GammaTech’s Durabook D14RM is the antidote for folks who are really rough on their hardware. The notebook’s gray and black magnesium-alloy case, complete with black rubberized corners, not only makes the rig look burly, but also serves to protect it from aggressive manhandling.

GammaTech says the notebook complies with MIL-STD-810F guidelines for ruggedness, so we put those claims to the test. We “accidentally” knocked the D14RM off a desk when the machine was open and running a program, dropped it from a standing position onto a concrete floor (a few times, because it gave us such a thrill), and spilled a full 16-ounce cup of liquid across its keyboard. The D14RM withstood all that abuse without any apparent damage to its structure or functionality. And mind you, the D14RM uses a mechanical hard drive. Yes, an SSD seems like a more obvious choice for a notebook that’s meant to be tossed about, but then it wouldn’t be nearly so affordable. 

Read on for the full review!

If there’s one thing that might take your mind off your financial woes, it’s some good old-fashioned fragging. And Asus is happy to oblige by offering the most affordable full-fledged gaming notebook that we’ve ever tested. The G51Vx-RX05, sold exclusively through Best Buy, costs less than a grand—OK, at $999, that’s a technicality, but still, this 15-inch notebook is cheap. It’s half the cost of the 15-inch iBuypower M865TU gaming rig we reviewed in November.

Of course, Asus had to cut some corners to get there. The notebook’s Core 2 Duo P7350 CPU, for example, boasts a mere 2GHz clock speed—that’s 33 percent slower than the iBuypower’s proc. And true to form, the G51Vx-RX05 performed about 30 percent slower than the iBuypower (our new zero-point rig) in our Premiere, Photoshop, ProShow, and MainConcept benchmarks.

A Power Control Panel option in the G51Vx-RX05 lets you overclock the CPU by up to 150MHz. That’s a 7.5 percent boost, which amounted to around five percent of additional performance in our CPU-centric benchmarks: Using the so-called “Extreme turbo” mode, we shaved 11 seconds off our original Photoshop time and a minute off of Premiere Pro. That doesn’t do much to bridge the gap between the G51Vx-RX05 and its higher-clocked competition, but it does add some value to the package.

Continue reading this review after the jump.

Blu-ray has yet to prove itself as a sensible storage medium—there are just too many less-costly solutions for backing up data. But just because you’re satisfied with a standard DVD drive for your burning chores, doesn’t mean you should be denied the enjoyment of watching Blu-ray movies on your PC—especially now that large 1920x1080 monitors are so affordable.

Enter Plextor’s PX-B320SA DVD burner/BD-ROM combo. We can’t say it offers the best of both worlds, but it strikes a nice balance. The drive’s DVD speeds aren’t up to the likes of, say, Samung’s SH-S223 performance DVD drive. For example, the Plextor is rated at 16x for DVD+R writes compared with the Samsung’s 22x. In our tests, that amounted to a 5:20 (min:sec) time to fill a single-layer disc vs. 4:46—not such a big deal. With double-layer media, the Plextor took 16:58 vs. the Samsung’s 13:16—yes, over time those minutes can add up.

Continue reading this review after the jump.

From the looks of it, you probably wouldn’t figure iBuypower’s M865TU for a gaming notebook. Its aesthetic is much more subdued than typical representatives of that class. The chassis is covered in a subtly textured black plastic, with tasteful silver trim around the edges and the touch pad. Unlike other gaming notebooks, backlighting is limited to the power button and an unobtrusive iBuypower logo on the notebook’s lid. Furthermore, the 15-inch M865TU is smaller than many gaming rigs and has a more streamlined formfactor.

