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Chuwi AuBox X 256V: 30-second review
Chuwi has crammed Intel’s Lunar Lake platform into one of the smallest and most affordable packages, close in size to the original Intel NUC. The Intel 200 series processor is a serious proposition for anyone chasing efficient local AI compute, a punchy compact desktop replacement, or a whisper-quiet home server.
The 115 TOPS headline figure is not marketing fluff either. With the NPU, GPU, and CPU all pulling together, this machine genuinely handles Copilot+ workloads and lighter local LLM inference without breaking a sweat.
The price is the real story, though. At around $829 direct for the model with the Core Ultra 7 256V silicon, this is slightly more costly than a similar 1TB configuration from GMKtec while maintaining a similar physical footprint. Build quality is impressively high, and it comes with USB 4.0 ports, dual 2.5GbE LAN and dual monitor outputs.
The downsides of this design are that the 16GB of memory is not upgradable, the small size of the system doesn’t allow for a silent cooling system, and using the second USB4 port requires a docking station.
However, most high-end mini systems are transitioning to surface-mounted memory, and there aren’t many other options powerful enough for local LLMs.
Overall, if this system had been launched only a few months ago, it would have been cheaper and probably offered a 32GB option. But its price and specifications increasingly look like the new norm, and by definition, that’s a retrograde step from the systems that came out a year ago.
At a lower price, this might have been featured in our best mini PC guide, but that argument gets less compelling above $800.
Chuwi AuBox X 256V: Price and availability
- How much does it cost? $829/£612.87
- When is it out? Available now
- Where can you get it? Currently, this machine can be obtained directly from Chuwi
Considering the specification, the price of the AuBox X 256V seems reasonable, but hardly a bargain – it’s available direct from Chuwi here.
We’ve seen Intel 200 Series systems costing over $1000 on several occasions, so finding this one with the Core Ultra 7 256V chip directly from the makers for $829 is a small revelation.
The UK price is £612.87, and based on the current exchange rate, it is a little more expensive than in the USA. Euro pricing is €707.58, which is probably the most costly option.
At the time of writing, Chuwi has yet to release this hardware via online resellers, but they sell many products via Amazon, so its appearance on that channel is only a matter of time, I suspect.
For those wanting the same system style but at a lower price, Chuwi has a Core Ultra 5 225V model, just called the Chuwi AuBox X, that sells for $699/£516.76/€596.62. That design comes with the same 16GB of memory, but only 512GB of storage.
These are the only SKUs, and the maximum memory is only 16GB in either case.
The only competitor using the same processor series in a mini PC form factor is GMKtec NucBox K13, which is priced at $719.99 for a machine with the Core Ultra 7 256V and 1TB of storage. If you are willing to work with a 512GB drive, that price can be $669.99.
That makes the Chuwi AuBox X 256V seem overpriced, but there are subtle differences between these designs that might make the Chuwi system worth the extra money.
I suspect the price difference we are seeing is largely due to the dramatic increases in memory and storage costs that are affecting products currently in production. It may be that GMKtec finished making the K13 before these price hikes occurred, allowing them to undercut Chuwi in this instance.
What I don’t have a reason for is why only these two makers have built systems around this mobile silicon, because it seems well-suited to mini PC use.
Chuwi AuBox X 256V: Specs
|
Model: |
AuBox 256V |
|
CPU: |
Intel Core Ultra 7 256V, 8C/8T, P-core up to 4.8GHz, E-core up to 3.7GHz, 12MB cache |
|
Architecture: |
Lunar Lake (Series 2), TSMC N3B process |
|
TDP: |
8-37W (configurable) |
|
iGPU: |
Intel Arc 140V, 8 Xe2 cores, up to 1.95GHz, XeSS / XeSS3 support |
|
NPU: |
Intel AI Boost NPU4, 47 TOPS, OpenVINO / DirectML / ONNX / WebNN |
|
Total AI TOPS: |
115 TOPS (INT8) |
|
Memory: |
16GB LPDDR5X 8533 MT/s, on-package (soldered) |
|
Storage: |
1TB PCIe 4.0 SSD ZHITAI Ti600 |
|
Storage expansion: |
2x M.2 2280 (up to 1x PCIe 5.0 + 1x PCIe 4.0) |
|
Display outputs: |
HDMI 2.1 FRL (8K@60Hz / 4K@120Hz), HDMI 2.1 TMDS (4K@60Hz), DP 1.4 via USB-C (4K@120Hz), USB4 (4K@144Hz) |
|
Max resolution: |
8K@60Hz |
|
eGPU: |
Yes, via USB4 (40Gbps) |
|
USB |
1x USB4 40Gbps (PD + DP), 4x USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-A, 1x USB 2.0 |
|
Network |
2.5GbE RJ45 (Intel), Wi-Fi 6E (up to 2.4Gbps), Bluetooth 5.3 |
|
Audio |
3.5mm combo jack |
|
Power |
100W 20V / 5A USB-C |
|
OS |
Windows 11 Pro, multi-language |
|
Dimensions |
128.4 x 128.4 x 40.5mm |
|
Weight |
580g |
|
Colour |
Black |
|
VESA mount |
Yes, VESA 100 |
Chuwi AuBox X 256V: Design
- Mostly metal Mini PC
- USB ports on front and back
- Easy internal access
Mini PCs are not exactly celebrated for bold industrial design, and the AuBox X is no exception. Chuwi has kept things understated. The chassis is a compact black square measuring 128.4 x 128.4 x 40.5mm. That is smaller than the GMKtec NucBox K13, which runs to 186mm in length. The AuBox X is genuinely pocket-sized in the way that very few desktop-class machines manage.
