by Galina Sudareva
11/05/2004 | 02:19 PM
The market of portable computers is currently offering a variety of models, from super-light sub-notebooks of low performance but long battery life time to office notebooks for working in multimedia and office applications and high-performance desknotes, capable of substituting a desktop system.
Many notebooks look the same from the outside – having the same case, dimensions and connectors – but differ in their configuration, price, and purpose. Today I’m going to tell you about two such machines from Acer: TravelMate 803LCi and TravelMate 6003LCi models. The main difference between them is in their graphics subsystems: the former uses a discrete graphics processor and dedicated graphics memory, while the latter is equipped with an integrated graphics core.
Let's meet our today's testing participants!
As I said above, you can’t tell one notebook from the other by their looks. The color scheme of their cases (a gray base with a light-silvery lid) is overall simple but elegant:
I already discussed the design and ergonomics of the Acer TravelMate 803LCi in the article called Two Office Notebooks: ASUS M6B00N and Acer TravelMate 803 LCi, but I think it would be right to repeat the basic points, paying special attention to differences, if any, between the 803LCi and the 6003LCi.
The lid opened, you can see a round power-on button and four quick launch buttons. They are all located on 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.
Near these buttons, the opening of the integrated microphone is found on the 803LCi model; on the 6003LCi the microphone is located in the right corner near the screen hinge. So, these portable computers can be both used 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 bright green. The second group is located on the front panel, and this is very handy since the LEDs can be always 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 is sending or receiving data packets), and a Bluetooth connection indicator (it goes alive when this connection is active). The external difference between the two TravelMates is that the insertions in their front panels are made of different material, and the system status indicators are lined up in a different order, as the snapshots below show:
Acer TravelMate 6003LÑi
Acer TravelMate 803LÑi
The keyboards of the notebooks have a curious bow-like shape, emphasized by the bezel that smoothes sharp corners out. The full-size keys are made of black plastic (the top row of functional keys has a reduced size); the numeric pad and two Windows keys are here, too, like in an ordinary desktop keyboard. The letters are labeled in white, and the functional keys in blue (press and hold [Fn] to use them). A few useful keyboard shortcuts are available: Fn+F6 turns the screen off to save the battery charge; Fn+F7 disables/enables the touchpad to avoid accidental touches as you’re typing text; Fn+F8 mutes or enables the sound. The cursor-controlling keys are not quite handy as the Arrow Left and Arrow Right keys have a small size and there are Page Up/Home and Page Down/End buttons on the sides that can be accidentally pressed on. But this is a minor drawback – they keyboard is really ergonomic and convenient overall.
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The touchpad repeats the keyboard’s design with its rounded corners and frame. The frame is wider on the TravelMate 6003LCi and the useful area of the touchpad is thus reduced. Besides the two standard buttons that replace the mouse’s buttons, the two notebooks have an oval-shaped four-position joystick for vertical and horizontal scroll.
The 15” screens of both notebooks have a maximum resolution of 1400x1050; the screens are bright, with good color reproduction and viewing angles. The screen brightness is controlled with functional keys. When adjusting the brightness, there’s no scale or other indication of the current brightness level, which is rather inconvenient (but such a scale does appear when you’re adjusting the sound volume). The brightness range is not too big; you can conformably read something at the minimal setting.
At the front panel of the Acer TravelMate 803LCi, besides the display latch, there’s a Bluetooth connection button, a WLAN InviLink button, an IrDA port, and two speakers on the sides. The 6003LCi model also features a card-reader that supports Smart Media, Memory Stick, MultiMediaCard, and Secure Digital formats.
At the left panels of the reviewed notebooks you can find the following:
As I described in my article called Two Office Notebooks: ASUS M6B00N and Acer TravelMate 803 LCi, the settings written on the smart card and accompanying software (PlatinumPas, PlatinumSecure, PlatinumKey) allow organizing a multi-tier security system around the notebook.
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 the 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 following ports and connectors are found at the rear panel:
Acer TravelMate 803LÑi
Acer TravelMate 6003LÑi
At the bottom of the notebooks you can find hard disk drive, memory, WLAN mini-PCI card, and battery bays, a pocket for the owner’s personal card, a Disk Anti-Shock Protection system logo (DASP), and more vent holes.
The following table lists the communicational capabilities and physical parameters of the two notebooks:
The packages of both notebooks contain the following stuff, besides the notebooks proper: an external power adapter, a phone cable, a bracket for the optical drive bay, a smart-card kit, documentation, user manuals, a booklet with a list of Acer’s authorized service centers, a pack of necessary drivers and utilities, and system restore discs. There is no transportation bag included with any of the notebook, although such a bag is really a handy and useful thing.
