Mobile Roundup: A Trio of Midrange 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....