Desktop replacement notebooks are essentially high-end notebooks that are close to desktop PCs in terms of features and performance. If you are after a fast notebook that can be used in the office or taken home, then there’s a notebook here that would certainly suit.
In this feature we look at six Wintel notebooks and two Apple notebooks. In addition to the vendors reviewed here, we also invited Compaq/HP, Dell, Fujitsu, IBM, NEC, Panasonic, and Sharp, none of whom were able to submit a product for review.
Of the Wintel notebooks, only one had a Pentium III processor, while the rest had a Pentium 4. Intel’s new mobile Pentium 4 processor is built on 0.13-micron technology, and features a 400MHz frontside bus, 512KB of Level 2 cache and support for DDR RAM, so we were quite keen to see how these new technologies affected performance. This was also the first time we tested the Apple PowerBook G4 800.
Recent developments
CPU speeds
Both Intel and AMD broke the 1GHz speed barrier some time ago. The mobile Pentium 4 processor starts at 1.4GHz, and has 1.5GHz, 1.6GHz, 1.7GHz, and 1.8GHz options. What was more interesting, two of the vendors used the desktop version of the Pentium 4 processor, rather than the mobile version.
Although the desktop version is small enough to fit into a notebook, and somewhat cheaper than the mobile version at the same clock speed, it generates more heat and draws more power. Some tier-one vendors initially used the desktop chip before the mobile chip became available, but now you’re only likely to see the desktop chip in clone notebooks. Not only are they cheaper but they also run at much faster speeds—the fastest desktop CPU can run at 2.5GHz.
The advantages stop there though, and we believe there are disadvantages. Desktop CPUs require large heatsinks, which tend to make the notebook a lot heavier. Desktop CPUs also don’t make use of Intel’s SpeedStep technology, which adjusts the clock speed and processor voltage to save battery life. The mobile Pentium 4 processors can go into a Deeper Sleep Alert State, which reduces the processor voltage during brief periods of inactivity.
Once again, we didn’t receive any notebooks with AMD processors, which was a shame since the company has recently released a new line of mobile processors.
Graphics
In the past, graphics was the major dividing line between desktops and notebooks, but that’s not so much the case these days. With today’s ATI and nVidia graphics accelerators, we are able to run true 3D graphics on notebooks at very high speeds.
Another interesting development is nVidia’s GeForce 4 420 Go graphics accelerator, which includes a range of system power controls called PowerMizer. This not only adjusts the power consumption of the graphics processor, but also the CPU and the display.
