Intel Centrino/Pentium-M Notebook Roundup: Dell, FIC and IBM Examined
by Matthew Witheiler on March 12, 2003 11:22 AM EST- Posted in
- Laptops
General Usage Performance
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24.9Right off the bat we see all the Pentium M based notebooks neck in neck with the desktop Pentium 4 2.4GHz chip we threw into the mix. The 1.6GHz IBM ThinkPad T40p leads the pack, performing a negligible 2% faster than the Dell Latitude D800. Both these notebooks hold about a 8% performance advantage over the 1.5GHz clocked Pentium M solutions (the IBM ThinkPad T40 and the FIC Centrino notebook) and a 7% performance advantage over the Pentium 4 2.4GHz desktop system. On the 1.5GHz side of things, both the FIC and the IBM notebook perform almost identically, which is odd being that the FIC system included an additional 256MB of memory. We suspect that if we outfitted both the IBM T40 and the FIC Centrino notebook with the same amount of RAM that the IBM T40 would come out slightly on the top.
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Office Productivity SYSMark 2002 paints a similar picture. In this benchmark the IBM ThinkPad T40p rises to the top of the performance charts again. Here the 1.6GHz IBM system performed about 7% faster than the Dell Latitude notebook with the same processor and 4% faster than the desktop Pentium 4 2.4GHz chip. The 1.6GHz chips hold a 5% speed advantage over the 1.5GHz Pentium M chips, slightly less than the 8% advantage we measured in Business Winstone 2002. Again we find the two 1.5GHz solutions, the IBM and FIC notebooks, performing essentially the same in Office Productivity SYSMark 2002.
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builda - Thursday, February 2, 2006 - link
There appears to be a wide spread fault with the Gigabyte NB-1401 model notebook, where it reports having system disk errors or cannot find the hard disk. We have 7 of this model notebook and now 6 of them have reported the same problem. After running chkdsk to temporarily repair the errors that had been caused on the harddisk I found the problem returned the escalated to the point the harddisk could not be found. I further checked using Hitachi drive fitness testing tool which reported a cable error on each machine. Originally I returned 3 of these for repair as they were just outside the warranty period and the supplier checked with Gigabyte with the fix being to rub the cable all over with an eraser!! This worked for a short period but the problem has returned a couple of months later and has spread (like a virus) it now affects 6 out of the 7 notebooks. The supplier has just gone into administration and my next step is to approach Gigabyte who's support service has been found to be extremely unresponsive in the recent past.dbiberdorf - Tuesday, July 27, 2004 - link
I beg to differ with the reviewer. The keyboard on this unit is mediocre, and the track stick buttons are an abomination. They sit too low in the case and have too much travel. It makes my thumbs hurt after a while, and I often have to press them with a finger to get them to activate fully.The most powerful notebook in the world loses big points in my book if they built-in keyboard and pointing devices are weak. Certainly it's the case here. Dell, please figure out how to buy good keyboards for your machines!
Finally, the power adapter, while featuring convienent wrap-around cabling, is phenomenally large. My cordless phone at home is smaller. With the large profile of the machine, the adapter has to go in a side pocket of the carrying case, adding a little more bulge to your day.
visibilityunlimited - Thursday, October 30, 2003 - link
Screen resolution beyond SXGA+ would be unreadable using Windows for example while being more readable using Linux.Both the Linux text console and graphics mode X-windows-system screen drivers can be fully customized to display text at any resolution. The text characters could easily be displayed with current software at 1200dpi or more (if only the graphics processors and monitors could operate at that speed) and still retain the current character size. Text can currently be generated from vector based Type I and TrueType fonts for rasterizing at any resolution. Image scaling is a different and very easy problem.
The Windows OS is the real culprit holding back general usage of higher resolutions and typeset quality displays because of the OS being handicapped by the inertia of antique display modes. Darn. I want 3200x2400 or more!