by Galina Sudareva
08/31/2004 | 11:43 AM
There is sharp specialization in the notebook world as some machines are oriented at on-the-run work and others at replacing desktop PCs.
<%BANNER[article]%>Each category of notebooks has its advantages and shortcomings, of course, and today we will try to find the pros and cons of two representatives of the well-established class of office portable computers.
Endowed with all the necessary functionality, these notebooks can make a good substitute for a desktop PC (although they are not desknotes proper). They are the Acer TravelMate 803 LCi and ASUS M6B00N.
The color scheme of the Acer TravelMate 803 LCi uses a combination of gray and silvery colors. With its smooth lines, rounded corners and relief plastic, the notebook looks like a fragile child toy.
The lid opened, you see a round power-on button and four quick launch buttons. They are located to the right, near the screen hinges. One quick button launches your e-mail client, another starts up the Internet browser, and two more buttons are user-defined.
The opening of the integrated microphone is found at the center, so this portable computer can be used as a dictaphone to record sound.
There are two groups of indicators of the system’s status. One is above the keyboard, on the right, and consists of a hard disk drive activity LED, Num Lock and Caps Lock indicators. They are highlighted with green. The second group is located at the front panel, and this is very handy since the LEDs can be seen whether the notebook’s lid is opened or closed. This group consists of a power indicator (green when power is attached), a battery charge indicator (green when the battery is fully charged and orange when it is being recharged), an InviLink WLAN connection indicator (it lights up when the integrated adapter sends or receives data packets), and a Bluetooth connection indicator (it goes alive when this connection is active).
The keyboard of the TravelMate 803 LCi is bow-shaped; a frame goes around it and smoothes up the sharp corners. The keys have the normal size, only the top row of functional keys are small. A block of numeric keys and two Windows buttons are available. The cursor keys are somewhat less handy as the arrow right/left buttons are small, and there are PgUp/Home and PgDn/End buttons at the sides to be accidentally pressed on. With this minor inconveniency, the keyboard is overall usable and ergonomic.
The touchpad of this notebook is designed in the same manner as the keyboard, with a frame and rounded corners. Besides two standard keys that replace the mouse’s right and left buttons, there is also a four-position joystick for vertical and horizontal scrolling.
The 15” screen has a maximum resolution of 1400x1050; it is rather bright, with good color reproduction and viewing angles. Brightness is adjusted with functional keys, in a rather small range. Setting the screen brightness to the minimum, you can read text in full darkness without any discomfort.
Beside the spring latch of the display, the front panel of the notebook contains a Bluetooth connection button, a button for activating the InviLink WLAN, an IrDA port and two stereo speakers.
The following components are located on the left side of the case:
Using the settings written on the smart card and the enclosed software (PlatinumPas, PlatinumSecure, PlatinumKey), you can fence your portable computer in with a multi-tier security system.
PlatinumPas is the first tier as it starts up before the BIOS POST procedure (if the smart card is not inserted, the notebook will not boot up). PlatinumSecure enhances the Windows XP logon procedure on the OS level. It offers user authorization, encryption/decryption services (except system files, subfolders and files encrypted with other programs) and protection against unauthorized access. The PlatinumKey program is employed to store passwords on a smart card and to automatically confirm the password at Web sites that require authentication.
At the right side of the case, you find only a network connector and a DVD/CD-RW drive (its eject button is rather inconvenient, being sunken deep into the surface).
The rear panel of the notebook has the following:
The bottom of the case has HDD, memory, miniPCI and battery bays, a pocket for the owner’s personal card, a DASP technology logo (Disk Anti Shock Protection) and vent holes.
The case of the ASUS M6B00N resembles the ASUS M6800N we reviewed earlier: the same black color scheme with a slight metallic luster and silvery insertions at the sides. When the lid is open, you can see that the top panel is also made of black plastic, while the bezel around the screen is pure black, without silvery color as in the ASUS M6800N model. At the bottom of the bezel, there are two stereo speakers. Overall, this notebook has an elegant appearance.
The widescreen LCD matrix has a diagonal of 15.4 inches and a maximum resolution of 1280x800. Its aspect ratio is 16:10. The screen is bright, good at reproducing colors; the viewing angles are sufficient, too. The screen brightness is adjusted with the functional keys. During adjustment, the screen displays a scale-like window with the current settings. When at the minimal brightness, the screen doesn’t practically show anything, but this mode may come in handy in full darkness.
At the top of the notebook, next to the screen hinges, there are a vent hole, a power-on button (it is highlighted with bright blue when the notebook is on), and five quick launch keys that do the following:
The system’s indicators are divided into two groups. At the right upper corner of the notebook’s top panel, next to the screen hinges, there are a hard disk drive activity LED, Num Lock and Caps Lock indicators. They are highlighted with the same bright blue as the power-on button. The second group of indicators is found on the front panel – you can see them when the notebook’s lid is down. They include an Audio DJ indicator (it lights up when this feature is active – it allows listening to music without booting the system up), power indicator, battery charge indicator, incoming e-mail indicator (it is lighted when you’ve got new e-mail messages waiting), and a WLAN connection activity indicator.
