Gentlemen, Start Your Notebooks
Sydney Morning Herald
Tuesday March 16, 2004
Grunt is not enough. Test driving the latest in computer mobility, Charles Wright also needs a fast pit crew.
I expect to see a minor price war in the notebook computer industry during the next few months, as manufacturers start to put together new offerings based on the AMD XP-M alternative to Intel's mobile Pentium range.
We've started to see some startling deals on AMD systems: a 15.4-inch widescreen notebook with 30 GB hard drive, 256 MB of RAM, and a combo CD-R/DVD (read-only) drive for instance, at just $1348 including GST.
The first brand-name notebook to sport the chip is the Acer Ferrari 3000. We admitted recently to being uninspiredby the instantly acquired F1heritage.
Darren Yates has already observed in these pages that the Acer package offers some attractive features - 60 GB hard drive, 512 MB of RAM, plus 129 MB ATi Radeon mobility 9200 graphics card, DVD burner and a 15-inch (1400x1050) TFT screen, four USB 2.0 ports and a Firewire port, a 4-in-1 memory card reader (SD, MMC but not CF), Bluetooth and 802.11g wi-fi (compared to the Centrino's 802.11b).
He rated it a good desktop replacement but one which fell down in the area of battery life.
Our tests indicated, however, that the AMD offerings are likely to confront buyers with some interesting conundrums.
We were able to compare it with the new Sony Vaio PCGZ1VGP, which has the 1.6 GHz Pentium M running at roughly the same clock speed (1.587 GHz) as the AMD XP-M 2500+ (1.611Ghz).
The Sony ships with a CD burner only but it will read DVDs. It lacks Bluetooth and, being a Centrino, supports the slower (11Mbps) 802.11b wi-fi.
While it does have an ATi Radeon Mobility graphics card, Sony has been less than generous with video RAM, providing 16 MB on a less powerful Radeon chip.
The Sony has Firewire but its flashcard reader predictably supports only the Sony Memory Stick format. In terms of features, it was an easy win for the Acer.
It's unfair to compare the 3D capabilities of the two machines but we did some tests and found some interesting results.
The Vaio scored only 70 in 3DMark2003, while the Acer scored more than 1000, which you'd expect, given its superior video system. The Aquamark3 benchmark favoured the Sony. While its overall score was lower than the Acer's, the Vaio outperformed it in all CPU-related areas - 6415 to the Acer's 4884.
We turned to another benchmark, Sisoft Sandra's, and it rated the Intel CPU as faster. The difference was nowhere near as great as in Aquamark3.
The thing with benchmarks is that if one tries enough of them you will eventually find one that favours the AMD.
Close inspection of the two CPUs shows that while the AMD runs at a similar speed and for a number of tests turns up similar results, it lacks some of the Intel's features - including SSE2 and ACPI support.
Basically this means the AMD is going to perform very close to, if not better than the Intel, until you run an application that uses SSE2 - Adobe Premier for example.
And that ACPI support means the Intel system has better power management. The Acer lasted just over two hours (148 minutes) on the MobileMark benchmark, which is the sort of life you'd expect from a Pentium 4 notebook, rather than a Pentium M. On the other hand, if you had the Acer's video card on the Sony it would have lopped quite a bit off the more than three hours we wrung out of it.
Regardless of the benchmarks (and the paint job), we had a lot of fun with the Acer.
The Acer is a good computer but it is in a different class to the Sony - which is reflected in the fact that at the $3300 we've seen it advertised, it's $700 cheaper than the $3999 Sony.
The Acer's hard drive did die on us during testing - which happens every now and again with any notebook. And it gave us the opportunity to evaluate Acer's two-hour warranty express service. They sent someone around to pick up the machine just before lunch, and had it back to us in less than two hours. They couldn't have done any better if they'd been driving a Ferrari.
© 2004 Sydney Morning Herald