the Teclast notebook and is much stylish and stronger than the previous traditional hinge design. More importantly, this allows the lid to open and close smoothly with one hand.

Much to our surprise, the thickness of the notebook must be mentioned as well which is 13mm. I don’t know how they managed to make it that thin despite the limited 14″ size and low budget. As a whole, the laptop occupies a space of 36.00 x 25.00 x 1.30 cm which is equivalent to a standard 14-inch laptop but with better thickness like said. Concerning the weight, the notebook weighs around 1.8 kg which is considered lightweight because we have pure metal as the chassis.

Keyboard & TrackPad

Despite being a 14″ laptop, Teclast somehow manages to add a full-size keyboard. The keyboard matches the dark greyish color of the chassis and the figures are printed in white. Moreover, we do have an advantage of the numeric pad, however, in a 14″ laptop, this means that the key spacing is pretty less allowing you to accidently press two buttons at a time. But that’s a rookie problem since with time you get used to the keyboard. However, the keystroke is great. The best part is that the keyboard has white LED backlighting added to it for typing in dark.

I really like how Teclast F15R Laptop has can oversized trackpad/touchpad. This is too rare to witness in Chinese budget laptops because either the trackpad is too small or too slippery. F15R’s trackpad is none of them but a precise one supporting smart gestures such as two fingerprint vertical and horizontal scroll, pinch to zoom in and out. Though the clicking is still somewhat noisy. That’s okay for the other features the trackpad offers.

Screen & Display

Another selling point of the Teclast F15R Laptop is the display. Teclast boasts how they managed to fit a 15.6-inch 16:9 IPS display with Full HD resolution of 1920×1080 pixels in size a 14″ inch laptop.

Teclast uses the term ‘frameless’, though the display is not frameless the screen-to-body ratio is interestingly 82%, and the side frames are only 7 mm thick. Since the display is IPS you can expect a clear side view from a maximum 170 degrees. The color reproduction and contrast are much better than the HD LCD display used in laptops at this range. Teclast doesn’t mention about the laminated display since it’s not laminated and the screen appears to be glossy as well. None the less, a Full-HD IPS display with narrow bezels is what I care about.

Hardware & Interface

Moving to the hardware section, you won’t get a 9th Core i7 or i9 inside a budget-friendly laptop under $400. However, the processor you get is still good since Teclast always focuses on providing energy efficient configuration. So under the hood, we have a quad-core (14 nm) Intel Celeron N3450 (Gemini Lake) processor running at a max frequency of 2.4 GHz (4 MB Cache) accompanied by an integrated Intel UHD Graphics 600 (200-700 MHz). The SoC is combined with a nice 8 GB LPPDR4 RAM and a 256 GB SSD (M.2) for quick start and multiple tasking. Teclast says that since RAM and storage aren’t attached permanently to the board, they can be easily replaced.

Teclast F15R Laptop also follows the latest trend of adding a USB Type-C port. Other ports include two USB 3.0, HMDI, a microSD card slot, 3.5 mm hybrid audio jack and a separate DC port for charging. Concerning the wireless features, there’s the Bluetooth 4.0 module, WiFi 802.11ac, and a 1MP webcam on the top border of the screen. It runs Windows 10 Home Edition as the OS.

Last but not least, with a massive 41800mAh battery, the laptop can run up to 7 hours with average use and can play video playback for 5 hours continuously.

In short, performance wise it’s a low powered 14″ laptop with a glorious 15.6-inch Wide IPS FHD display, a premium CNC metal built, and numerous connectivity options for a price under $400.

Selling Points

• CNC metal built
• Full-Size Keyboard with Numeric Pad
• Backlighting added to Keyboard
• Huge trackpad size
• 15.7-inch IPS FHD display inside a 14-inch laptop
• Thin Bezels
• 7 hours of battery life
• Numerous connectivity options
• 8GB + 256GB M.2 SSD

Price & Availability

You can grab Teclast F15R laptop from Geekbuying for a price of $379.99. It’s only available in one color option which is Grey. Here’s the link to the store: