Conclusion
We finally got some retail Centrino 2 notebooks into our labs for testing. How much of a difference does Centrino 2 make? If the results didn't already make this clear, most of the improvements are hardly noticeable. The biggest change comes in terms of gaming performance on the G50V, but in that case it's simply a faster midrange GPU and has nothing to do with Centrino 2.
That doesn't mean that you shouldn't purchase a Centrino 2 notebook; we just wouldn't recommend replacing a recent laptop purely for the sake of getting Centrino 2. As we mentioned when Centrino 2 officially launched, the changes are hardly revolutionary. The new Intel 5100 WiFi Link wireless adapters in day-to-day use don't seem to be any different than the 4965AGN (none of the laptops we've seen have used the 5300 WiFi Link), so the only actual change comes from the updated chipset. A slightly faster front side bus, faster DDR2 or DDR3 memory, and improved deep sleep states on the CPU are all incremental steps forward, and the new Centrino 2 notebooks do appear to offer better battery life than older laptops; it's just that the difference isn't huge, particularly in light of what Apple does with battery life.
If you tend to carry your notebook from place to place and plug it in, battery life may not be a huge concern, but for people that truly like to be untethered (remember those old Intel Centrino ads?), let's put things in perspective. The 2008 Apple MacBook (standard model) is only slightly larger and heavier than the ASUS U6V, and it comes with a 45 Whr battery. We measured a battery life of 3.1 to 4.8 hours during normal use. With a slightly larger battery capacity, the ASUS U6V can only manage about two hours of video playback or 2.5 hours of Internet surfing.
Is this something that OS X manages to do superbly well and Vista just falls flat on its face? I can't say for sure, but for the price I would undoubtedly to go with an Apple MacBook or MacBook Pro if battery life is a primary concern. Honestly, we want our cake and we want to eat it too when it comes to laptop performance and battery life. We can't see any reason why battery life under OS X should be roughly double that of Windows Vista, and we're not entirely sure Windows Vista is that much worse than Windows XP. If you don't absolutely have to run Microsoft Windows, you should seriously consider the Apple MacBook laptops. (Or you could always get a MacBook and dual boot.)
Looking at the laptops we are reviewing today, where does that leave the ASUS U6V? It's stuck between the proverbial rock and a hard place. This is an ultraportable laptop by every metric we can conceive of, but battery life is only slightly better than the much larger G50V - with the same size battery. Whatever the cause, we simply can't recommend a $1500 12.1" laptop that can't run typical office tasks for at least four hours before the (55 Whr) battery is dead. Apple has shown that it's possible to provide all of that in a notebook that weighs less than 4 pounds and costs less than $1500, so their competitors need to match that level of performance - or at the very least come close.
The ASUS G50V and HP dv5t are in a better position, since they offer reasonable gaming performance. Battery life is even worse, but at least in the case of the G50V we can state that it would be faster than anything Apple has to offer - and quite a bit cheaper than the MacBook Pro. An overclockable CPU, GeForce 9700M GT graphics, 4GB of RAM, and dual hard drives providing 500GB of storage for under $1600? Including a two-year warranty and one year of accident protection? That's actually a very good deal. We are still inclined to recommend the G50Vt for less money and better gaming performance, although again we would prefer if ASUS increased the price slightly and kept the WSXGA+ LCD panel.
As for the HP dv5t, the overall design is pretty nice but the 1280x800 LCD panel is nowhere near as good as the panel on the G50V. Contrast ratio is extremely poor, and anyone who dislikes reflective LCDs will probably find that the HP "designer glass" is as bad as the new MacBooks - although unlike Apple you can actually save $50 and get a regular glossy LCD where the glass doesn't extend to the borders of the laptop. Hopefully the 1680x1050 panel is better, but without testing it we can't say one way or the other. The true selling point of the HP dv5t is going to be the ability for users to customize the configuration. This may be one of the best gaming notebooks that HP manufacturers, but we would recommend something else for gaming, in which case you can get the dv5t with integrated GMA X4500 graphics and be fine. That will save you money and battery life should improve quite a bit as well. For around $1100, you can get a very good HP dv5t.