But despite its smaller stature and no-nonsense appearance, the M865TU’s got game. That’s courtesy of the Nvidia GTX 260M GPU under its hood. Based on a reworked G92 chip, which uses a smaller, faster process (55nm vs. 65nm) and features slightly higher clocks, the GTX 260M proves more capable than previous-generation G92 mobile parts. For example, the M865TU performed almost 30 percent better in Far Cry 2 and Call of Duty 4 than the 9800M GTX-equipped Qosmio X305 we reviewed in June, with scores of 31.3fps and 58.3fps, respectively, at the notebook’s 1680x1050 native res and the highest quality settings. (This month, we jettisoned the games we have previously used for notebooks reviews in favor of FC2 and CoD4, which are far more indicative of a GPU’s prowess—expect to see these titles integrated into our benchmark chart going forward.)

In our August 2009 ultraportable notebook roundup we fell hard for Toshiba’s Portégé R600—the lightest, sleekest ultraportable notebook we’d ever tested. At $2,150, however, that notebook isn’t cheap.

This month we tested Toshiba’s more affordable ultraportable, the Portégé A605, to see how this consumer-class model compares with its fancier business-class kin.

In looks, the two machines are quite different. While the R600 wowed us with its silver, svelte stylishness, the A605 looks more commonplace. Inside and out, it’s adorned with that shiny black plastic you see everywhere these days, which looks really good… until you smudge it. Its keyboard, thankfully, has the same fingerprint-proof silver coating as the R600’s, and more importantly, sports the same full-size dimensions that make typing on it easy. The A605, which measures 11.3x8.8x1.2 inches, is close in size to the R600, just not as wafer-thin, and it’s a noticeable three-quarters of a pound heavier. Like the R600, the A605 offers a generous selection of ports and expandability options, including a USB/eSATA port (in addition to two standard USB ports), an ExpressCard slot, and an SD media reader.

Continue reading this review after the jump.

But aesthetics are only part of the Latitude Z’s story. Far more intriguing is the notebook’s ability to operate completely free of wires—at all times. An optional wireless charging station (pictured) lets you simple set your notebook down upon it—no hooking up or plugging in anything—where its battery is re-juiced via an inductive coil inside the notebook’s bottom panel. An optional docking station, featuring several USB ports along with a DVI port, uses Ultra-Wideband wireless technology, so your notebook can access connected devices—external storage, a printer, even a large HD-res screen—completely untethered. The Latitude Z starts at $1,999. Pricing for the wireless charging and docking stations is to be announced. 

In our July issue, we reviewed OWC’s Mercury Pro 8x Blu-ray External and found the drive’s performance puzzling. In short, the Mercury Pro’s BD-R write speeds belied its 8x rating, with the drive taking nearly an hour to fill a 25GB disc with data, compared with the 22-plus minutes it took LG’s 6x GBW-H20L. It got us wondering whether the issues were more the fault of OWC’s external enclosure or the Pioneer 8x Blu-ray drive at its heart.

This month we were able to answer that question as we tested Pioneer’s BDR-2203, the same drive used in the Mercury Pro. We immediately cut to the chase, testing the BDR-2203’s BD-R write performance. While the Mercury Pro was incompatible with the Nero DiscSpeed app we use for our optical drive tests—forcing us to use Nero 8’s Burn Express instead—the BDR-2203 had no such problems. Using DiscSpeed along with 4x Verbatim media, the drive wrote 22.5GB of data to a BD-R disc in 14:56 (min:sec)—a Lab record!—maintaining 8x speeds through much of the job. With rewriteable media, the drive’s performance wasn’t quite as impressive. The BDR-2203 held a steady 2x speed when filling a 25GB BD-RE disc, for a time of 45:35, much like the Mercury Pro—and 15 percent slower than the LG GBW-H20L’s BD-RE write time.

Continue reading this review after the jump.

When AVADirect offered to send us a Core i7 notebook, we said, hell yeah, and immediately cleared off space in the Lab—a lot of space, because the D900F not only sports a powerful desktop CPU but also the powerfully large proportions you’d expect from a desktop replacement. At 15.5x11.75x2.5 inches with a carry weight of nearly 15 pounds, the D900F is portable in only the loosest sense of the word. You certainly wouldn’t want to lug this thing around on a regular basis.

