by Galina Sudareva
11/10/2004 | 04:40 AM
As is known mobile technologies develop somewhat slower than any other of the computer segments. It is no secret that notebooks have been long considered as alternatives to “type-writers” or later as strictly office machines. No one even tried to regard notebooks as solutions suitable for gaming needs (their specifications didn’t allow even thinking about that). Not to mention the multimedia applications, of course.
<%BANNER[article]%>However, desktop PCs have already become all that and very often stood for entertainment centers at home or even at work (sometimes :)
Today portable notebook systems do still yield in terms of performance and characteristics to desktop solutions (which are considerably bigger at the same time). But this is actually the price we have to pay for portability and smaller size and weight of today’s laptops. Especially, since most contemporary laptops started using fully-fledged graphics controllers with their own RAM, which support all up-to-date 3D graphics effects. Today we are going to introduce to you a new laptop equipped with the latest mobile graphics controller – ATI Mobility RADEON 9700.
Please meet our today’s hero: Acer TravelMate 3201XCi.
The silver case of this solution is decorated with black plastic parts along the sides of the laptop. When you open up the top cover, you see a combination of black and silver colors (the frame around the screen and the space around monitor retention mechanisms is colored black, while the rest of the surface is bright silver). In fact, this is a pretty common coloring for a laptop, so we wouldn’t call this design outstanding or striking. In other words, it didn’t make any great impression at first glance.
The top cover can be opened very easily, you just have to lift it and adjust the monitor viewing angle accordingly (you can even do it with one hand, if you are holding the laptop on another hand, for instance). There is no spring clip or any other lock to prevent you from lifting the top cover easily. The 14.1-inch screen with the maximum resolution of 1024x768 boasts very good brightness and contrast default settings and offers comfortable viewing angles. You can adjust the brightness to your taste with the help of special functional keys. Although the brightness settings range is not that wide, you will feel comfortable when reading with the minimum brightness even if you leave the lights in the room on. In the middle of the bottom display frame there is a hole for the built-in microphone, which can even be used as a dictaphone due to its high sensitivity and quality sound reproduction.
The system status indicators are split into two groups. One of these groups is located right above the keyboard and includes the HDD status indicator, Num Lock indicator and Caps Lock indicator. Together with them you can also see a small rectangular power button, which makes it not very convenient to reach. Another group of system indicators is situated at the side of the laptop. You can see the power indicator in the center (it lights up if the system is on) and battery status indicator. These two LEDs are located very conveniently I should say, because even when the notebook is closed you can still see them.
On the right, next to the monitor retention there are four more quick-launch buttons for the most frequently used applications:
The keyboard of Acer TravelMate 3201 XCi is a full-size one manufactured of solid black plastic. Only the functional keys are a little bit smaller than on a regular keyboard. The layout is pretty traditional: white marking on the keys and blue marking for the [Fn] keys. The layout is quite convenient to work with: there is a numeric pad on the right, two special Windows keys, PgUp, PgDn, Home and End keys are located vertically, one under another on the right side of the keyboard, while Print Scrn, Pause, Insert and Delete keys together with the functional keys are all located at the top of the keyboard and are of slightly smaller size, as we have already mentioned.
The Touchpad sensor panel is pretty small and there are two major keys serving as the left and right mouse keys. There is also a four-position joystick for vertical and horizontal scrolling (designed as a square with the marking indicating the scrolling direction).
On the side of the laptop we can see two stereo speakers and a few more functional buttons and ports:
On the left side of the notebook there are:
On the right side of the notebook there are the following ports and connectors:
On the back side of the laptop there is only the connector for external monitor (D-Sub) and replication-port.
At the bottom of the case there are covers leading to the HDD, RAM, miniPCI wireless network card, battery, and numerous ventilation slits.
The table below sums up all the functional peculiarities of the Acer TravelMate 3201XCi notebook to give a better idea of the number and variety of ports and connectors it features:
The notebook comes with the following accessories: external PSU (a pretty small one, I should say), telephone cable, all necessary documentation, detailed user’s manual, a booklet with a list of authorized Acer service centers, a set of drivers and utilities, system recovery disks. Unfortunately, this notebook didn’t go with a transportation bag, as most other notebooks we reviewed (although you can always order it separately). All in all, I cannot say that the accessories bundle struck us as very rich and diverse this time.
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:
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:
We ran the benchmarks with the notebook’s preinstalled operating system – Microsoft Windows XP Professional with the DirectX 9.0a. The network services, audio subsystem, power-saving services, antivirus software, screensavers and error messages were all disabled before the tests.
The tests were run in two modes created by changing the power source settings. In the first case we ran the tests with the AC/DC power source, i.e. the notebook was powered constantly, which provided the maximum performance and guaranteed shortest battery run-down time. In the second case the notebook was powered only from the battery, with battery saving mode activated. In this case we got maximum battery life.