If you're keeping track of the latest in mobile hardware, you may have noticed that we still haven't reviewed any new Centrino 2 notebooks with integrated graphics. We have a review in the works, and battery life is improved quite a bit over the other midrange offerings we've tested. It still can't touch the MacBooks, but at least getting more than three hours of battery life is feasible. We're also still waiting for a notebook that allows users to switch between integrated and discrete graphics (similar to the MacBook Pro). We have another notebook that does feature that capability, but we're a little surprised that it isn't more of a gaming notebook. It seems to us that the best place for NVIDIA's Hybrid Power technology would be in laptops like the ASUS G50V/G50Vt or Gateway's P-7811 FX - again, we want to have our gaming performance without sacrificing the battery life cake. Otherwise, you might as well just stick with IGP, since the 9300M class hardware is only a small boost in performance over the X3100/X4500. We'll have to wait and see if anyone is willing to step up to the plate and offer such a notebook.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
27 Comments
View All Comments
CEO Ballmer - Sunday, October 26, 2008 - link
This thing is Vista Home Certified! That's the bomb!http://fakesteveballmer.blogspot.com">http://fakesteveballmer.blogspot.com
alantay - Saturday, October 25, 2008 - link
I don't have a very comparable figure about Linux power requirements, but on a Core 2 Duo Santa Rosa based HP laptop (T7100, X3100 IGP, 15.4" screen), the reported power consumption with a default Ubuntu 8.10 installation is 13 watts with lowered screen brightness and 19 watts at full brightness. Not bad, but not a big difference either.Truth is, Linux was bad at power usage until 12-18 months ago. Clearly worse than Windows XP at the time. Only recently there have been significant improvements, so it's now better than Windows Vista, but it seems nowhere near OS X. But it's getting better and better, so in a year it might be doing really good.
sprockkets - Friday, October 24, 2008 - link
While it is true you may not need to have access to the cpu for upgrades, it literally sucks to have to get to it, just to properly clean out the fan, or worse, to replace it.enki - Friday, October 24, 2008 - link
Those laptops seem to be very poor representations of good pc laptop battery life. Look at the review for the T400:http://www.notebookreview.com/default.asp?newsID=4...">http://www.notebookreview.com/default.asp?newsID=4...
It got 581 minutes of battery life in their web browsing test and could play a 3d game for longer then those laptops could browse the web (3 hours)
So in your conclusion when you say if you like to work untethered you should pick a Mac it seems like a T400 with about 2 times the bettery life would be better
JarredWalton - Friday, October 24, 2008 - link
Someone else mentioned the T400 in response to the MacBook article. To repeat what I said there, here's a few quote from their review:"With the T400 you can reach 9 hours and 41 minutes with the wireless enabled, screen backlight at 60%, and the laptop in integrated graphics mode using only the 84Wh 9-cell battery. In this situation the notebook is only consuming roughly 8.5 watts of power. In dedicated graphics mode under the same settings battery life falls by exactly 2 hours down to 7 hours and 41 minutes, and power draw increases to 10.5 watts. The 6-cell battery managed 6 hours and 4 hours and 28 minutes respectively."
Another statement: "When watching XVID encoded movies off the hard drive the 9-cell had an estimated 6 hours and 45 minutes of battery life, drawing 13 watts of power." I really don't like "estimates", though I still suspect it can hit at least 6 hours of Xvid playback.
No mention is made of actually *surfing* the web - WiFi is merely "enabled". Without knowing more about how they conduct their battery life testing, I can't say whether their numbers are comparable to ours. What I do know is that U6V battery life almost doubles (149 minutes vs. 261 minutes) when I go from web surfing to idle. With a similar battery, the U6V would jump up to 418 minutes idle battery life. DDR3 and the ability to disable the discrete GPU probably make up the difference.
Three hours playing Portal with an 85 Whr battery on the T400 is okay, but not that much better than what I would expect from the U6V with a similar battery. With the default battery, that would drop to only two hours.
