Hypersonic Sonic Aviator 3.06GHz Pentium 4

Construction - Under the Hood (continued)

With all the components and logic located on the bottom of the Sonic Aviator's motherboard, it should not come as too large a surprise to find the front of the motherboard fairly bare. A good deal of the top of the motherboard is dedicated to power circuitry which dominates the left side of the motherboard in this view. The memory expansion slots (both of them) are are this side of the motherboard, as is the internal modem and free mini-PCI slot.

The remaining 32MB of video memory is found on the top of the motherboard, almost directly behind the two 16MB chips mounted on the back of the motherboard. To the right of the memory is a Texas Instruments TSB43AB21 1394a controller which is used to power the single 4-pin firewire connection on the back of the notebook.

Below both the memory and the firewire controller, towards the front of the motherboard, lies an O2Micro OZ165T chip. This chip is the brains behind the CD player portion of the Sonic Aviator. When the system is powered off, the OZ165T takes control of the CD-ROM drive and allows for audio playback via the front control buttons.

Our system was shipped with two sticks of 512MB PC2100 DDR SODIMM memory populating the two SODIMM slots available on the system making for a 1.0GB of system memory total. The memory modules were produced by Transcend.

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The mini-PCI slot in our test system was not in use. Note that the system is not prewired for wireless connectivity (there is no internal antenna) so using this expansion slot to bring wireless support to the notebook would not be the easiest thing in the world.

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We were pleased to find the Sonic Aviator outfitted with a 40.0GB 5400RPM Toshiba MK4019GAX hard drive. 4200RPM drives have been holding notebook computers back for what seems like ages now so we are always excited to find manufacturers taking the extra step to lessen a notebook's I/O bottleneck. The drive features an average seek time of 12ms and an average latency of only 5.55ms compared to 13ms and 7.14ms typical of 4200RPM drives. This is the same hard drive we found in the Dell Inspiron 8200 that we took a look at recently. The option to upgrade from the base 40GB 4200RPM drive to the 40GB 5400RPM amounts to only $30 and is money well spent.

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The speakers atop the Hypersonic Sonic Aviator turned out to be fairly typical notebook speakers. Again, sound quality was fine for producing Windows sounds and quick audio playback, but one wouldn't want to use the system as a boom box.