As mentioned above, the TravelMate 803LCi and 6003LCi notebook models from Acer have a similar architecture but differ in their graphics subsystems (the former uses a discrete graphics processor with dedicated graphics memory and the latter employs an integrated graphics core).
The notebooks feature different chipsets, too. The 803LCi model is based on the Intel 855PM chipset, and the 6003LCi on the i855GME. They both have an Intel Pentium M 1.6GHz processor inside (0.13-micron Banias core, 400MHz FSB, 1MB L2 cache), and a Hitachi hard disk drive. The 803LCi uses a Hitachi IC25N060ATMR04-0 model (4200rpm, 8MB cache buffer, 60GB capacity), while the 6003LCi has a Hitachi IC25N040ATMR04-0 (4200rpm, 2MB cache buffer, 40GB capacity).
The integrated graphics subsystem of the Acer TravelMate 6003LCi is an example of shared memory architecture as the user can choose the portion of the system RAM to be used by the graphics core (8, 16 or 32MB). So you can increase the performance of 3D applications at the expense of the overall system performance, and vice versa.
The TravelMate 803LCi is equipped with a discrete graphics processor RADEON Mobility 9000 and 64MB of dedicated graphics memory, which allows playing modern 3D games with some comfort.
The integrated audio subsystems of the two notebooks give voice to the operating system, applications and games; the stereo speakers have a good volume reserve.
Each of the notebooks has two memory slots occupied with 256MB PC2700 modules of DDR SDRAM; the maximum possible memory amount for both notebooks is 2048MB. One slot is found at the bottom of the case in its bay that you access after unfastening two screws. The second slot is under the keyboard; to access it, you also unfasten two screws at the bottom of the case (labeled as K). Then, remove the panel near the screen hinges and shift the keyboard off its place towards the screen.
You can see the system coolers there, too. I should confess they are rather noisy at work, but the touchpad and the adjacent area (where your hands are resting as you’re typing text) were perceptibly hot at work (of course, not so much as to scorch you). I measured the temperatures of the notebooks as they were running Multimedia Content Creation Winstone 2004:
The notebooks both have an optical DVD/CD-RW drive with the following speed characteristics: 8x DVD read, 24x CD read, 10x CD rewrite, 24x CD write. There’s no floppy-drive in either of the notebooks, but it is well compensated by the CD-recorder. Then, USB flash drives have also become widespread enough as to make the old floppy drive obsolete.
Both systems are equipped with Wi-Fi units of the IEEE 802.11b/g standard and network adapters from Broadcom. The TravelMate 803LCi can also establish Bluetooth connections.
The table below compares the technical characteristics of the two reviewed notebooks:
I tested the Acer TravelMate 803LCi and 6003LCi notebooks with their preinstalled operating systems – Windows XP Professional and Windows XP Home Edition, respectively. After all, the owner of each of these notebooks is likely to use the preinstalled OS, I guess. The DirectX 9.0a API was installed on both notebooks, too. I disabled network services, audio subsystems, power-saving services, antivirus software, screensavers and error messages before the tests. The computers were tested at the maximum and minimal screen brightness settings and at the maximum resolution of the LCD matrix.
Our tests:
I used two power modes in my tests. First, I selected the Always On power mode for the maximum performance and the shortest battery run-down time. Then, I switched to the Max Battery mode for the maximum battery run-down time.
The results of the synthetic tests SiSoftware Sandra 2004 and PCMark 2004 are presented below:
The notebooks both deliver a good performance. Note also that they both drop their speeds almost in half when powered from their internal batteries. As shown in the table above, the results of Sandra’s CPU Arithmetic and Multimedia Benchmarks are almost the same with both notebooks as they use the same central processors (Intel Pentium M 1.6GHz). The memory performance is, however, different: the TravelMate 803LCi is 7-10% faster than the 6003LCi in Sandra 2004 as well as in PCMark 2004. This is probably due to the 6003LCi model’s using shared memory architecture, while the 803LCi features 64 megabytes of dedicated graphics memory. The disc subsystems of the two notebooks also differ by about 10%: the 803LCi model has a 60GB Hitachi drive with an 8MB buffer, whereas the 6003LCi is equipped with a 40GB drive with a 2MB buffer. As might have been expected, the graphics subsystem of the TravelMate 803LCi (RADEON Mobility 9000 with 64MB of graphics memory) is reported to be 23% faster than the integrated graphics subsystem of the 6003LCi in PCMark 2004.