At 580g, it is light enough to mount behind a monitor with the supplied VESA bracket, or it can happily live on the desktop, being so small.
Build quality is the area where Chuwi’s budget DNA tends to show itself. The brand has a long history in the affordable tablet and laptop space, and its finish tolerances are better than some might expect.
While it isn’t engineered like an Asus NUC, it’s not cheap and plastic either.
The issue with a NUC this small was always going to be thermal design, and it is a genuine talking point here. Chuwi promises whisper-quiet operation, and the Core Ultra 7 256V is well suited to that ambition. With a configurable TDP range of 8 to 37W, the chip can run extremely cool under light loads.
However, when the processing load kicks in, the fan volume becomes much more noticeable. I noticed this on my desk, but if the system were behind a monitor, I suspect it would be much less apparent.
The port layout is generous, given the limited space on the front and back. Up front, you get two USB-A ports for everyday peripherals, plus one USB4 and the audio jack. On the back is the other USB4 port, but it is used by the external PSU to power the device.
Because of that choice, you will need a docking station to use both USB4 ports.
This might be a worthwhile purchase because each of the USB4 ports is rated at 40 Gbps, enabling them to support external SSDs, DisplayPort video, power delivery, and eGPU enclosures.
One especially useful feature is that the two M.2 NVMe slots are both 2280-sized, enabling this machine to take the least expensive storage in the most common form factor. By default, one of these slots is already occupied with a 512GB module, and that is connected thermally to the metal case with a silicon thermal pad.
On the rear are four USB-A ports, with three being USB 3.2 Gen 2 and one being USB 2.0.
As it has a total of four Gen 2 ports, that means one on the front is, by definition, a Gen 1 port, although Chuwi failed to label any of the USB ports, and I deduced that by testing them all.
Curiously, all the other ports are labelled, including the dual HDMI and DP and 2.5GbE LAN port on the back. But as the makers used black lettering on a dark grey case, it’s not like they are easily readable.
Networking is handled by a 2.5GbE Intel port alongside Wi-Fi 6E. At this price, 2.5GbE is expected, and I was a little surprised that we didn’t get two LAN ports. Users planning to use the AuBox X 256V as a home server or NAS companion will appreciate the faster wired throughput. You could easily add another 5GbE or even 10GbE LAN port using an adapter with a USB4 port.
Internal access is straightforward, requiring only four screws to get inside. Once open, you can access the two PCIe M.2 slots. According to the specification, one of these is Gen4 and the other is Gen5, but it isn’t clearly labelled whether the faster port is SSD1 or SSD2.
I suspect the Gen5 one is SSD1, but I don’t have a Gen5 drive to test that assertion. The default Gen 4 drive was inserted into SSD2 on the review hardware.
My only reservations about using a Gen5 drive in this system, and a larger-capacity Gen4 mechanism, are that no thermal pads are included to transfer heat from the drives to the case, and as a result, there might be a tendency for them to overheat.
Chuwi AuBox X 256V: Features
- Intel Core Ultra 7 256V
- 16GB of LPDDR5X
- Local AI platform
,The Intel Core Ultra 7 256V is a Lunar Lake chip. Lunar Lake is Intel’s second-generation Core Ultra platform, built on TSMC’s 3nm N3B process. It is a genuine SoC design, meaning the CPU cores, iGPU, NPU, and memory all live on the same package. That architecture brings real efficiency gains, but it also brings a fixed memory ceiling. The 256V ships with 16GB LPDDR5X running at 8533 MT/s and there is no way to add more.