It does look like the T400 may be more or less equal to the MacBook, which is good to see. The MacBook with a 45 Whr battery under a heavier load (Xvid + constant downloading + web surfing) got 3.1 hours and the T400 gets an *estimated* 6.75 just playing Xvid. If we call those loads relatively "equal", the MacBook gets 4.13 Min/Whr compared to 4.82 Min/Whr on the T400. Probably the surfing and downloading would again make up the difference.
I'll see if I can get a T400 for review, but Lenovo hasn't sent us anything in the past so it's a long shot....
cweinheimer - Friday, October 24, 2008 - link
"Otherwise, you might as well just stick with IGP, since the 9300M class hardware is only a small boost in performance over the X3100/X4500".Slightly better you say? If I recall the article from Anand's IGP chronicles, the 9300igp in atx destroys any intel IGP. Surely the 9300m isnt that much worse than the deskyop counterpart.
JarredWalton - Friday, October 24, 2008 - link
What's twice as fast as a snail? LOL Okay, even at three times as fast it's hardly anything to brag about. If you want GPU performance, go out and get an appropriate GPU. If you're not going to play 3D games (which I wouldn't plan on doing with the 9300M GS), why bother? For 1280x800 gaming, I'd say the 9500M or HD 3600 are the bare minimum you should get. I'd also wager that the inclusion of the 9300M on the U6V cut battery life by at least 10% relative to X4500. (Would be nice to see an NVIDIA IGP notebook other than Apple as well....)garydale - Friday, October 24, 2008 - link
I'm sorry, but nothing has changed in a couple of decades nor is it likely to, Notebooks are always slower, more expensive and more difficult to repair than desktop systems. It's inherent. You're trying to squeeze equivalent functionality into a smaller, integrated package.CPU manufacturers bring their new cores out for desktop systems first sos they can get the technology right before they add in the extra notebook features. Notebooks run off limited power so you need to make some adjustments, such as extra circuitry for dual power sources, power conservation, etc.. You need to add extra components like battery packs, dual outputs and docking interfaces.
When you buy a notebook, you're always buying the whole thing. You can't reuse your old keyboard, mouse, monitor, etc. And you have to squeeze everything into a smaller package, which makes it harder to manufacture.
So please, stop telling us how notebooks are catching up to desktop systems. They aren't and they can't. Notebooks are popular right now but serious users have desktop systems for the speed, flexibility, performance and cost.
I'm running a quad-core desktop system with 4G of dual-channel RAM and 3x500G SATA drives in a RAID 5 array. I don't think there is a notebook out there that can match any of the specs, let alone all of them. And I certainly can't get any notebook that powerful at the price I paid for the desktop system.
JarredWalton - Friday, October 24, 2008 - link
I never said that notebooks are "catching up"; I simply pointed out that we are reaching the point where they are "fast enough". You pretty much repeated everything I stated in the intro, with a negative slant. I'm *not* recommending everyone go out and buy notebooks; what I'm saying is that they're a viable option for many users, even if they cost more.Anyway, the Clevo D-901C can handle three hard drives (in RAID 5), up to 8GB RAM, and quad-core processors (only 2.67GHz I believe), plus 9800M SLI. Total cost for such a system, however, ends up being over $5000. LOL
Now, tell me *why* your average user needs quad-core, a 1TB RAID 5 set, and probably SLI graphics while we're at it. Throw out gaming, video encoding, and 3D rendering (and other workstation/server loads). That's the market a notebook can easily satisfy. Heck, I have a single-core AMD 3800+ still hanging around that handles all the Internet/Office tasks 95% of PC users require, and I can guarantee that the three laptops in this article outperform it in every meaningful benchmark. We've reached the tipping point where there are a lot of people that just need something that's "fast enough".
geokilla - Friday, October 24, 2008 - link
This laptop might actually contain a 9800M GS and not a 9800M GTS, which is basically an underclocked version of the GTS.More info on whether it's a 9800M GS or GTS can be found here.
http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=3...">http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=3...