What it offers instead is the best damn applications performance we’ve ever seen from a notebook. That’s primarily due to the machine’s 3.33GHz Core i7-975 Extreme Edition proc, but the two 80GB Intel X25-M SSDs in RAID 0 no doubt also help. The closest-performing notebook we’ve tested—Lenovo’s W700 ThinkPad, with its 2.53GHz Core 2 Extreme Q9300—was more than 50 percent slower than the D900F in our Premiere Pro CS3 and Photoshop CS3 benchmarks, and more than 80 percent slower in ProShow Producer and MainConcept. Indeed, in all those tests, the D900F was within 10 percent of the 3.6GHz Velocity Micro desktop system that held our desktop benchmark records for months until Maingear’s 4GHz ePhex unseated it in August.

Continue reading this review after the jump.

With all the fuss being made about netbooks, you’d think they were God’s gift to computing convenience. Sure, there’s something to be said for those low-cost, low-power machines, but what if you actually need to get some real work done? There’s nothing convenient about being hobbled by an anemic processor, a relatively low-res screen, a shrunken keyboard, and the various other compromises that contribute to a netbook’s cost savings.

For extreme portability in a machine that packs a punch, you’ll need to set your sights higher, to an ultraportable notebook. Ultraportable notebooks are every bit as light, or lighter than, a netbook, with the added benefit of superior features and a more powerful processor. As a general rule, you’ll find your hardiest ultraportables among the business-class models, which are made for both regular travel and all-around productivity. Of course, convenience of this caliber comes at a premium price—usually four to five times the cost of the average netbook.

Thus, choosing an ultraportable is not a decision to be taken lightly. To help you out, we gathered up four elite representatives of the class and put them through rigorous testing. Obviously, we can’t expect any ultraportable machine to have the muscle required for chores like video editing, batch transcoding, or serious gaming. But we do expect these notebooks to accomplish the gamut of typical day-to-day tasks, including photo editing, slide-show creation, and multitasking. And we expect them to offer all the comfort and features necessary for full-fledged computing on the go.

Fujitsu has been a pioneer in the notebook category, dating back to its P2000, one of the first ultraportables to feature an optical drive. In this roundup, however, the standard Fujitsu set is better implemented by its competitors.

At 10.75x8.25x1.5 inches, the P8020 has a slightly smaller footprint than the others, but, sadly, where that’s most apparent is in the keyboard. It’s surprising how less than a half-inch can change your typing experience, but we found the slightly smaller keys and key pad difficult to use. The P8020’s touchpad has the distinction of being multi-touch, meaning you can zoom in and out by pinching or separating your fingers, a moderately useful tool. We’d rather have multi-touch right-click, frankly.

At two pounds, 13.8 ounces, the P8020 is light but feels well-constructed, although there’s some flex to the body and display cover. The entire unit is matte black, save the glossy black lid. Fingerprints on this surface are of course inevitable, but the lid also picked up a scratch after minimal use.

Continue reading this review after the jump.

If you think of HP’s 2530p as a strapping workhorse of an ultraportable, Toshiba’s R600 is like a stylish, sophisticated cousin—and we were quickly smitten with its charms. The R600 shares much in common with Toshiba’s R500, but with improvements to its build quality and structure. At 11.1x8.5x0.8 inches and a weight of two pounds, six ounces, the R600 is so thin and light as to seem ethereal. There’s some flex to the magnesium-alloy case when you lift the notebook by one corner and some bendiness to the display enclosure, but the notebook doesn’t feel fragile.

And svelte as it is, the R600 is packed with features. It offers a healthy array of ports, including an SD media reader, an ExpressCard/54 slot, and three USB ports—one of which doubles as eSATA and can even be used for charging devices when the notebook is off. Amid all that is a DVD burner, as well as a volume dial.

Continue reading this review after the jump.

