CHUWI CoreBook Air Plus 16 review – Part 3: Ubuntu 25.1…

We’ve already checked CHUWI CoreBook Air Plus 16 hardware in the first part of the review, before testing the AMD Ryzen 5 6600H laptop with Windows 11 Pro, and today I’ll report my experience using the CoreBook Air Plus 16 laptop with Linux using Ubuntu 25.10…

We’ve already checked CHUWI CoreBook Air Plus 16 hardware in the first part of the review, before testing the AMD Ryzen 5 6600H laptop with Windows 11 Pro, and today I’ll report my experience using the CoreBook Air Plus 16 laptop with Linux using Ubuntu 25.10 distribution. The Ubuntu review will include system information, benchmarks, YouTube 4K and 8K video playback, feature testing, storage and WiFi 6 performance, and measurement of fan noise and power consumption/battery life.

The initial plan was to install Ubuntu 26.04 (daily image) on the laptop in dual boot configuration with Windows 11 Pro. So I resized the Windows partition in Disk Management to leave a 125GB partition for Ubuntu. I downloaded a daily Ubuntu 26.04 ISO (February 28, 2026), and created a startup disk on my Ubuntu 24.04 laptop using an 8GB USB flash drive. I plugged the USB flash drive into the CHUWI CoreBook Air Plus 16 laptop and entered the BIOS by pressing the F2 key in order to select the USB drive as the boot device.

The good news is that Ubuntu Resolute Raccoon (Development branch) can run on the laptop, but nothing happens when clicking on the Install Ubuntu icon. I noticed that the ubiquity installer was not installed, so I tried to do that manually, but many errors appeared. Testing Ubuntu 26.04 from a slow USB drive might not be ideal, so instead, I decided to switch to Ubuntu 25.10, and the installation went smoothly.

The only little issue was that the laptop would still boot directly into Windows, and I was not shown the Grub menu. I just went to the AMI Aptio Setup again and changed the Boot priority in the BIOS. Going to the Settings->About window in Ubuntu 25.10 confirms we have a “CHUWI Innovation and Technology_SHenzhen_co.,Ltd CoreBook Air Plus” model powered by a 12-thread AMD Ryzen 5 6600H processor paired with 16GB of RAM and a 512.1 GB drive.

The System Details window shows Ubuntu 25.10 64-bit with GNOME 49, Wayland windowing system, and Linux 6.17 kernel. The utility detects a 12-thread AMD Ryzen 5 6600H CPU clocked up to 4,566 MHz with 16 GB of RAM, a 122.48 GB rootfs partition on a 512 GB G932E NVMe SSD, a 1920×1200 integrated display, HDMI output, a Luxvisions Innotech USB webcam, a Realtek RTL8852BE wireless module with WiFi and Bluetooth, two audio devices, and a 60Wh battery.

It looks good so far. The idle temperature range is reported to be 50.9°C. No throttling was explicitly reported by the utility, but the temperature reached up to 95.0°C (THM LIMIT CORE in ryzenadj, see below), and the CPU frequency dropped during cpuminer: Having said that, the 7-zip benchmark results between runs indicated throttling did not occur (or only mininal throttling) during that test.

The full log can be found in /var/log/sbc-bench.sh. We can check the PL1 and PL2 power limits with ryzenadj, after disabling secure boot in the BIOS.: For reference, the PL1 and PL2 power limits were set to 35W (PBP) and 45W (MTP)  in Windows 11. Geekbench 6.6.0 can help us evaluate the single-core and multi-core performance on the AMD Ryzen 5 6600H CPU in the CoreBook Air Plus 16 laptop. Let’s start GPU testing with Unigine Heaven Benchmark 4.0 for 3D graphics performance evaluation.

The laptop could render the scene at an average of 16 FPS and yield a score of 402 points at the display’s 1920×1200 resolution (rather than the usual 1920×1080 resolution we use with mini PCs). It feels on the low side, but we’ll check that in the benchmark comparison table further below. A 4K 30 FPS (VP9) video played smoothly for over 6 minutes with only 18 frames dropped out of 11,737. A 4K 60 FPS AV1 video was perfectly watchable for 5 minutes with a few more dropped frames (370 out of 18,836).

I didn’t test 8K 60FPS on the same AV1 video for long, so it was a disaster from the start, basically a slide show… It’s the same experience as in Windows, and it may not matter that much since the laptop does not offer 8K-capable video outputs. One issue was that the audio didn’t work at all, at least not through the internal speakers. Those are detected and not muted in pavucontrol and alsamixer, but I couldn’t hear anything.

The Conexant SM6180 audio codec is apparently problematic in Linux. I tried to play around with Jack retasking, but I couldn’t find a combination that worked. The good news is that I could get audio through speakers connected to the 3.5mm audio jack, an HDMI TV, and Bluetooth earbuds. So audio is working except for the internal speakers. I also took the opportunity to test the webcam and microphone with guvcview, and both the video and audio could be recorded into an MKV video.

