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
Content Creation Performance
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36.1
35.5
34.5The Content Creation Winstone 2003 numbers mimic those recorded in the Office Productivity portion of SYSMark 2002. Again the IBM ThinkPad T40p takes the performance crown among the Pentium M laptops by performing 5% faster than the Dell Latitude D800. The system also held a slight speed advantage over the desktop 2.4GHz Pentium 4 processor we paired it up against. The 1.6GHz Pentium M notebooks averaged about 11% more performance than the 1.5GHz Pentium Ms, not too shabby for 100MHz.
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As we discussed in our Pentium M review, the Content Creation SYSMark 2002 numbers generated in SYSMark 2002 cannot be used to measure cross platform performance. The applications in Content Creation SYSMark 2002 are simply too Pentium 4 optimized, explaining the huge lead that the Pentium 4 processor enjoys over the Pentium M processor in this benchmark; the first and only time that the desktop solution finds itself atop a 2D benchmark graph.
The benchmark can be used to compare performance of the various Pentium M solutions. The results indicate that both 1.6GHz solutions, the IBM ThinkPad T40p and the Dell Latitude D800. The FIC Centrino notebook is able to gain a bit of speed over the IBM T40, owing the additional speed to the extra 256MB of RAM that the FIC unit was tested with. In this test the faster 1.6GHz processors held a 3% advantage over the 1.5GHz ones.
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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!