From...

July 5, 1999
Web posted at: 10:39 a.m. EDT (1439 GMT)

by Carla Thornton

(IDG) -- The number 400 can mean different things in different contexts. As a career home run mark, it's great. As an SAT score for your college-bound kid, it's far from ideal. And as the clock speed of Intel's newest mobile processors, it can go either way.

Here's why. We examined two of the first notebooks packing Intel's new 400-MHz Pentium II processor, and one equipped with its new 400-MHz Celeron chip. The two PII-400s -- NEC's Versa SX and Compaq's Prosignia Notebook 165 -- are little faster than the average PII-366 notebook we've tested, yet they cost $300 to $500 more. Our advice? If you're in the market for a fast, top-of-the-line portable and you can wait a little while longer, keep an eye out for notebooks based on even faster chips due later this year.

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Intel's new Celeron-400 processor is a different story. The one notebook we tested using this chip, Micron's TransPort Trek2, performed like a Pentium II-366 -- but it costs $2499, about $200 less than Micron's similarly configured PII-366 Trek2. You may be able to find comparable deals on Celeron-400 notebooks from other vendors, thanks to Intel's marketing of the Celeron processor as a budget alternative.

Behind the numbers

One version of the mobile PII-400 will be the first mobile x86 chip built with a manufacturing process that creates transistor elements .18 micron thick. Others will be built with a larger, .25-micron manufacturing process. The more compact .18-micron CPUs should consume less power and generate less heat. Still, many PII-400 notebooks, such as the two we tested, will include the .25-micron chips. In our tests, these notebooks, equipped with a 14.1-inch screen, lasted between 2 and 2.5 hours on one battery charge, a battery life we consider at the low end of acceptable.

This lower-power technology is expected to play an increasingly important role in the upcoming generation of Pentium III notebooks due by year-end. The .18-micron manufacturing process will enable PIII notebooks to offer the same 2 to 3 hours of battery life as current PII notebooks, according to Intel spokesperson Manny Vara. Celeron processors will move to the .18-micron process in the year 2000, according to Vara.

But processors are only part of the story. Of the two PII-400s we looked at, NEC's $3799 Versa SX was thinner, lighter, faster, and more expensive. You pay a premium for its unique combination of a 1.3-inch-thick case, 4.8-pound overall weight, and a modular bay capable of holding a range of add-in options. It's also the only portable of the three to include a DVD-ROM drive. But while the Versa SX outperformed the Prosignia Notebook 165, its PC WorldBench 98 score of 192 is only 3 percent better than the average score of Pentium II-366 notebooks with 64MB of RAM; and the Versa holds less than a 1 percent edge over the speediest PII-366 on record, Dell's Inspiron 7000 A366LT. These increases fall substantially below the 10 percent threshold necessary to produce a detectable difference in everyday applications.

Compaq's Prosignia Notebook 165, which is positioned as a desktop replacement, performed a shade below the PII-366 average, with a PC WorldBench 98 score of 183. Compaq confirmed that some of the preloaded programs could have hampered performance and contributed to the system's low score (the bundle included special system management software). At $2699, this PII-400 is not especially expensive considering the feature set it offers, but you could save a little money by opting for its PII-366 sibling.

The Cadillac of desktop replacements, the 8.4-pound Prosignia Notebook 165 offers a polished, convenient all-in-one design for people who need a presentation machine with the best built-in notebook audio available. It also holds many of the same types of add-ins as the NEC Versa SX.

Micron's TransPort Trek2, the only Celeron-400 that we tested, is a reasonably priced desktop replacement with plenty of multimedia delights. At only $2499, it's the least expensive of the three notebooks we looked at, yet it earned a very respectable PC WorldBench 98 score of 184 and comes with two pointing devices and an LS-120 drive. The Trek2 is easily the heaviest notebook in this clutch, weighing more than 9 pounds with the AC adapter included. But for the price, you can't beat it, especially when you compare it to an identically configured Pentium II-366. In our battery tests, the Trek2 lasted a little more than 2.5 hours on a single charge--satisfactory longevity at this chip speed.

Adding it up

If you're looking for a good deal right now on a fast notebook, consider a portable with a Celeron-400 CPU. If you can wait, you'll be able to select a notebook equipped with a new chip from Intel rival AMD, the K6-III-P-380, which should be widely available in midsummer. These portables should be almost as fast as PII-400 notebooks but cost a couple of hundred dollars less, says Linley Gwennap, editorial director with Cahners MicroDesign Resources in Sunnyvale, California.

600-MHz holidays

If you need something significantly faster than today's notebooks, you'll have to wait until December, when the next big jump in notebook processor speed is due. At that time, you'll see notebooks equipped with the long-awaited mobile Pentium III and a new chip set.

These developments will allow notebooks to graduate from today's 66-MHz bus to one that runs at 100 MHz. Further, when plugged into an electrical outlet, these notebooks will operate at 600 MHz -- matching the speed of the fastest PC desktops for the first time in years -- and when using a battery, they will run at 500 MHz. Now those are numbers worth waiting for.