Mobile Roundup: A Trio of Midrange Laptops
by Jarred Walton on September 17, 2008 3:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Laptops
AVADirect IFL90 - Thoughts and Summary
The IFL90 isn't an amazing notebook, but it's definitely not a bad notebook either. Like the overall design, it's a functional if rather generic laptop offering. The HL90 improves on a few important areas, but compared to the rest of the Centrino 2 offerings now on the market it also fails to offer anything truly noteworthy that you can't find elsewhere. The real benefit here is going to be purchasing a laptop from AVADirect with the ability to customize your component selections. We should also note that we didn't experience a single problem with the IFL90 during testing - no unexplained crashes, lockups, etc. AVADirect is also great in that they allow you to have a notebook shipped with no extra software installed, so unlike Gateway and Acer for example, on your initial boot you won't be greeted by several windows asking for your attention and half a dozen icons in your system tray.
As an overall package, the IFL90 is decent and we like the ability to get a higher resolution LCD on a 15.4" notebook. As you will see later in the benchmarks, this display is certainly head and shoulders above certain 1280x800 15.4" options, but it's by no means the best laptop LCD on the market. In particular, we would be interested in seeing more LED backlit offerings and higher color gamuts. We're also interested to see what happens when OLEDs start arriving on laptops. Samsung has a 12.1" prototype, but we're not just interested in ultraportable laptops with the technology. We want to see OLED in WSXGA+, 1080P, WUXGA, and all the other standard resolutions in small as well as large display sizes. It might still be several years before we see these displays reach the affordable stage, unfortunately.
We do have one complaint that we can level at AVADirect, that being the lack of warranty options. The IFL90/HL90 comes with a standard one-year warranty, and we were a bit surprised that AVADirect doesn't offer any extended warranty options for the notebook. What's odd is that they do offer extended warranties on most of their other notebooks, with the difference apparently being the notebook ODM. Perhaps it's Compal that doesn't want to bother with extended warranties, but unlike desktop computers it's not unusual to have notebooks experience difficulties during the first three years of use.
AVADirect is certainly worth a look if you're in the market for a new notebook - or desktop for that matter. Prices are competitive with other vendors, and they have extensive customization options. Customer comments at resellerratings.com are very high overall, and it's good to see dissatisfied customers getting responses to their comments. They don't have as many ratings as some companies, but they do have significantly higher scores than certain others (i.e. Gateway and Dell to name a few). The IFL90 (and by extension the JHL90) is an okay laptop, but having tested it we would be more inclined to select one of the other AVADirect offerings, if only for the longer warranty. With Centrino 2 models now in plentiful supply, AVADirect has quite a few options worth a look.
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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.