Mobile Roundup: A Trio of Midrange Laptops
by Jarred Walton on September 17, 2008 3:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Laptops
Gateway M-152XL - Thoughts and Summary
As we will see shortly, in terms of performance the Gateway M-152XL is the equal of the other two notebooks in this roundup. Short of running benchmarks, most users would be hard-pressed to notice a difference between any of these notebooks. What they will notice is some of the added or missing features. Considering you spend most of your time using a computer looking at the display, differences in laptop LCDs are also going to become readily apparent. Gateway definitely falls short in that area, and personally I would rather use just about any other LCD - although to be fair, many other budget 15.4" laptops are going to have the same or a similar LCD panel. Still, not everyone is an LCD snob, and the display definitely isn't unusable.
The build quality and features of the M-152XL are actually very good, and as we mentioned already, this is our favorite laptop in terms of appearance out of these three notebooks. The inability to customize Gateway notebooks is something of a drawback, and sorting between the various models can often be confusing. Some of the models are even specific for one retailer, so you can end up with two laptops with identical components but with different model numbers. Acer and HP notebooks have a similar drawback, but the benefit is that the companies are able to mass-produce a limited number of variations, helping to keep prices low.
One other problem that has to be mentioned with Gateway in particular is that their laptops come with a ton of preinstalled software. (Acer wasn't much better, if at all.) The first item on our agenda as soon as we booted up the notebook was to disable or uninstall anything we didn't feel was necessary. This list includes: an Internet security suite and antivirus software; Gateway's BigFix utility that notifies you about software updates; some unnecessary in multimedia applets; and lastly a variety of Internet games (including "buy me" nags) that you could easily find without any preinstalled software. (Okay, so the Internet security suite isn't necessarily a terrible thing to have, but personally it gets in my way and slows things down, and smarter web surfing habits are more important than software that very likely won't help if you do something stupid. I prefer my hardware router/firewall and an ounce of common sense when it comes to opening email attachments and downloading files.) The mass-produced aspect of Gateway notebooks removes the option for software customization, but thankfully it only takes about an hour or so (and a few reboots) to clean up all the extra junk.
The M-152XL certainly is an okay notebook, but after the P-6831 and P-7811 Gateway offerings, it fails to impress. Gateway seems dedicated to the price/performance conscious users, and the M-series offerings definitely fit that market. You'll sacrifice features, performance, and quality to varying degrees, but if all you're after is a basic laptop we encountered no difficulties with the M-152XL. It was extremely stable and feels as durable as any other notebook we've used. If Gateway could replace the LCD with something better, even if it increased the price by $100, our opinion of the notebook would improve dramatically. At the very least, a few models with a better display would be great. As the highest priced M-series laptop, the M-152XL/M-153XL need something extra to separate them from the less expensive models. Putting the cheapest LCD panel you can acquire into a $600 laptop makes sense, but once you reach $1000 or more we think most users would appreciate a better display with improved contrast and colors.
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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.