The chip packs 8 cores across two architectures. Four Lion Cove P-cores handle the heavy lifting, boosting to 4.8GHz. The remaining four Skymont E-cores top out at 3.7GHz and handle background tasks. In PassMark testing, the 256V scores around 19,500 in multi-core, which puts it ahead of the previous-generation Core Ultra 155U and competitive with AMD’s Ryzen 7 8840HS despite drawing significantly less power.
Chuwi quotes the PassMark multi-core score as 19,547 on their product page. That puts it ahead of the Core Ultra 5 226V (Chuwi’s own lower configuration) and the Ryzen 7 7840HS. It trails dedicated gaming and workstation chips, as you would expect from a 37W-maximum mobile platform.
The integrated Intel Arc 140V is the graphics story here. This is an Xe2 architecture iGPU with 8 compute units running at up to 1.95GHz. Chuwi positions performance as close to an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050, which is a stretch, but the Arc 140V is genuinely the best integrated graphics Intel has shipped.
It supports hardware ray tracing, XeSS upscaling, and XeSS3 Multi Frame Generation. For light gaming at 1080p on medium settings, it is a credible option. For serious gaming, the USB4 port opens the door to an external GPU, which transforms the proposition entirely.
The 16GB LPDDR5X is soldered onto the package. That is the nature of Lunar Lake. There is nothing Chuwi could have done differently. For most everyday tasks and Copilot+ AI workloads, 16GB is workable. For serious local LLM inference, particularly with larger quantised models above 7B parameters, the memory ceiling will bite.
A 7B model in Q4 quantisation sits around 4-5GB. A 13B model in the same format pushes past 8GB. Running either alongside Windows and supporting applications starts to feel cramped.
Storage is more flexible. The stock 1TB PCIe 4.0 SSD gives ample room for the OS, applications, and a reasonable model library. The dual M.2 2280 slots are the important feature. One supports PCIe 5.0, which is genuinely forward-looking in a machine at this price. Users who want to load larger model libraries or run fast storage for video editing will appreciate the room to expand.
The headline AI figure is 115 TOPS combined. That breaks down to 47 TOPS from the dedicated NPU4, 64 TOPS from the Arc 140V GPU, and a small contribution from the CPU. The NPU4 supports OpenVINO, DirectML, ONNX Runtime, and WebNN. That breadth of framework support matters when you want to run models built for different ecosystems without converting them first.
The 47 TOPS NPU comfortably clears Microsoft’s 40 TOPS threshold for Copilot+ certification. That means Recall, Cocreator, Click to Do, and real-time Live Captions all run natively on local hardware rather than bouncing to the cloud. For privacy-conscious users, that is a meaningful difference.
Chuwi specifically calls out OpenClaw support on the product page, which is a local AI agent framework for automation and scripting. It does not come pre-installed, but the hardware is fully capable of running it.
But, a short warning before doing that. OpenClaw isn’t classic AI; it’s an Agent, and therefore, to do clever things, it needs to use an AI to help it decide what to do with its problems. Using it with free AI services is extremely challenging, and even with paid-for AI services, it is possible to incur significant cost overruns given how many tokens OpenClaw can chew through.
Chuwi AuBox X 256V: Performance
|
Mini PC |
Header Cell – Column 1 |
Chuwi AuBox X |
GMKtec K13 |
|---|---|---|---|
|
CPU |
Row 0 – Cell 1 |
Intel Core Ultra 7 256V |
Intel Core Ultra 7 256V |
|
Cores/Threads |
Row 1 – Cell 1 |
8C 8T |
8C 8T |
|
RAM |
Row 2 – Cell 1 |
16GB LPDDR5X 8533 |
16GB LPDDR5 |
|
SSD |
Row 3 – Cell 1 |
1TB ZHITAI Ti600 |
1TB Huawei eKitStor Xtreme 200E |
|
Graphics |
Row 4 – Cell 1 |
Intel Arc Graphics 140V |
Intel Arc Graphics 140V |
|
3DMark |
WildLife |
28538 |
22653 |
| Row 6 – Cell 0 |
FireStrike |
8456 |
7364 |
| Row 7 – Cell 0 |
TimeSpy |
4012 |
3413 |
| Row 8 – Cell 0 |
S.Nomad |
2809 |
1914 |
|
Cine24 |
Single |
122 |
116 |
| Row 10 – Cell 0 |
Multi |
633 |
508 |
| Row 11 – Cell 0 |
Ratio |
5.17 |
4.39 |
|
GeekBench 6 |
Single |
2796 |
2731 |
| Row 13 – Cell 0 |
Multi |
10566 |
9429 |
| Row 14 – Cell 0 |
OpenCL |
30397 |
25982 |
| Row 15 – Cell 0 |
Vulkan |
34962 |
26274 |
|
CrystalDisk |
Read MB/s |
6941 |
7132 |
| Row 17 – Cell 0 |
Write MB/s |
4900 |
6338 |
|
PCMark 10 |
Office |
8657 |
7781 |
|
WEI |
Score |
8.8 |
8.6 |
The only system I could reasonably compare this to is the GMKtec K13, since they use the same underlying platform.
