ExplorerBook Pro Series II
Price: AU$4,399.
Distributor: e@PC
Ph: 1300 65 62 65
www.e-pc.com.au
Mitac 6120
Price: AU$4,795, including carry case.
Distributor: Synnex Ph: 03 9538 0000; Fax: 03 9540 0556
www.synnex.com.au
Pioneer 2000 PowerBook III 850
Price: AU$4,499.
Company: Pioneer Computers
Ph: 02 9690 2888, Fax: 02 9690 0333
www.pioneercomputers.com.au
The TestLab had a close look at the 6120 back in the August issue of PC Magazine Australia. Last time, Pioneer Computers and e@PC had each submitted a 6120 notebook and this time around we received one from three distributors. Mitac is actually the manufacturer of the 6120. Pioneer and e@PC have decided to rename the Mitac 6120 notebook and Synnex, on the other hand, has decided to keep the Mitac name. From the outside the three 6120 notebooks looked exactly the same. The Pioneer and e@PC submissions, however, shipped with PIII 850 processors while the Synnex came with a PIII 750. e@PC also did something different from Pioneer and Synnex. They decided to install an IBM hard disk drive instead of a Hitachi hard disk.
The 6120 is a nicely constructed notebook. There is plenty of space to rest your palms while you type. There are two speakers, one on each side of the notebook. If you ever listen to music while you're typing you may find that you will be covering up the speakers with your wrists. The keyboard demonstrated some bounce and was a little noisy especially when we typed quickly. The keyboard provided adequate tactile feedback and also separates the standard keys from the function keys through the use of different key colours.
The 6120 features a single USB port, single PS/2 keyboard/ mouse port, a serial port, external VGA port, parallel port, an audio line out, and microphone jack as well as an interface for a docking station. The left-hand side of the notebook has an S-Video port and two Type II or one Type III PCMCIA slots. You will also find a built in 1.44MB floppy drive. The DVD drive slides out from the right-hand side of the notebook. The battery also slides out from the right. You must, however, turn the notebook upside down and slide a locking switch in order to release the battery. The battery has a handy battery life indicator. A small button located on the actual battery when pressed displays how much life is left in the battery (when the battery is fully charged four light bars shine, two if it's 50 percent charged).
The Pioneer and Synnex notebooks shipped with a 12GB Hitachi hard disk and, as we mentioned before, the e@PC shipped with an IBM hard drive. We have known IBM hard drives to outperform Hitachi hard drives. On this occasion, however, the IBM hard drive in the e@PC notebook could not match the disk performance of the Pioneer notebook. We even removed the IBM hard drive from the e@PC notebook and installed it in the Pioneer notebook. The IBM hard disk still performed the same and was slightly slower than the Hitachi hard drive in WinBench Business Disk. We then decided to run Windows Disk Defragmenter on the IBM hard drive but that didn't make the IBM hard drive run faster. We couldn't quite understand why the IBM hard drive performed so poorly, especially when the IBM hard drive in the HP performed so well. We can only suggest that the IBM hard drive in the e@PC notebook might have been mildly faulty and the fact that the HP would have a different IDE implementation to the e@PC notebook may also explain why the two identical drives performed so differently.
The 6120 notebook features an 8MB ATI Rage LT Pro graphics accelerator. The Pioneer and e@PC notebooks scored around about the same in WinBench Business Graphics and High-End Graphics. The Synnex notebook was running Windows 2000 so we couldn't make any real comparison between it and the other two notebooks. The Pioneer and e@PC notebooks were a head above the rest with the Pioneer notebook scoring the highest score in both WinBench Business Graphics and High-End Graphics.
In CD WinBench, the Pioneer notebook scored much lower than the e@PC. They both had identical DVD drives and we couldn't work out why the Pioneer scored so badly. We thought maybe a faulty DVD drive may have been the cause but we soon found out once we installed the e@PC DVD drive in the Pioneer that was not the case. The Pioneer had still scored poorly.
Upgrading the hard disk in this notebook may take you a little while. You have to unscrew the entire base cover to get to the hard drive, which is located underneath the floppy drive. The RAM modules were located under the keyboard. There are two RAM slots which can accommodate two 128MB RAM modules. You can also, however, purchase the 6120 with 64MB of motherboard mounted memory. The maximum total amount of RAM would then be 320MB.
The battery life between the three 6120 notebooks was pretty similar. The 12.6v 4800mAh Li-Ion battery drove all the 6120 notebooks well over two hours.
Of the three 6120 notebooks that were submitted, e@PC has managed to provide one that is about $400 cheaper than the Synnex notebook, while Pioneer has provided one for around $300 cheaper. And you also get the 850 processor with the e@PC and the Pioneer.
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