Mobile Roundup: A Trio of Midrange Laptops
by Jarred Walton on September 17, 2008 3:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Laptops
AVADirect IFL90 - Overview
We've looked at an AVADirect gaming laptop earlier this year and were fairly impressed with the customization options available. AVADirect sells various "whitebook" laptop offerings from Clevo, Compal, MSI, and ASUS - essentially barebone notebooks where they add the CPU, memory, hard drive, and optical drive. In some cases, you can also customize the LCD, GPU, and/or battery as well. Some people might still prefer to do the assembly on their own, but with laptops that can be more time-consuming than putting together a desktop, and AVADirect offers an extensive selection of components and will assemble and test the notebook for you with only a small markup.
Unfortunately, the timing of this article is a bit off, as the Compal IFL90 is no longer available at AVADirect. (Note that Compal lists the model as IFL90 while AVADirect referred to it as the FL-92. We'll stick with the Compal naming scheme for the text, but we generated our charts with FL-92 so just know that the two names are equivalent.) It was just replaced by the updated Compal HL90 (JHL90), which is a Centrino 2 platform. Other than minor differences in performance, features, battery life, and some external modifications, the two notebooks should be very similar. The new model should be equal to or better than the IFL90 in every instance, so take what we say about the IFL90 and factor in some improvements and you have the JHL90 (more or less).
One of the drawbacks of getting a whitebook laptop is that they often look generic. AVADirect can provide a custom paint job, for an additional fee, but that doesn't change the basic design. Then again, there's not a whole lot of differentiation among the various notebooks on the market; there are only so many ways you can assemble a screen, keyboard, various internal components, and battery. If the Acer 6920G suffers from a case of form over function, the Compal IFL90 chassis is pretty much devoted to function and the form is what's left over. That's not to say that the notebook is bad, but it's also no better than any other notebook we've tested. (As a side note, you may notice that there's no company logo on the top panel; AVADirect apparently had a supply problem and the notebook we received was missing the logo. This is not an issue with shipping notebooks we're told.)
Considering this is a Compal chassis, we thought it might be appropriate to completely dissect the notebook so you can see how everything is put together. Presumably, a few people out there might end up with a barebone notebook that they need to assemble themselves, so hopefully the above images will help. The process is almost identical to taking apart the Gateway P-7811 FX, only with a slightly smaller chassis. In fact, the vast majority of the assembly process only requires access to the bottom compartments. You can upgrade the memory, hard drive, WiFi card, and CPU with a minimal amount of fuss. If you want to get at the rest of the system (i.e. the motherboard and GPU), you'll need to remove the keyboard, LCD, and pretty much disassemble the entire chassis. The only real tricky part is that you need to start by popping up the "media panel" above the keyboard as the first step. After that, everything proceeds in a reasonable fashion. The NVIDIA GPU sits on an MXM module as usual, and judging by the Compal HL90 it should be able to accommodate up to a GeForce 8700M GT/9600M GT, but anything more than that would almost certainly exceed the cooling capacity of the heatsink/fan. Not that anyone actually sells upgraded MXM modules....
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Hrel - Thursday, September 18, 2008 - link
Midrange graphics are great! Why would you expect to run any game on a laptop at high or max detail settings? Why do you care about detail settings? It doesn't effect how fun the game is. On a laptop, as long as you can run modern games at min-med settings and get decent frames that's all I would ever want. If you want to max everything out use your desktop. However, I would like to see the ability to turn off the discrete card and use integrated graphics become standard. And, in general, laptops need much better LCD's and better battery life, HP has a 24hour notebook, meaning the battery lasts 24 hours, LED backlight, why aren't LED backlights standard place?????JarredWalton - Thursday, September 18, 2008 - link
The HP "24 hour" notebook includes an extra battery attachment that sits under the notebook and weighs several pounds if I'm not mistaken. If you buy any of these laptops and six to eight extra batteries, you could get 24 hours as well. :-) Yeah, that's sort of extreme, but so is a huge battery sitting under a small laptop.As for midrange graphics and gaming, let me reiterate: running at 1280x800 I couldn't break 20 FPS in Mass Effect or Crysis even at minimum detail, and GRID at medium-low detail was playable but looked like a four year old graphics engine. There are plenty of other games that start looking quite poor before you break 30 FPS. Graphics aren't everything, true, but they do make a difference. That's not to say you can't play any games on these midrange GPUs, but I would hate to give people the mistaken impression that midrange mobile GPUs run most games "fine" when that's simply not true.