The ASUS M6B00N uses a full-size keyboard with small functional keys. PgUp, PgDn, Home and End keys are placed in a vertical row along the right edge; there’s a block of numeric keys and two Windows button at your disposal. The block of the arrow keys is placed outside of the bulk of other keys. Unlike in ASUS’ standard notebook keyboard, we have a second Fn button and a button that imitates the click of the mouse’s right button.
The hole of the integrated microphone is located near the bottom left corner of the keyboard.
Besides the buttons that substitute the mouse’s left and right buttons, the touchpad of the ASUS MB800N also has an additional scroll joystick.
The left panel of this notebook contains the following:
The right panel only contains a DVD-RW bay with an eject button, an emergency disc extraction hole, and a few vent holes.
The rear panel of the case has the following:
At bottom of the ASUS M6B00N, there are hard disk drive and memory bays, an accumulator battery cell, a pocket for the owner’s personal card, two stereo speakers and vent holes. You also find an emergency shutdown hole here – it may help when Ctrl-Alt-Del does not work.
The following table compares the communicational capabilities of the two notebooks:
The notebooks come with two different sets of accessories, and their packages differ in size:
The Acer TravelMate 803 LCi comes with the following components: an external power adapter, a phone cable, a gag for the optical drive bay, a smart card kit, documentation, a user manual, a booklet with a list of Acer’s authorized service centers, a set of drivers and utilities and system restore CDs.
The ASUS M6B00N offers the following accessories: a small external power adapter, S-Video à RCA adapter, optical mouse, phone cable, a gag for the optical drive bay, documentation, user manual, cards with tech support Web-addresses and phones of service centers around the world, installation CDs, a bag to carry the notebook around:
The installation CDs contain two discs for system restore, necessary drivers and utilities, a Nero disc, video-editing software, slideshow creation software, a DVD player, three discs with games (Battle Engine Aquila; Gun Metal: War Transformed and a collection called Games Power).
The exclusive bag you receive with the notebook is made of black material. It looks most business-like. It has two compartments (for the notebook and its power adapter and for your documents) as well as two capacious zipper side pockets for your little things.
The ASUS M6B00N and the Acer TravelMate 803 LCi have a similar architecture, so it is the more interesting to compare their performance. Both notebooks are based on the Intel 82855PM chipset and feature the Pentium M 1.6GHz processor (Banias core, 0.13-micron technology) with 400MHz FSB and 1024MB of L2 cache. The ASUS has a 4200rpm Hitachi IC25N080ATMR04-0 hard disk drive (8MB cache buffer, 80GB storage capacity); the Acer is equipped with a 4200rpm Toshiba MK6021GAS drive (2MB cache buffer and 60GB capacity).
The notebooks both have two memory slots, occupied by 256MB PC2700 modules (the maximum supported memory amount is 2048MB for both notebooks). One slot is found at the bottom of the case, under a cover. The second memory slot of the ASUS M6B00N is located under the keyboard. To access this slot you have to remove the keyboard (undo two screws at the back side of the case; press three clips at the top line of the keyboard; and remove the keyboard by shifting it out of its place towards the display). Under it, you also find a miniPCI card bay.
Unfortunately, we couldn’t find the location of the second memory slot in the Acer TravelMate 803LCi.
The use of independent graphics controllers with dedicated graphics memory – ATI RADEON Mobility 9600 with 64MB memory in the ASUS M6B00N and RADEON Mobility 9000 with 64MB in the Acer TravelMate 803 LCi – allows the user to enjoy 3D games with various video effects. Games and applications speak to you through integrated audio subsystems and stereo speakers.
The configurations of the two notebooks also include optical drives. The ASUS M6B00N uses a DVD-RW drive that can read CDs and DVDs at 24x and 8x speeds, respectively. It rewrites CDs and DVDs at 10x and 1x speeds and burns them at 24x and 2x. The DVD/DW-RW drive of the Acer TravelMate 803 LCi has the following characteristics: 6x DVD reading, 24x CD reading, 10x CD rewriting, 24x CD burning. None of the reviewed notebooks has a floppy drive.
Both systems boast Wi-Fi units of the IEEE 802.11b standard and network controllers from Broadcom. The ASUS M6B00N comes with a Gigabit Ethernet controller even, but the Acer TravelMate 803 LCi features support of the wireless Bluetooth interface instead.