Next, I checked out the performance of the two notebooks in Business Winstone 2004 and Multimedia Content Creation Winstone 2004 tests which ran scripts of various real-life applications and produced the following results:
As you see, the TravelMate 803LCi is about 9% faster than the 6003LCi in Business Winstone 2004, and about 5% faster in Multimedia Content Creation Winstone 2004. This difference in the results is due to the difference in the configurations of the two notebooks (chipsets, graphics subsystems, hard disk drives). Here are a couple of diagrams for those of you who think visually:
Of course, you can tell the winner in gaming tests beforehand: the integrated graphics core of the 6003LCi is no match for the discrete graphics processor employed in the TravelMate 803LCi. Anyway, it’s interesting to learn the value of the difference. I checked out the speeds of the notebooks in Quake 3 with two graphics quality presets:
In the first mode, the 803LCi is 47% faster than the 6003LCi; in the second mode the difference amounts to 73%! You must agree this is a hefty advantage. The results are tabled below:
And diagrammed here:
I used two graphics quality presets in 3DMark 2001 SE: 1) 1024x768, 16-bit color depth, Z-buffer and textures, and 2) 1024x768, 32-bit color depth and textures and 24-bit Z-buffer. The results follow:
So, the Acer TravelMate 803LCi quite naturally wins this gaming test, profiting by the use of a discrete graphics processor RADEON Mobility 9000 with 64 megabytes of dedicated graphics memory. Its performance as reported by 3DMark 2001 SE Pro is about 65% higher (at the low image quality settings) and 73% higher (at the high image quality settings) than that of the Acer TravelMate 6003LCi.
Note also that the latter notebook doesn’t support Game 4, Environment Bump Mapping, Pixel Shader 2.0 and Advanced Pixel Shader tests at all. The 803LCi passed a few tests (Fill Rate, Vertex Shader, Pixel Shader) at roughly the same speed irrespective of the power source.
The benchmarking results in Unreal Tournament 2004 can’t say anything new: the TravelMate 803LCi remains the leader of course (75%, 86% and 74% faster than the 6003LCi in botmatch-antalus, botmatch-citadel and flyby-asbestos tests, respectively). The results follow:
So, my gaming tests suggest that you can only run DirectX 9.0 games on the TravelMate 803LCi notebook with any comfort; the 6003LCi doesn’t suit for gaming much.
Next, I measured the battery run-down time with the help of Battery Eater Pro 2.23 (the Reader’s test has changed since version 2.22 – scrolling is performed each 15 seconds by page rather than by line; the CPU load is different too – it is now calculating the pi number with a definite precision).
I performed my tests at the highest and lowest screen brightness settings, and in three test modes:
The results of the test are listed below:
Thus, at the Acer TravelMate 803LCi lasts as long as over 3 hours in the classical test mode, slightly less than 4 hours in the reader’s mode, and over 3 hours in the DVD watch mode. The 6003LCi model works about 3.5 hours in the classic mode, over 4 hours in the reader’s mode and 2.5 hours in the DVD watch mode.
You can get a nice battery life bonus by reducing the brightness of the notebook’s screen. At the minimal brightness it is even possible to read text, for example. However, this mode doesn’t suit for watching DVD movies since the colors and the contrast worsen too much.
So, you get the following bonus by reducing the screen brightness to its minimum:
The results of Battery Eater Pro 2.23 are put into the next diagram:
As you see, the 6003LCi model has a longer battery run-down time: it lasts longer than the 803LCi model by 26 and 42 minutes in the classic mode (max and min brightness levels, respectively), and 13 and 19 minutes in the readers mode (max and min brightness, respectively). This is because the TravelMate 803LCi uses a discrete graphics processor that consumes additional power from the notebook’s battery.
Overall, the batteries of the notebooks allow using them in “field conditions”, even though the notebooks themselves are not actually intended for that.
The TravelMate 803LCi and TravelMate 6003LCi models from Acer share the same case design, but differ in their market positioning and configuration. Particularly, the former uses a discrete graphics processor with dedicated graphics memory, whereas the latter employs an integrated graphics core. Of course, their price differs, too. You can purchase the 6003LCi model for about $1650, and the 803LCi model for about $1900.
Our tests suggest that these notebooks are high-performance machines with wide functionality and good ergonomic qualities, elegant design and a long battery run-down time. The 803LCi is positioned as an office notebook, which can be in fact used as a desktop PC replacement. The 6003LCi is touted as a corporative model. Well, these suggested uses suit well to them both.