We used the following tests:
Since Acer TravelMate 3201XCi is the first laptop with a fully-fledged ATI RADEON Mobility 9700 graphics controller, which we managed to get for review, we think it would be most interesting to compare its performance with that of a notebook featuring similar architecture, but equipped with an ATI RADEON Mobility 9600 graphics controller. The most suitable solution for this comparison appears ASUS W1B00Na notebook, which we have already introduced to you in our article called First ASUS Notebook with a Built-In TV-Tuner: ASUS W1B00Na Family. Both these solutions feature similar configuration (Intel Pentium M 715 CPU working at 1.5GHz clock frequency, 512MB of RAM, 60GB HDDs). However, they are based around different chipsets (Intel 855GME in the first case and Intel 855PM in the second), support various HDD spindle rotation speed (4,200rpm by Acer, and 5,400rpm by ASUS), and are equipped with different graphics controllers (ATI RADEON Mobility 9700 by Acer and ATI RADEON Mobility 9600 by ASUS respectively).
In the synthetic SiSoftware Sandra 2004 and PCMark 2004, which results are given in the table below, Acer TravelMate 3201XCi and ASUS W1B00Na performed more or less evenly. Note that when we tested them in battery mode, they both run almost twice as slow as they would run in case of AC/DC power, since both systems automatically switch to power-saving mode.
As you can see, in CPU Arithmetic benchmark, CPU Multimedia Benchmark and Memory Benchmark the results are almost identical (the difference lies within the acceptable measuring error). In fact this is pretty expected as these notebooks boast similar configurations. And as far as the disk subsystem results are concerned, the difference is pretty evident: Acer appears about 13%-15% slower than ASUS. The reason is very simple: the hard disk drive in Acer TravelMate 3201XCi features slower spindle rotation speed than the HDD of ASUS W1B00Na: 4,200rpm against 5,400rpm.
Business Winstone 2004 and Multimedia Content Creation Winstone 2004 serve to test the systems performance in office and multimedia applications. During these tests we obtained the following results:
Well, these results are pretty sufficient to ensure comfortable work in applications of this type. Note however, that Acer turns out a little bit slower in Business Winstone (3% slower in Battery mode and up to 10% slower in AC/DC mode), while in Multimedia Content Creation Winstone the results are almost the same (3201XCi manages to turn out 1% faster). This performance difference can actually be explained by the influence of a few factors: different mainboard chipsets, slightly different graphics controllers and HDDs with different spindle rotation speeds. For a more illustrative picture here are the diagrams based on the results given in the tables above:
In the gaming tests the results are also not bad at all (you should pay special attention to these data because it is the focus of our entire test session: both testing participants have similar configuration, but different graphics controllers). The tests in Quake3 were carried out in two image quality modes:
Note that in the first case Acer TravelMate 3201XCi using the ATI RADEON Mobility 9700 graphics solution appears only about 2% faster than ASUS W1B00Na. Well, this is not such a big difference, but it can be easily explained by the fact that most workload is laid upon the entire system as a whole, and the overall systems configurations are pretty similar, as I have already mentioned. In the second case, when the graphics subsystems bear most of the workload, the performance gap in Acer’s favor grows somewhat bigger and makes 6%. The more detailed results follow:
And here are the diagrams:
The results obtained in the 3DMark 2003 3.40 benchmarking set are also different: Acer wins about 10% from ASUS. In the battery mode both laptops run about 7-10% slower in general, for power-saving purposes. Only Fill Rate, Vertex Shader and Pixel Shader stay about the same independent of the power source.
The results obtained during notebooks testing in Unreal Tournament 2003 do not surprise us at all: the leadership still stays with Acer. Both laptops prove almost equally fast in botmatch-antalus (taking into account the measuring error, of course). In botmatch-citadel and flyby-asbestos Acer manages to get 6% and 8% ahead ASUS respectively.
The diagrams below represent the just discussed results of Unreal Tournament 2003:
Well, as we have just seen, the gaming performance of the two systems is pretty good, so that you will be able to enjoy a few contemporary 3D games supporting DirectX 9.0. However, unfortunately, I haven’t noticed any significant performance improvement in Acer TravelMate 3201XCi due to the use of fully-fledged ATI RADEON Mobility 9700 graphics controller.
The battery life of the systems was tested with the help of Battery Eater Pro 2.30. The tests were run with two different brightness settings: maximum and minimum. Also, the test was run in several work modes for each of the testing participants:
Here are the results:
With the maximum screen brightness the battery life in different work modes appeared as follows:
If we reduce the screen brightness down to the minimum, we will be able to extend the battery quite tangibly. Also note that during DVD playback we do not measure the battery life for minimal brightness settings, because you will hardly enjoy watching the movie with settings like that.
So, brightness reduction ensures the following battery life increase:
The diagrams below will make it easier to compare all results against one another:
Having finished these tests we arrive at the conclusion that Acer TravelMate 3201XCi is a pretty comfortable and convenient solution. The model we have just introduced to you boasts pretty good performance, relatively small size and weight, nice ergonomics and functionality. At the same time if you check out the pricewatch you will see that the price-to-performance ratio also seems pretty attractive.
However, if you consider buying this notebook only for the sake of getting a more advanced graphics controller from ATI, you should not expect too much: as we have just seen, the performance gain is not that great compared with the previous graphics controller model.