Recent developments (con't)
Hard drives
For comparison, we ran all the same tests on an Acer desktop machine, which had a 1.8GHz Pentium 4 processor, 256MB RAM, and a 32MB GeForce 2 MX graphics card. The Acer desktop outperformed the notebooks in just about every test, although surprisingly, some of the notebooks did better in 3D graphics. The main reason is that desktops have faster hard drives. Most notebook hard disks only spin at 4200RPM. The Toshiba Satellite Pro shipped with a 5400RPM hard disk, but this still doesn’t compare with the 7200RPM drives you see in many desktop systems. Once again, heat and power consumption will limit the speed of notebook hard disks, which in turn limits performance.
Portability
Common with the desktop replacement notebooks is the all-in-one design, sometimes referred to as three-spindle. This means that the hard disk, floppy drive, and CD-ROM or DVD-ROM drive are built-in and can be used simultaneously.
The downside is this makes the notebooks somewhat larger and heavier, but at least you don’t need to cart around extra peripherals.
Networking
Bluetooth and 802.11b wireless connectivity is increasingly being built into notebooks, at least as an optional extra. The Toshiba notebook shipped with an integrated Bluetooth antenna but it didn’t come with the Bluetooth module. Several notebooks also came with integrated 802.11b wireless modules built in. All the notebooks in this review featured an integrated 56K modem and integrated 10/100 Ethernet network interfaces.
Thermal Stress Testing
In order to compare the heat generation of the mobile Pentium III, mobile Pentium 4 and desktop Pentium 4 processors, we ran thermal stress tests on three of the notebooks. We locked up each of the notebooks for six hours in an enclosed environment, and made them run WinBench for the whole duration. We recorded the temperature of inside the box every 15 minutes.
As you can see in the table to the left, the Pioneer notebook, which uses a desktop CPU, generates much more heat than a notebook with a mobile CPU. This also means it uses up more power.
Battery Life
All the Pentium 4-based notebooks had a difficult time running Ziff Davis’s Battery Mark test successfully so we decided to create our own battery test called BMark. Most of the P4 based notebooks managed to run BMark for around 90 minutes, which wasn’t very impressive.
However, keep in mind that all the power-saving features were turned off and each notebook was made to work at full speed the entire time. In a normal working environment, you’d see much better battery life.
