Posted:2006-06-09 By notebook review Number of View:90753
SAMSUNG X1 REVIEW NOTEBOOK
PERFORMANCE BENCHMARK
By :notebook review
Posted:2006-06-09
xtreview is your : Video card - cpu - memory - Hard drive - power supply unit source
At one time photos of this notebook spread through all the Web resources in some way or other related to mobile computing
– it was just so unusual. The developers’ goal was to make the thinnest
notebook of this class and they succeeded! The notebook is indeed
eye-catching, but its component layout is so completely different as to
make it rather uncomfortable to use.
Note the unusual position of the keyboard – it was moved down to make place for the optical drive.
The drive resembles pocket CD players.
It has a spring-up cover you have to press down with your hand after you’ve loaded the disc.
It’s
clear why they had to use such a drive. Having the thinnest case in its
class, the X1 just doesn’t have room for a normal optical drive with an
ejected tray. As a sad consequence to this, the TrackPoint with its
buttons is very poor.
The keyboard is normal, though. Its layout doesn’t differ much from the traditional one:
The keys are large enough. The Page Up and Page Down keys are placed
near the arrow keys, which is not quite good because you can press them
by mistake. The main drawback of this keyboard is the block of
functional keys on the left.
You have to learn all the shortcuts involving the functional keys anew.
The row of buttons on the right includes Insert and Delete as well as
buttons to launch media applications and volume controls.
Its positioning accuracy is average and its buttons are a nightmare, so if you do buy an X1, you should also purchase a notebook mouse right away. This is going to save you a lot of trouble.
Frankly
speaking, this notebook is a pure image-making device and nothing more.
If you need a notebook for work, you should consider something else. As
for its image-making capabilities, its brand isn’t that prominent as to
distinguish its owner.
The X1 complies with its concept,
though. It is indeed a thin notebook that easily fits into a document
folder which is quite a rare capability for this class of computers.
It’s just impossible to be thinner that that:
The case is not more than 2 centimeters high at any side. The original
approach to the component layout affected the placement of the
interface connectors, too. There’s nothing on the front panel except a
card-reader:
he developer found an unusual place for the speakers of the integrated audio system.
They are on the ends of the screen hinge. Of course, they sound poor, but are quite enough for emitting system sounds.
The bottom panel doesn’t give you easy access to the components, only the memory slots are accessible.
Well, you don’t need anything else. I doubt a user of this notebook
is going to change anything in it manually. The number of available
ports and the functionality of the system when it is used as a desktop
computer can be extended by means of a docking station which is attached to this connector:
This is a solution to the mouse problem. Just plug your mouse into
the docking station and the X1 will become much easier to use.
As for the display, it’s not clear to me why having its own LC panel manufacture and pricing its notebooks rather high, Samsung
cannot provide normal matrixes in them. This display produces a faded
picture; its color reproduction, speed, color saturation and viewing
angles are all below average. The only advantage I can find is its
natural reproduction of body colors. Other manufacturers put such
displays into their low-end products. Again, I can’t understand this
because Samsung has a good reputation as a producer of high-quality
matrixes – remember the series of top-end home monitors on PVA
matrixes, for example. Unfortunately, you just can buy a Samsung
notebook and put a Sony display into it. As a result, both the Samsung
notebooks included in this review are the two that have the worst
displays, yet they are not the cheapest.
The battery isn’t quite good, either:
This is one half of a normal battery and that’s bad notwithstanding the
Pentium M ULV processor the notebook is equipped with. I think such
notebooks must come with a full-capacity battery for the user to choose
between a smaller and lower-capacity battery and a bigger but
larger-capacity one.
As for bonus accessories, there is only one – a small remote control:
You can use the remote control to turn the notebook on, control the
media player and the special AVStation Now shell which is much alike to
Microsoft’s Media Center in look and functionality.
It’s hard to
make a verdict about this notebook because it seems not a finished
product for use, but a concept that somehow made it to retail shops.
Funnily enough, other companies took a look at what Samsung had done
and corrected all the mistakes. For example, Panasonic produced a model
with a similar component layout but in which the keyboard occupies its
traditional place with the optical drive below it. They kept the normal
keyboard layout and also left the touchpad where it should be. So, if
you need a super-slim notebook, there exist alternatives with better
ergonomics and with a weightier brand. Considering the ongoing
transition of Samsung’s model range to the new platform, the X1 is
likely to leave the market soon, to be replaced by a corresponding
model on the new platform and with normal ergonomics.
Performance
First I checked the notebooks in Business Winstone 2004 and Content Creation Winstone 2004 benchmarks
Samsung X1 winstone benchmark
And here are the results produced by PCMark04:
Samsung X1 pcmark performance
The results of the Photoshop CS are indicative of the overall performance of the CPU, platform and hard drive:
Samsung X1 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:
Samsung X1 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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