Configuration

Acer TravelMate 3201XCi is based on Intel 855GME chipset with an Intel Pentium M 715 CPU working at the actual 1.5GHz frequency (Dothan core manufactured with 0.09micron technology). It features 2048KB L2 cache and 400MHz system bus. Moreover, it is equipped with Hitachi IC25N060A04-0 hard disk drive with 60GB storage capacity, 8MB cache-buffer and 4,200rpm spindle rotation speed.

The reviewed notebook model features a fully-fledged ATI RADEON Mobility 9700 graphics controller with its own 64MB of graphics memory, which will ensure that you enjoy various video effects during DVD or VCD disks playback, and should provide comfortable gaming experience in a few 3D games supporting DirectX 9.0. the integrated sound system is quite sufficient for the Windows environment, games, office and multimedia applications you are most likely to run on this notebook. The built-in speakers provide pretty sufficient volume level even for DVD playback. Well, 3201XCi can hardly ensure real Hi-Fi sounding, but a portable solution hardly needs that functionality, and you will hardly expect it to have sound of such high quality at all.

Acer TravelMate 3201XCi features two RAM DIMM slots, one already occupied by the 256GB PC2700 DDR SDRAM module (the maximum you can install into these slots is 2048MB of memory). Note that this slot is located on the reverse side of the laptop under a special cover, which can be opened only after you unscrew 6 fastening screws. The second empty slot seems to be right under the keyboard, although we didn’t remove the latter to make sure this assumption is correct.

The tested laptop also features a built-in DVD/CD-RW optical drive providing 8x DVD reading, 24 CD reading, 16x CD rewriting, 42x CD writing speeds.

The cooling solution of Acer TravelMate 3201XCi is pretty quiet. It seems to be doing its job quite well, as we didn’t notice any significant overheating of the work area. Nevertheless, we still took a few measurements from the different notebook surfaces with the help of the infra-red gun thermometer during the Multimedia Content Creation Winstone 2004 benchmark. As a result we got the following temperatures:

• Upper surface – 34^oC;
• At the cooling system exit – 33^oC;
• Lower surface – 34^oC.

Moreover, since we are now living in the era of wireless technologies, it was very pleasing to see that this laptop supports such interfaces as Wi-Fi IEEE 802.11b/g and Bluetooth. There was also a Broadcom network adapter onboard.

For your convenience here is a table listing all the Acer TravelMate 3201XCi laptop specifications: