Feature Articles

The Notebooks of Yore - Portable Past Meets Future

By Aloysius Low - 26 Mar 2009

Timeline: 2005

2005


  • In yet another year of Intel dominated news, the second generation of Intel's Centrino platform made its way to the consumer market. Codenamed Sonoma, the platform utilized the newer Dothan processors while upping the FSB up to 533MHz. Together with enhancements made to its chipset (Intel 915 and ICH6-M) and wireless networking (which now supported 802.11a in addition to b/g of the older platform), it looked as though Intel was here to stay.

Music jingle, Sonoma! Music jingle, Sonoma! Yeap, the second generation of the Intel Centrino platform had arrived!

  • The Acer TravelMate 8100 notebook based on the Intel Sonoma platform was probably one of the better laptops that we reviewed in 2005. While performance was definitely on par with what we expected, it was the internal DVD writer that supported DVD+R DL that left us quite impressed though the unit did have its drawbacks, especially since it was using a slower IDE HDD as opposed to the newer SATA drives. It also lacked multimedia controls despite having support for HD Audio and connectivity options such as analog RGB, DVI-D and S-Video but all in all, it was generally worth the S$3998 that it retailed for.

The Acer TravelMate 8100 had a DVD writer that supported DVD+R DL, which meant we could burn, baby burn!

  • More Sonoma based notebooks would continue to grace our labs throughout 2005, though none were remarkably outstanding; While there were notebooks didn't meet up to our expectations like the Gigabyte N411 or the MSI S250, the Samsung Q30 Ultraslim was set to impress with its 1.1kg weight and a 23.8mm thickness. While it ran on the Centrino platform, the Q30 used a more power efficient Intel Pentium M ULV 753 which ran at 1.2GHz. Using this processor, it was no surprise to find that performance wasn't really up to the usual fast standards we were used to testing, but the Q30 was a quiet and extremely portable workhorse which would have cost you a whopping US$2400 just three years back.

 It was slim and it was beautiful, but the Samsung Q30 would also cost you US$2400. Ouch.

  • With Intel dominating the headlines for the last two years or so, it was only a matter of time before AMD struck back with their Turion 64 mobile processors which we covered in the form of MSI's S270. Unfortunately for AMD, our reviewed showed that the MSI S270's performance was none snappy despite its 64-bit capability, faster system bus, wider processor-to-system bandwidth and SSE3 instruction support. It needed much more juice which was another complaint that we had with the platform. Though given an extended battery, the notebook lasted enough to meet some of our expectations. All in all, the MSI S270 didn't quite let us down, nor did it make us cry, but it did leave us wondering how AMD would do against Intel in the coming months.

The MSI S270 was the first AMD Turion 64 notebook that we reviewed.

  • We took another stab at reviewing an AMD Turion 64 based notebook and came out feeling much better this time, thanks to the HP Compaq nx6125, a huge 15-inch notebook that tipped the scales at 3.22kg. Of course, that was due to it being extremely sturdy business machine. Battery performance seemed to have taken a turn for the better due to better engineering on HP's part which fared much better in our tests. With an extremely reasonable price of US$1440 and the plethora of security features on the nx6125, it seemed that we had found a bargain on our hands. It wasn't the last time we would see an AMD notebook, but it was one where we did feel that there was some value to be had alongside Intel's Centrino platform.

Faring much better in our next AMD Turion 64 based notebook review was the HP Compaq nx6125.

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