19 Pentium Portables Do Multimedia

With Pentium processors, gigabytes of drive space, large screens, and CD-ROM drives, these notebooks are more than ready for prime time.

Maggi Bender, Jim Kane, and John McDonough

When it comes to work, today's multimedia notebooks certainly let you take it with you. Running Pentium processors at rates of up to 166 MHz, today's multimedia notebooks might not be as fast as the top Pentium and Pentium Pro desktop systems, but they make good business computers, both on the road and in the office. These high-end Pentium notebooks are also expensive, being almost twice the cost of comparably configured desktop systems. However, with accelerated graphics, large active-matrix color displays, CD-ROM drives, and 810-MB or larger hard d rives, they provide full-throttle computing for on-the-go professionals.

We tested 18 Pentium portables that range in price from $3000 to almost $7000 and employ 100-, 133-, or 166-MHz CPUs. We also included Canon's AMD 5x86-powered Innova Book 360CD (see the article "AMD Inside"), which provides Pentium performance. You can buy a more economical 486DX4-based notebo ok, but you'll want a Pentium to handle graphics-intensive multimedia tasks under Windows 95 or OS/2 Warp -- and to delay your next upgrade cycle.

Modular components have become a hot notebook feature. Many high-end notebooks we test here provide an all-purpose bay that can hold a CD-ROM player, a floppy drive, or an additional battery. You swap them in and out depending on what you need. You can't use floppy and CD-ROM drives simultaneously, but the modular design saves space, weight, and battery power while maintaining desktop functionality. We included two ultrathin systems -- Digit al Equipment's HiNote Ultra II and the Impulse Duonote -- because they have attachable multimedia bases for CD-ROM and stereo-sound functionality, another form of modularity.

Most of the portables we tested have removable hard drives, a feature that ensures upgradability. Even the 2.1-GB hard drive in Micro-International's Mint 5200 may seem small in a year or two. Most notebooks have two Type II PC Card slots and infrared ports for cableless file transfers. The Toshiba and NEC units implement the new 4-Mbps IrDA 1.1 infrared standard.

All test notebooks came with active-matrix screens that display graphics with crisp details and deeply saturated colors. With three 10.4-inch exceptions, the high-end notebooks we reviewed have either 11.3- or 12.1-inch SVGA displays. All can display at 800- by 600-pixel resolution, which is great for Windows 95, but you'll want a big display and one with a wide horizontal viewing angle if you routinely use your notebook with a handful of people sitting around a table. The 12.1-inch panels provide roughly the same viewable screen real estate as a 14-inch desktop monitor.

Less expensive passive-matrix displays are still an option with most of these products, but the trend is toward the bigger, brighter, more responsive active-matrix displays. IBM, for instance, dropped its ThinkPad 550 with the pop-open butterfly keyboard so it could add more screen real estate, and Toshiba's cutting-edge Tecra 730CDT supports an unusual 1024- by 768-pixel resolution on its 12.1-inch screen (we reviewed the Tecra 500CDT).

Those notebooks costing more than $5000 are from big-name vendors such as Compaq, Gateway 2000, IBM, and NEC Technologies. Compared to less expensive units, they come with more software and longer warranties. A unit such as IBM's ThinkPad 760ED, for instance, has multimedia luxuries: a 64-bit graphics chip with 2 MB of dual-ported video memory, hardware-assisted MPEG playback, an internal 28.8-Kbps data/fax/telephony modem, and lithium-ion batteries that outlast nic kel-metal-hydride (NiMH) batteries in our battery run-down tests.

Such feature-laden portables use battery power quickly. We suggest that you get a notebook that can hold multiple lithium-ion batteries if you want to work throughout a cross-country plane flight.

The two 166-MHz notebooks we tested turned out not to be the fastest. In spite of 256-KB Level 2 caches, the Chem Book 5580 and the Micro-International Mint 5200 didn't perform as well as the 133-MHz NEC Versa 6030H. Typically, a 166-MHz Pentium system should perform 10 percent faster than a 133-MHz system. The Mint 5200 suffered from below-average memory performance and slow hard drive and CD-ROM drive speed.The Chem Book 5580 was hurt by poor memory and hard drive performance.

For multimedia, software development, or just to load large applications, a notebook must have a built-in CD-ROM drive. We recommend that you get one with a four- or six-speed CD-ROM drive for faster read and seek times. Multimedia notebooks must also have integra ted stereo speakers, though a small speaker size limits sound quality.

Notebooks that come with hardware-assisted MPEG -- the Compaq LTE 5300, NEC Versa 6030H, Nimantics Quanta 6x 133, Impulse Duonote, and IBM ThinkPad 760ED -- can effectively zoom video clips to full-screen without the dropped frames and blocky pixellation associated with software-only MPEG. Having 1 or 2 MB of dedicated video memory and a PCI-bus architecture also helps to enhance graphics I/O performance.

Toshiba's Tecra 500CDT has a Zoomed Port Video (ZPV) PC Card slot. The proposed ZPV standard establishes direct communication between the PC Card controller and the audio and video controllers, so that large amounts of multimedia data don't require processing through the CPU or system bus. When ZPV cards become widely available, the Tecra 500CDT will provide a fast connection for full-motion video playback. The Tecra 500CDT and NEC's Versa 6030H also support CardBus, another proposed standard. This standard provides for 32-bit PC Card peripherals such as Fast Ethernet and Fast SCSI adapters.

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Contributors

Jim Kane, Project Manager/NSTL

John McDonough, Technical Writer/NSTL

Maggi Bender, Senior Tester/NSTL

Dave Rowell, Senior Technical Editor/BYTE

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Portable Multimedia

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