The notebooks both have rather quiet cooling systems (a very important factor of any computer!) We measured the temperatures with an infrared thermometer during the Multimedia Content Creation Winstone 2004 test to get the following results:
The following table details the technical characteristics of the ASUS M6B00N and the Acer TravelMate 803LCi:
We checked out the performance of the ASUS M6B00N and the Acer TravelMate 803 LCi under control of Microsoft Windows XP Professional with DirectX 9.0a installed. Before the tests, we disabled power-saving and network services, the audio subsystems, antivirus software, and screensavers. We benchmarked the computers at the maximum and minimal screen brightness and at the maximum screen resolution.
Our tests:
We also used two power modes in our tests. First, we selected the Always On power mode for the maximum performance and the shortest battery run-down time. Then, we switched to the Max Battery mode for the maximum battery run-down time.
The ASUS M6B00N and the Acer TravelMate 803 LCi are positioned as office machines, so the results of Business Winstone 2004 and Multimedia Content Creation Winstone 2004 will be most important for determining their suitability to the proposed job.
We’ve got nice results. When powered by the accumulator battery, the notebooks both reduce their performance in double, as the system automatically switches into the resources saving mode. The ASUS M6B00N has about 6% better score in Business Winstone 2004 than the Acer TravelMate 803 LCi and about 13% better in Multimedia Content Creation Winstone 2004. For those of you how prefer thinking visually, here are a couple of diagrams:
The CPU performance results as reported by SiSoftware Sandra 2004 and PCMark 2004 are practically the same with both computers. Well, they do use the same Pentium M 1.6GHz processor model! The same goes for the memory performance.
The disk subsystem of the ASUS M6B00N is 13-19% faster than that of the Acer TravelMate 803 LCi – Hitachi’s drive of the first notebook has a larger cache buffer. The graphics performance as reported by PCMark 2004 is quite naturally higher with the ASUS M6B00N, as it uses a faster graphics processor (RADEON Mobility 9600 against RADEON Mobility 9000 in the TravelMate 803LCi). You can see the details of the tests below:
The notebooks use discrete graphics controllers, so it is interesting to benchmark them in games. As you see in the table below, 3DMark 2003 3.40 prefers the ASUS notebook with its RADEON Mobility 9600 and 64MB of dedicated graphics memory. The performance difference makes about 61%.
Note also that the RADEON Mobility 9000 controller of the Acer TravelMate 803 LCi does not support version 2.0 pixel shaders and cannot pass Game Test 4. And one more point: the graphics-related parameters of the notebooks (like fill rate, vertex or pixel shader performance) don’t change as we switch from the wall outlet to the notebook’s own accumulator battery.
The ASUS M6B00N remains the graphics leader in Unreal Tournament 2003. It outperforms the Acer TravelMate 803 LCi by 17% in antalus, by 37% in citadel and by 35% in flyby scenes.
The same numbers, but represented as diagrams:
Then we tested the notebooks in Quake 3 with two graphics quality presets:
Surprisingly, the Acer is 4% better than the ASUS in the first mode, but the latter regains its leadership with the second preset:
And diagrams:
So, you can play games on these notebooks. The TravelMate 803 LCi won’t run modern DirectX 9 games smoothly, though. On the other hand, I consider it as a good office machine, and you don’t make your office computer into a gaming station, do you?
Then we used Battery Eater Pro 2.22 to measure the battery run-down time of the notebooks at the maximum and minimal screen brightness settings.
We used three test modes: classic (the load is the highest and evenly distributed among the system components), reader’s (emulates the user’s reading the onscreen text), DVD movie watching.
The results follow:
So, the ASUS M6B00N kept alive a bit less than 4 hours in the classic mode, more than 4 hours in the reader’s mode and again less than 4 hours in the DVD watch mode. The Acer TravelMate 803 LCi worked less than 3 hours in the classic mode, less than 5 hours in the reader’s mode and more than 3 hours in the DVD watch mode.
Reducing the screen brightness to the minimum allows getting a bonus to the battery lifetime, but you may not want to do that when watching DVD movies – the screen is too dark. Anyway, the ASUS M6B00N worked 54 minutes more at the minimal screen brightness in the classic test mode, and 2 hours and 27 minutes more in the reader’s mode. The Acer TravelMate 803 LCi enjoys a 23 minutes longer time in the classic test mode and extra 1 hour 18 minutes in the reader’s test.
The numbers are represented visually in the following diagrams:
So, the battery run-down time is long enough with both notebooks, especially considering their market positioning as of office models.
The ASUS M6B00N and the Acer TravelMate 803 LCi are notebooks positioned as office machines and they suit this definition quite well. Powerful enough, with a wide functionality, nice ergonomics and elegant design, and also with a long battery run-down time, these notebooks can be used with the same success on business trips and in the office, at presentations and meetings.
Between the two, however, the ASUS M6B00N has a better price/performance ratio. On the other hand, the Acer TravelMate 803 LCi provides an exceptional security realized by means of smart cards and special software. The security system protects your valuable data from unauthorized access and this feature may be very alluring for corporative customers.