And, it was soon apparent that the one in the Chuwi AuBox X 256V has been tweaked to deliver more than its brother in the GMKtec K13. I should state that I no longer have the K13, and it may be that GMKtec released later firmware that would level this playing field.
On paper, the Core Ultra 7 256V is an impressive mobile chip that comfortably handles everyday productivity workloads. Office applications, browser-based tools, video calling, and light code compilation all run without hesitation. The P-cores deliver strong single-threaded performance for tasks that do not parallelise well.
Where the chip feels its mobile origins is under extended operations with sustained load. The 37W power cap means the machine eventually throttles when pushed hard for long periods. This is not unusual for Lunar Lake in any chassis, but it is worth testing thoroughly with the loan unit, particularly given Chuwi’s compact cooling solution.
This is where the Chuwi AuBox X 256V earns a separate conversation. The mini PC market has split into two camps. There are machines built around AMD Strix Halo APUs with up to 128GB of unified memory, purpose-built for serious local LLM inference.
Then there is everything else. The AuBox X 256V sits in the second camp, which is marginally less impressive, but it sits there with more credibility than most.
The 16GB memory ceiling is the critical limitation. Running a 7B model in Q4_K_M quantisation via Ollama or LM Studio is perfectly manageable and produces usable inference speeds. The GPU can handle the computation while the NPU assists with preprocessing and tokenisation, conveniently.
I’ve not started including AI benchmarks yet, but it is clearly something we will be looking to add, since people are making purchasing decisions based on AI performance.
The picture changes if you factor in the USB4 port. Connecting an eGPU enclosure with 16GB or more of discrete VRAM immediately removes the memory constraint for GPU-side inference. An RTX 4060 Ti 16GB in an external enclosure, for example, turns the AuBox X 256V into a genuinely capable local AI server at a fraction of the cost of a dedicated workstation. That is not a common use case, but it is possible, and this hardware supports it natively.
For Copilot+ workloads, the story is straightforward. Windows Recall, Cocreator, and Live Captions all run on the NPU and iGPU without touching the cloud. The 47 TOPS NPU handles the classification and inference tasks that these features rely on. In practice, that means image recognition, real-time transcription, and on-screen summarisation all work locally, with the privacy benefits that implies.
Speech recognition and lightweight embedding models are well within reach. If you are running a local assistant, a RAG pipeline over a personal document library, or a code completion backend via Continue or Tabby, the AuBox X 256V has enough horsepower to make it feel responsive. It will not replace a machine with an RTX 4090 or 5090 for anything serious, but for a small home server running background AI tasks, it punches well above its price point.
Chuwi AuBox X 256V: Final verdict
It’s been a while since I’ve seen a computer that was so well designed, was built around an excellent platform and had the potential to deliver such a good user experience.
It is a shame, therefore, that Chuwi then took such a solid foundation and let one extremely poor choice take away some of its shine.
Clearly, the person who said that 16GB of memory was plenty had no idea of the implications of that choice, or it was an entirely price-driven decision, where the cost of a 32GB or larger model was considered unworkable.
There is a potential workaround to the memory limits for AI users that involves adding an external GPU using USB4. But that’s an even greater expense to justify, and there are other Intel systems, like the Beelink GTi Ultra Series, that support an external GPU via an exposed PCIe slot.
These do cost a little more, starting at around $869 and requiring a PCIe dock that adds $179, but connecting a graphics card directly rather than via USB4 offers significant benefits. And, those systems come with 32GB of RAM onboard.
In its efforts to capture those with AI interests at the asking price, the Chuwi AuBox X 256V has a relatively narrow use case in that one area. But for more general use, it’s a punchy system that delivers enough performance to compete with traditional desktop systems.
Should you buy a Chuwi AuBox X 256V?
|
Value |
More expensive than the CMKtec K13 |
3.5 / 5 |
|
Design |
A small system that uses USB4 for power |
4 / 5 |
|
Features |
Powerful 200 series CPU, Arc GPU and Intel NPU, but only 16GB of RAM |
4 / 5 |
|
Performance |
Up to 25% quicker than the K13 |
4 / 5 |
|
Overall |
A neat system that should have cost less or had more RAM options |
4 / 5 |
Buy it if…
Don’t buy it if…
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