Posted:2006-06-09 By notebook review Number of View:85243
ACER TRAVELMATE 3222WXMI REVIEW
NOTEBOOK PERFORMANCE BENCHMARK
By :notebook review
Posted:2006-06-09
xtreview is your : Video card - cpu - memory - Hard drive - power supply unit source
I’ll start off with this rather fresh model from Acer.
The device is agreeable to the eye and to the touch and would look
equally well on a desk and in your hands. This computer features the
exclusive folio design the point of which is to make the notebook look as a document folder rather than what it actually is.
Well, I wouldn’t say the designers met their goal. The texture and
color of the material cannot conceal the simple fact that this is a
typical notebook. You can only mistake this thing for a folder if you
are looking at it from the front and a little from above, and only at
dusk. Well, it’s just the job of the marketing department to come up
with pretty names and their explanations. We’d better move on to
details. There are no special surprises or odd solutions here:
Besides the speakers’ grids, there are power source indicators and
buttons to turn on/off wireless interfaces (Wi-Fi and Bluetooth) on the
front panel.
There are two audio connectors on the left – for your headphones and microphone.
I really can’t understand why they have to put these connectors on the
front panel – that’s not the best place for them. But it’s good that
Acer moved them to the left so that the attached cables didn’t get in
your way.
The rear panel is typical of Acer’s notebooks of this class:
Besides the battery which dominates the notebook’s back, there is a power connector, one USB port and a port for an external port-replicator here
The latter connector is uniform on all Acer notebooks, so you shouldn’t have any incompatibility problems.
On the right side there is an optical drive, some vent openings, and a Kensington lock.
D-Sub connector for an external monitor, video output, LAN and
modem ports, two USB and one FireWire port, PCMCIA slot, card-reader
and IrDA port – this is more than enough for a business notebook. The
only thing I can complain about is the USB ports.
There are three of them here, which is a normal number (you seldom get
more than three with notebooks of this class), but they are not very
conveniently placed. The two USB ports on the side panel are so close
to one another that you can’t plug two large devices into them
simultaneously. The back-panel connector is just not very easy to
access.
You can recognize Acer by the typical curve of the keyboard:
The manufacturer claims this solution minimizes your hand strain. I
won’t agree or disagree because you can only make sure of that after
having worked for some time with the notebook, yet I didn’t feel any
discomfort due to the peculiar shape of the keyboard. Acer’s keyboards
are also distinguishable for their two currency keys:
These keys are located near the arrow keys, thus provoking erroneous
presses. The fact that the same arrow keys do double duty by allowing
to adjust the display brightness and sound volume settings is good
since they are easy to find, but on the other side bad as you cannot
adjust the brightness or sound with one hand.
The touchpad is blameless:
The power adapter is good, too:
This is a well-matched companion for a compact notebook: it is very
small and light for its wattage. The only thing I don’t quite
comprehend is why Acer includes such a thick power cord that would
better suit a room heater than a notebook with a consumption of a few
dozen watts. As a funny consequence, the coiled power cord that you
connect the power adapter to the electric outlet with takes up more
room than the power adapter itself!
So, the key features of the
Acer TravelMate 3222WXMi are good performance, compact size, nice
design, and good configuration. On the downside is the mediocre and
poorly protected display (rainbow patterns appear on it if you just
press on the back of the lid). The plastic of the lid is too
scratchable – the notebook may lose its good looks after a very short
period of intensive use (you can avoid this by carrying it in a special
bag).
Performance
First I checked the notebooks in Business Winstone 2004 and Content Creation Winstone 2004 benchmarks
Acer TravelMate 3222WXMi winstone benchmark
And here are the results produced by PCMark04:
Acer TravelMate 3222WXMi pcmark performance
The results of the Photoshop CS are indicative of the overall performance of the CPU, platform and hard drive:
Acer TravelMate 3222WXMi adobe photoshop
The well-balanced LW40 is almost as fast as the two notebooks
on the new platform. Other notebooks are slower. The two slowest models
shouldn’t be used to run such applications at all – they are only
capable of performing office tasks like processing text and
spreadsheets, browsing the Web, etc.
The next test shows what you can expect from these notebooks in gaming applications:
Acer TravelMate 3222WXMi gaming benchmark
performed this test using the maximum display resolution of each
notebook, except for the LG T1 (I used 1280x800 with it because
1440x900 would have been too much for its integrated graphics core).
The Acer TravelMate 3222WXMi is the best and can cope with modern games
if you don’t use the highest graphics quality settings. Among other
notebooks, only models with the X600 are interesting. The Samsung X11
is second after the TravelMate 3222WXMi but I doubt it’s going to be
that fast in real games.
I also published the results of the CPU
subtest to show you that 3DMark03 favors the Centrino Core Duo
platform. This is indicated by the Samsung X11’s results. This platform
is the most promising one when it comes to games, considering that all
the leading game developers have confirmed support for dual-core
processors in their upcoming products.
And now, the results of the most important test:
I put the results the notebooks achieved in Reader’s mode and under
maximum load into one diagram because the difference between the two is
indicative of how well the manufacturer set up the power-saving
parameters. The Sony VGN-FJ1SR looks best here as it yields you its
full computing power under max load but is very economical in Reader’s
mode. Besides the Sony, there are two more leaders: LG’s T1 with a
high-capacity battery and an L series Core Duo processor which features
low power consumption, and ASUS W3H00V. The latter proved to be a bit
of a cheater, though. Even under max load with the portable/laptop
power management scheme selected this notebook never increased its CPU
frequency higher than 1.3GHz.
It’s all clear with the first two diagrams, but then there are some things I’d want to single out. The LW40 is very fast in the memory test; it’s the best Centrino-based notebook I’ve seen in this benchmark. The Acer TravelMate
3222WXMi is unrivalled in the graphics subsystem test just because it
has the fastest graphics adapter among the tested notebooks.
Nvidia’s
GeForce Go 7400 is downright disappointing. If you need fast graphics,
buy a notebook that has dedicated graphics memory. Graphics subsystems
of other kind (with such suffixes as TC, HM) are not much better than
integrated graphics and cannot ensure high performance in 3D. In the
disk subsystem test the notebooks rank up according to the spindle
rotation speed of the hard drive they use.
xtreview is your : Video card - cpu - memory - Hard drive - power supply unit source
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