Midrange mobile graphics *aren't* great, and in fact even the fastest mobile GPUs are slower than desktop "midrange" graphics: the 9600 GT costs under $100 and outperforms the 9800M GTS, and the ~$110 8800 GT 512MB is faster than any mobile GPU. (Same for the HD 4670 and even HD 3850.) If you want to play modern games on a notebook, get the Gateway P-7811 or some other more powerful (and larger) notebook. Otherwise, the vast majority of people will be better off with a midrange desktop for gaming and a true midrange solution.
strikeback03 - Friday, September 19, 2008 - link
For this very reason I'm wondering why you bothered running the full gaming tests on all of these. Wouldn't maybe a full test on one game plus minimum settings/resolution for the others be enough to offer a best case ceiling and say "See, don't look to play modern games on these"? Would save you significant time I'd imagine.JarredWalton - Friday, September 19, 2008 - link
It would save time, but it wouldn't provide a ready comparison to other mobile GPUs, which is one thing I wanted to do. (That's also why I tested the Gateway M-152XL at settings other than 1280x800, just to show how the GPU would run with a different LCD.) If you just want 3DMark scores, you can find that at some other places, but no one plays 3DMark for fun.Another problem: if you choose just one game, which one should you go with? Assassin's Creed DX9 is roughly half the speed of the faster 9800M GTS, and while that's a big difference you can easily turn down a few settings and get acceptable performance at 1280x800. On the other hand CoH is about 1/3 to 1/4 the performance of the same GPU. The best characterization of performance requires more testing, so some people would want scores for TF2, HL2, and a bunch of older games as well, but I had to draw the line somewhere.
At least now I can point to a (relatively large) battery of gaming tests and say, "This is why you shouldn't plan on using low or midrange laptop GPUs for gaming. It's not just one or two games that will struggle, but a large number of newer titles won't run well regardless of settings, and others will only run well when you set the detail levels to 'ugly'." :)
JarredWalton - Thursday, September 18, 2008 - link
Edit: that last line is supposed to say "a true mobile solution".arjunp2085 - Thursday, September 18, 2008 - link
Why is that i have never seen a Single AMD based laptops on the list....780G is one great solution for graphics on laptops.. Y is there no article about PUMA????
Is it some BIAS??
JarredWalton - Thursday, September 18, 2008 - link
I could forward the list of email messages requesting AMD laptops to you if you'd like. I specifically asked a couple of companies for one of the HD 3200 laptops, because I think it's a very compelling platform. Why haven't I received one yet? No idea... but I'll check back with the contacts and hopefully get one soon.Voldenuit - Thursday, September 18, 2008 - link
For $1100, you can buy a Thinkpad T400.I don't see how anyone would prefer an Acer, Gateway, or AVADirect at these pricepoints.
JarredWalton - Thursday, September 18, 2008 - link
It all depends on what you're after, but Lenovo is certainly a viable option. The T400 is good, but you'll probably want to spend more than $1100. I'd get 4GB RAM, 320GB HDD, LED backlighting, 6-cell battery, Vista Home Premium, DVDR, 802.11N WiFi, and Bluetooth. That puts the price at around $1450, which includes $450 savings (limited time offer) and only a 1-year warranty. Bump it up to 3-years and you're at $1550, which is actually still very good. Without the $500 savings it would be difficult to recommend that much, however.Voldenuit - Thursday, September 18, 2008 - link
You can easily configure a great T400 w/ 2 GB RAM, DVD-burner, discrete Radeon 3470, wireless-N (only $15 extra), LED screen (only $60 extra) and 6-cell battery (only $15 extra) for under $1200.