Let’s now run Speedometer 2.0 in Firefox to evaluate web browsing performance. The CoreBook Air Plus 16 laptop managed 253 runs per minute. Since we haven’t reviewed any laptops recently, I’ll compare the Ubuntu 25.10 benchmark results for the CHUWI CoreBook Air Plus 16 laptop with three mid-range mini PCs: the Beelink EQi13 Pro (Intel Core i5-13500H), GEEKOM A5 (AMD Ryzen 7 5800H), and GEEKOM A6 (AMD Ryzen 7 6800H).

All three were tested with Ubuntu 24.04 rather than Ubuntu 25.10. Some of the results are the same as in Windows, notably lower multi-core performance of the hexa-core processor compared to octa-core or 12-core processors, as one would expect, and the relatively low memory bandwidth of the LPDDR5 chips used in the laptop. What’s more surprising is the low score in Unigine Heaven Benchmark 4.0, since the CHUWI CoreBook Air Plus 16 laptop was competitive in that respect against mini PCs in Windows 11 Pro, and reached 41.7 FPS in the same benchmark.

That would be 3,189 MB/s sequential reads and 3,034 MB/s sequential writes, which compares to 3400.14 MB/s sequential read speed and 3170.72 MB/s sequential write speed using CrystalDiskMark on Windows 11. Close enough. We also tested the USB 3.2 ports using the lsusb utility and the iozone3 storage benchmark to measure the transfer speed with ORICO M234C3-U4 M.2 NVMe SSD enclosure. We didn’t test the USB 2.0 Type-C port since we don’t have a compatible USB 2.0/3.0 storage device.

For reference, here are the results of the USB 3.2 Type-C port (left side, closer to the user): Roughly the same as in Windows, and the 5 Gbps port delivers relatively lower performance than the expected 400 MB/s. The 10 Gbps USB ports are also slightly slower than expected, but nothing dramatic. We tested 5GHz WiFi 6 performance using iperf3, a Xiaomi Mi Router AX6000 router, and AAEON’s UP Xtreme i11 Edge mini PC (2.5GbE) on the other end.

Bluetooth also worked better than in Windows. Besides being able to use Bluetooth earbuds (Redmi Buds Play 6), I could also transfer a photo from my Android smartphone to the laptop without issue, something that would not work on Windows, as the connection would continuously drop after pairing. I ran a stress test on the 12-thread AMD Ryzen 5 6600H CPU while monitoring the CPU temperature and frequency using tools such as Psensor and the sbc-bench.sh script.

The AMD Ryzen 5 6600H CPU quickly reaches 95°C and stays there for a few minutes (about 5 minutes) before the CPU temperature drops to around 91°C and the CPU frequency to 3270 MHz (from around 3400 MHz). So there’s some thermal throttling, at least in a room at about 28°C, but it’s not too bad. The laptop’s fan is hardly noticeable when idle or performing light tasks, but it becomes fairly loud, albeit not in a massively annoying way, when running heavy loads such as CineBench R23.

My air conditioner is usually noisier than the fan of the laptop. After turning the air conditioner off, I measured the noise with a sound level meter placed close to the screen and on top of the keyboard, approximately 5 cm from the fan ventilation holes: I tested battery life after charging the laptop fully to 99%, setting the brightness to maximum, and disabling automatic suspend and dim screen.

The workload was a mix of YouTube video playback (2 hours), web browsing, and idle time. It took a little over 4 hours to discharge from 99% to 8%, surprisingly a little longer than on Windows, but since the same range (3h30+). YouTube video playback and the stress tests were done with the brightness set to maximum. The longer battery life can be explained by the lower power consumption under Linux.

The CHUWI CoreBook Air Plus 16 works fairly well as a Linux laptop when running on Ubuntu 25.10. The main issue is that the built-in speakers do not work, although they are detected along with the Conexant SL6180 audio codec. It probably just requires a driver fix. Other than that, the performance is mostly as expected for a mid-range laptop based on an AMD Ryzen 5 6600H  processor, although the memory bandwidth is rather low, and a hexa-core CPU is quite slower than octa-core processors in multi-threaded benchmarks, as we’ve seen in Windows.

One small disappointment is the underwhelming performance in Unigine Heaven 4.0 3D graphics benchmarks, which should not matter for most people. All other features perform as expected, including the USB 3.2 Gen2 Type-C ports with charging, DisplayPort Alt mode, and 10 Gbps data rate, HDMI output, the webcam, the microphone, and YouTube 4K video playback in Firefox. Both WiFi 6 (~900 Mbps) and Bluetooth worked great.

Small complaints are the same as in Windows: under a typical workload, the relatively low performance of the 5 Gbps USB Type-A port (about 385 MB/s), and a privacy switch for the camera that feels cheap. The battery life is a little over 4 hours, thanks to the lower idle power consumption under Linux. I’d like to thank CHUWI for sending the CoreBook Air Plus 16 laptop for review. It can be purchased for $547.23 on the Chuwi website after applying the coupon code CNXAirPlus for a 13% discount.

CHUWI also manages Amazon and AliExpress stores, but the new CoreBook Air family is not listed at the time of the review. Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011. Support CNX Software! Donate via cryptocurrencies, become a Patron on Patreon, or purchase goods on Amazon or Aliexpress.

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