I decided to take a different approach for this review......let me elucidate the reason
The most important criteria when people choose a PC is performance + performance/Price ratio (Value).....If it's a laptop, few other parameters like
i) Weight ii) Battery Life iii) Build Quality and Ruggedness iv) Connectivity options v) Display Quality also come to mind.......
Let me take up the non essential parameters first and then talk about the performance
1) Weight: at 2.6 Kgs, this laptop is not a featherwieight ultra portable, but not a heavy piece of baggage either : Rating 3.5/5
2) Battery Life: With a 4.4Ampere-Hour Li-ion battery (vs ~2-3 AH for most other models) combined with the low power requirements of Intel-M class processores, this piece gives a avg battery life of 3-3.5 hrs with normal usage compared to ~2-2.5 for other m/c's in the same price range
Rating : Excellent...4.5/5
3) Build Quality/Form Facor: Plastic casing with a black/silver finish......Good looking but slightly flimsy ....doesn't look as solid as IBM laptops, but doesn't come across as a badly build piece either.
fit & finish are excellent and coupled with the pretty looks and wide-screen , the piece is a stunner that is sure to turn heads at airport lounges/coffee shops...Also, it has a think and sleek form factor ....One can easily slide it into a back-pack/haversack while travelling/trekking because of the rectangular profile instead of the usual squarish profile of laptops
Rating: 3/5 for ruggedness 4.5/5 for looks
4) Connectivity options:
-3 USB ports- usually more than adequate for most people
802.11b wifi card built-in: good for setting up a home wi-fi network or accessing the net at wi-fi hotspots like some airports
The usual Ethernet and Modem connection ports
The ususal 1 VGA out for Monitor/LCD
S out for connecting to TV
6-in-1 card reader built in for direct access to external memory cards ,,,Unfortunately, no option for connecting a CF memory card directly which is the most common memory used by digi-cams
IEEE-1394 firewire port for connecting Handycams
Rating: Much better than average connectivity options: Rating 4/5
5) Display Quality: A stunning 1280 X 768 display comapred to the usual 1024 X 768 display on most laptops,..excellent for watching movies because of the 15:9 aspect ratio.....also a better viewing angle than most other laptops...however, some degree of solarization does occur when viewing screen from the sides....rating : 4.5/5
Now for the big question , how does a Celeron M based laptop perform in comparison to the supposed bigger daddies on the block, namely the P-IV and Pentium-M
Here I will take a detailed comparison that me a nad a couple of friends did last week between our laptops and also one desktop ...Here is what we found:
Test configs:
Test config 1-Compaq V2010 (equivalent of the V2036AP in India) with Pentium-M 725 (1.6 Ghz) with 512 MB ram, 4200 RPM 40 GB HDD and Intel Extreme Graphics (1250 $ ~ 55K, the Indian version V-2036 retails at approx 65K) and wide-screen (1280X768) display
Test config 2- Compaq V2035 with Celeron -M 1.5 Ghz (52K Chennai price + 2.7K for extra RAM), 512 MB RAM (2X256) 4200 RPM 40 GB HDD and Intel Extreme Graphics and wide-screen (1280X768) display
Test config 3- Toshiba S-331 with P-IV 3.06Ghz, 256 RAM, 40 GB HDD, on board gfx Radeon 7000 IGP (think my friend paid 61K for this 1 month ago)
4- My desktop with AMD Sempron 2400+, FX5200 gfx card, 80 GB 7200 Hard disk, 256 MB RAM
I have posted the benchmark results that we ran from what remains inmy memory..(but I do have all the results (exact figures) on an xls somewhere, so if someone is interested, I will take the pain of hunting for it :-)))
ResultsWe ran a lot of benchmarks + also tried gaming with Unreal Tournament (original) and UT 2004 @ 800X600 resolution
The benchmark whose results I remember (And would be relevant for many of you as this benchmark taxes purely the CPU ) is Super Pi (This benchmark calculates the value of Pi to a pre-defined number of digits...the lesser time a CPU take, the better it is )
Super Pi at 2 Million digits (all non-essential apps shut down)
Test config 1- P-M 725- 2 min 20seconds
Test config 2- Celeron M Laptop (V2035)- 2 min 37 seconds
Test config 3 - P-IV laptop - 2 min (but it got appallingly hot while running the test)
Test config 4- Sempron Desktop: 2 Min 34 seconds
Now in % terms, that's not really much of a difference b/w the PentiumM and CeleronM, is it?
Unreal Tourney (Original): Don't rememeber the FPS (frames per second, the higher the better the gameplay and smoothness of graphics....20 fps is the bare minimum for playability and 40fps + is excellent for gaming) count but the gameplay was extremely smooth on all the systems (easily <40fps on all)
Unreal Tournament 2004: (This is the latest avatar of the hugely successful Unreal tournament with superior graphics and realism)
Desktop- Very playable with avg fps over 35 fps
My laptop: Decent Playability with fps in the range of 25-30 but with all effects turned off
Celeron Laptop - Surprisingly, it yielded the same fps nearly all the time (probably the bottleneck was the GFX subsystem ) (again with all effects turned off)
Toshiba Laptop: FPS~30, but game kept crashing ...also the laptop was consistently hot to the touch....
Interpretation: A laptop will never match the performance of a desktop (though we didn't have a laptop with a good GFX card, but other factors like HDD speed etc will drag the sysstem down even on one with a decent GFXcard...)
B) HDD speed: Tested using a tool called HDtune for burst Data access rate
-All the laptops gave an Avg 24-25 MBps (blame it on the 4200 RPM HDDs)
- The Desktop gave ~40 MBPS :-) (because of the superior 7200 RPM hard disk)
Final thought on the performance:
FInal Thoughts:
1- There's another intersting fact that not many are aware of.....That a Celeron M is as good as a normal P-IV but with the addd advantage of lower battery consumption....
2- The price difference between a Celeron M and Pentium M doesn't justify the performance diffference.....
3- A P-IV may be faster than a M series (Dothan or Banias core ) processorbut the high heat dissipation and battery drainage makes it a bad choice for a laptop...Howver, the superior (??) architecture of the M series ensures that even at a ~1/2 clock speed of a P-IV, the performance difference is miniscule
4- Some of you may be wondering as to why didn't I test the performance for the most common usage of a laptop i.e. Office applications and Internet Browsing...The reason behind that is all of the configurations above are more than powerful enough to take care of multiple word/excel/IE instances.That is the reason why we never tried to put some objective/numeric performance figures on this aspect
5- One thing that I missed out to test was Audio/Video encoding/decoding performance. This would be useful for a person who wants to use the laptop for converting say Handycam Video captures to VCD/MPEG format or MP3 files to WMA format etc.ll do it inmy free time.Anyone interested can ask for it in the comments section or PM me for the same :-)
