Yep, Another One...

Raikiri

Raikiri

Raikiri

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Uni is looming ever closer so I need a laptop. Budget isn't huge, maybe £450.

I've been looking at a few options, outright speed isn't a big deal as I have my fairly well specced desktop for any rendering/compiling I may have to do. Portability and battery life are the main things to consider..

The Acer Timeline 13.3" - £450:

Processor: Intel Celeron 723 1.2GHz
Memory: 3GB DDR3 SDRAM
HD Capacity: 320GB
Display: 13.3" 1366 x 768 WXGA Acer CineCrystal LED-backlit TFT LCD
Graphics Card: Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 4500MHD 64MB

7-8 hour battery?

Samsung N510 - £???

Atom 530 1.6ghz
9400m Graphics
1gb RAM (would upgrade this)
160GB HDD
11.6" 1366x768

5-6 hour battery?

Samsung NC10/20 and any number of other netbooks - £200-350

Atom 1.6ghz
9-12" 1024x600
1GB RAM
16-250gb SSD/HDD

I would install Windows 7 on anything I did get so I little bit of speed would be needed I guess, so I'm leaning towards a proper notebook or Ion based netbook (if they become available without a silly premium).

Any ideas?

Thanks by the way :)
 
Can't really help you much apart from saying personally I wouldn't consider battery life over 5 hours to be any great plus so I wouldn't use that as a judging point. But thats just me.

Also I don't know your course or if you know much bout university. But It's unlikely youll be taking a laptop into your lectures. So your laptop will mainly be used on trains, in your room and taking it out with your friends to café's to study most probably.

Don't know if that changes anything for you, but really as you can see the battery life isn't such a big concern when your going to be near a wall socket most the time.

:EDIT:

Also having 3gb of ram vs 1gb looks like a huge bonus to me. But seens as your not gaming id probably say aim for 2gb. 1gb seems to slow in the OS personaly.
 
I'm in the exact same position as I'm also going to be taking my desktop to uni and personally I'm aiming for the n510 + adding 1GB ram + W7.

It's finally started shipping in continental europe so we'll be seeing reviews and benchmarks very soon. I could see using anything less than a 12" screen getting a little bit annoying after a while, especially with <full sized keyboards so at least for me that rules out the 10" netbooks.

The ION is a bonus, as it'll allow DXVA and has HDMI out so you could watch HD stuff on it without any issues if you ever want to hook it up to a TV. It'll also mean W7 aero is nice and nippy.

Prices are looking to start at around £400-£450, so similar to the timeline, and I think with the ION it's slightly better value for money. Plus it's a Samsung, so I think it'll have better build quality. Also the mention of a Celeron isn't exactly hope inspiring :p
 
The XT2? It starts at £1200 + VAT.

AFAIK the Celeron should be considerably faster than the Atom but I can't find much in the way of reviews/benchmarks.
With the larger screen, larger HD, longer battery life and 3GB RAM (and the fact I just found it for £430) I have to say it is still in front. I just need to find some reviews.
 
My google skills are failing me quite miserably, I can't seem to find any info anywhere on the 723, not even a simple superpi time.

If it turns out the celeron is noticeably faster than the atom that'll make it a lot more appealing. Coupled with the slightly bigger screen, bigger HDD and more RAM it'll put the n510 and the timeline about on par with each other.

The only thing that's the issue now is whether the ION is worth it or not... It might be the sort of thing that you don't really notice when it's there, but you'll miss it if it's gone.
 
Ion may be very exciting, or it may just end up draining battery life. However 13" screen sounds rather better than 10" to me. I think I'm going to wait until most of the way through September to make a decision, in the spirit of leaving it as long as possible.

Main reason to post though it to mention (2.5") ssds. I sold an nc10 using an ocz core v2 at the start of the summer, since I wouldn't need it over the summer. It was astonishingly quick, the improved storage access time largely made up for the processor. I suspect that the ion + atom + ssd combination would be very balanced and remarkably good. However if it doesn't make it out in time, I'll probably get another nc10.

Samsung have a strange website. Perhaps this will be useful, a comparison of the N110, N120 and N310 in case you go down the netbook route. As far as I can tell they're all exactly the same
 
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Yeah, I'm going to do the same and wait until as late as I can (not that I have much choice, my loan/grant won't come through until 30th September anyway).

It is probably the best idea anyway to see if any reviews of the 723 and Ion based netbooks are released. The only info on the 723 I can find is a SPEC2006 score where it gets a base acore of 8.9, whatever that means.

Edit: An Opteron 146 scored roughly the same.

On Passmark the 146 gets 457 compared to the Z530s 307, making the 723 roughly 50% faster assuming it performs similarly to the 146 in all applications.
 
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According to this site the atom gets around 6 on SPEC2006 on the same test (assuming you got the figures for the 723 from this).

This means the celeron is about 50% faster than the atom, though neither is particularly fast at all as something like a core 2 is about 3 times more powerful than the celeron.

I've found a video showing off the ION in the n510, and that it can accelerate 720p playback damn near perfectly, meaning the gfx do pack a decent grunt.


Assuming the 723 is 50% or so better than the atom in the NC10, we'd still be provided with frankly horrifying video playback on it. For me at least, that's pretty much ruled out the timeline as I'm going to be using it a lot for watching videos on the move.

Couple of benchmarks for the GMA 4500MHD (in the timeline) and for the 9400M (ION). Both suck, but the ION is noticably less sucky. You could probably shove something along the lines of TF2 on the n510 and have it run relatively OK.
 
The x4500HD is capable of playing back anything up to Blu Ray with a much higher bit rate than anything you're likely to be watching so I wouldn't worry about that.

Gaming is the only thing it's going to be worse at and well, they're both ultra portables so that's hardly a surprise.
 
FFFFFUUUUUUU

I was under the impression that, as an onboard card it wouldn't do DXVA but you're right, it seems like it does. And rather well at that.

Well this suddenly makes choosing one hell of a lot harder as it all hinges now on whether slightly better graphics performance with the ION on games I'll probably not be playing as I have a desktop is worth sacrificing 1.7" of screen space, 2GB of RAM, a superior processor, a bigger HDD and better battery life.

Well that actually doesn't seem too hard. I'll be taking the timeline thank you very much :D
 
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