Intel's Core Duo Launch - Notebook Performance Revealed
by Anand Lal Shimpi on January 5, 2006 8:00 PM EST- Posted in
- Laptops
Lenovo T60 - The Tangible Intangibles
The construction of the T60 is top notch, as is the case with all Thinkpads. The screen latches onto the rest of the notebook at two points, but the latch is operated by a single lever at the front of the notebook.
At around 5lbs, the T60 isn’t an ultraportable but it is light enough to carry around while offering the screen real estate to get some serious work done. While the X series is better suited for the constant traveler, the T series is good for the user that needs to get more of a desktop experience while sacrificing a bit of mobility.
On the right side of the notebook you’ve got the Thinkpad UltraBay, which on our sample was outfitted with a DVD-ROM/CD-RW drive. You can replace the DVD drive with an extra battery that will supposedly bring the T60 up to a full 9 hours of battery life. Given what we’ve seen with the standard 6-cell battery, a second battery should have no problems almost doubling the battery life you get out of the box. We’d like to put that claim to the test, but once again we’ll have to wait for final hardware.
Next to the UltraBay there are two USB 2.0 ports stacked on top of one another.
On the back of the notebook there is the power connector for the AC adapter as well as vents to draw in cool air for the CPU’s heatsink.
The front of the notebook has an IR port as well as a button to manually disable the wireless adapter. Having the latter is always useful from a battery conservation standpoint, as well as being simply more convenient than trying to disable the wireless adapter in software.
On the left side of the notebook we’ve got some more vents for the CPU’s heatsink/fan, a VGA output, both phone and Ethernet jacks, mic-in and headphone-out, a vertical USB 2.0 port, Express Card slot and a legacy PC Card slot.
The T60 we reviewed was outfitted with a 14.1” SXGA+ screen with a native resolution of 1400 x 1050. The resolution and screen size are well matched for one another and was quite comfortable to work with, even for long periods of time.
The screen itself features a decent backlight and doesn’t use any high-contrast coating. The maximum setting on the backlight however isn’t the brightest we’ve seen, we would characterize it as about average for a screen of this size. The panel is sufficient for the needs of the T60 but it is by no means stellar.
As a Centrino Duo notebook, the T60 we reviewed relied on the integrated Intel graphics to drive the panel. Intel’s integrated graphics, as you can guess, work just fine for normal day to day tasks but don’t plan on getting any sort of real gaming done on this notebook.
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Shark Tek - Thursday, January 5, 2006 - link
Lets hope that AMD release Turion's X2 with a even more reduced power consumption and DDR2 support that will be really "Sweet".Se imaginan un Turion64 X2 o un Core Duo combinado con un x1800 Mobility Radeon eso seria la combinacion perfecta para 'Lan Parties'. Sin la necesidad de andar con equipo pesado.
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Can you imagine a notebook with Turion X2 or Core Duo matched with a X1800 Mobility Radeon. That will be the perfect combination for Lan-Parties. Without the need for carrying heavy parts from your Desktop @ home.
Just imagine that ....
coldpower27 - Thursday, January 5, 2006 - link
Very impressive.monsoon - Thursday, January 5, 2006 - link
yeah, me too i'm curious about the Apple products coming with Yonah, and how they stack up to X2 athlons PC Yonah notebooks......and overclocking !!!
PS - BTW did you try to overclock the ASUS Yonah notebook ?
PeteRoy - Thursday, January 5, 2006 - link
noDoormat - Thursday, January 5, 2006 - link
Page loads took forever but the review was interesting.I'm still interested to see what Apple does with these chips in their iBooks next week.
The battery life of the T60 was impressive - 227 minutes for DVD playback. Finally, I can watch an LOTR episode on one battery!
The release of only 1 single core chip speaks volumes - intel is ditching single core chips when they can. They want to push dual core hard.
Calin - Friday, January 6, 2006 - link
In DVD playback the DVD unit consume some of the power... I wonder if playing a DVD from a virtual drive or from a network would prolong battery lifeFuren - Thursday, January 5, 2006 - link
Very lovely power consumption. I suppose power consumption will be a bit higher when both cores are at 100% usage but most of us dont keep our CPU usage pegged at 100% when using a notebook and specially not if we care about power consumption at all. It'd be nice if Intel had decided to go to 90nm on the chipsets but I suppose their power consumption is not that high to begin with and Intel needs a use for its 130nm fabs...Calin - Friday, January 6, 2006 - link
off course the power consumption will be higher with both cores at 100% usage - but in this case the "work per watt" is greater, as processors don't use all the power in the system.Just that people would prefer a laptop that consume a battery charge faster but finish the work much faster than the other way around.
cheburashka - Thursday, January 5, 2006 - link
Intel's chipset shortage problem is because all current MCH's are still on 130nm, which is maxed out in the fabs. They would love to get the 90nm Broadwater/Crestline chips out the door to free up 130nm capacity to build low end parts again.