Product Listing

Lenovo ThinkPad X300

By Aloysius Low - 14 Apr 2008

Stings Like a Butterfly Too

Stings Like a Butterfly Too

Having previously covered SSDs when we reviewed the Sony VAIO VGN-TZ18GN, there's really no need to go into detail again (though if you're interested, feel free to visit the article here ). One reason the X300 commands a higher premium for its class is that the X300 only comes in the SSD variety, which means there's no cheaper alternative for people looking for X300s with normal HDDs. Of course, SSDs do have a few things going for them, such as a lower energy footprint and a higher survival rate should you accidentally drop the X300.

As far as hardware options goes for the X300, there really aren't many to choose from besides swapping to a better battery and upgrading the memory. That means that the X300 is pretty much limited to the Intel Core 2 Duo SL7100, which should be sufficient for today's office needs. It's not hard to guess why this is so, due to the tight confines of its slim chassis, not to mention the fact that the X300 is designed around a low energy, green platform, thus limiting the choices for the hardware used.

The X300 is powered by a 3-cell battery, though Lenovo does offer 6-cell Li-Ion varieties. The 3-cell shown here is rated for 4.3 hours, though our tests showed otherwise.

 please do not eat batteries, they aren't good for you.

The X300 allows for easy upgrading of RAM, and as you can see, we still had space for another 2GB stick.

Battery and Portability Index

To test how power efficient is the X300, we used our normal DVD test to drain the battery, by setting both brightness and volume of the unit at 50% while running a DVD movie. In addition to this, we also looped a standard definition QuickTime movie to emulate the MacBook Air test for a more direct comparison. Our results showed that using the SSD for watching movies is going to be much more better than watching movies using the optical drive (seeing as how SSDs don't need to keep spinning like normal HDDs). While battery performance wasn't as good as the Air, we still obtained pretty reasonable results from the 3-cell battery.

Our portability index is something that we've come up with to show in figures roughly how portable a device. The X300 scored pretty well here, though definitely not anywhere as good as the Sony VAIO VGN-TZ18GN, even when we factored in the SSD versus Optical Disc Drive (ODD) figures.

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