On the surface, OWC’s Mercury Pro Blu-ray external drive could seem appealing. The cabinet is attractive and sturdy; it offers FireWire 400, FireWire 800, USB 2.0, and eSATA interfaces—including all the requisite cables; and it holds a Pioneer BDR-203 drive, which is rated at 8x for BD-R writes—the highest rating available—and 16x for DVD+/-R. Yet, after using the device, we’re unimpressed.

We first tried to test the drive with the eSATA interface but it failed to work with any of our test beds, which use the nForce 680i SLI chipset. It was recognized by motherboards using Intel’s P45 and X58 chipsets as well as those boards’ auxiliary Marvell controllers. However, we benchmarked using USB 2.0 on our standard test bed for continuity.

Continue reading this review after the jump!

The first word that comes to mind when you pick up HP’s 2530p is “solid.” From its heft, to its construction, to its scratch-resistant anodized aluminum display enclosure and palm rest, this notebook seems eminently rugged. HP claims that the 2530p has passed a battery of Mil-Spec tests including 26 drops from different angles at a distance of 30 inches, but we didn’t have the stomach to verify that. We will say the notebook seems up to the rigors of heavy use and regular transport. The price of this sturdiness is added weight—at three pounds, 12.7 ounces, the 2530p weighs about a pound more than the other notebooks in this roundup, although it doesn’t feel cumbersome. We’re more bothered that the battery protrudes from the notebook’s 11.1x8.5x1.5-inch body by almost an inch.

The 2530p’s keyboard feels as solid as the body, with a conventional key layout, full-size keys, and both TrackPoint and touchpad options. Small nubbins just above the palm rest ostensibly prevent the keys from abrading the screen when the notebook is shut. Like the X200s, the 2530p sports a keyboard light. An LED-lit touch-sensitive volume slider above the keypad would be handy if it weren’t so twitchy. Teleconferencers will like that the 2530p features a 2MP webcam (vs. the typical 1.3MP) and a dual-array mic. Most everyone will like the notebook’s full complement of ports and slots—our only complaint is that there are just two USB ports.

Continue reading this review after the jump.

Lenovo’s X200s has qualities we’ve come to expect from a ThinkPad—and that’s a good thing. Its magnesium alloy chassis is wrapped in the line’s signature matte black finish, making for a notebook that feels sturdy and looks serious. And at 11.2x8.25x1.25 inches and weighing less than three pounds, the X200s is also lightweight and compact. Yet not so compact that the keyboard suffers—it’s full-size and quite comfortable for typing. A handy light positioned above the screen will illuminate the keyboard and there are dedicated buttons for controlling audio volume.

As with all ThinkPads, the X200s also features the TrackPoint navigation system, whereby you control the cursor using an isometric joystick in the middle of the keyboard, with the left- and right-click buttons in close proximity just below the spacebar. For the uninitiated, TrackPoint can be easily mastered and it’s nice that you can perform navigation functions without moving your hands off the keyboard. But unlike larger ThinkPad models, the X200s doesn’t feature a conventional touchpad as well, which will disappoint folks who like that option.

Continue reading this review after the jump.

For several months we’ve been talking about what a great value Gateway’s P-7811 FX gaming notebook was (reviewed October 2008). So we were anxious to see how the update to that model, the P-7808u FX, holds up.

At first glance, “update” seems too strong a word for Gateway’s latest 17-inch performance-oriented notebook. The P-7808u FX looks identical to its predecessor, sporting the exact same black-and-orange chassis as the P-7811 FX, the exact same arrangement of ports— three USB, FireWire, eSATA, HDMI, VGA—and the exact same right-angle power connector that we griped about the first go-round.

The P-7808u FX even features the same videocard, a GeForce 9800M GTS. This card helped last year’s P-7811 FX win us over with impressive scores in our standard gaming benchmarks and the new P-7808u FX’s performance in those tests was equally strong. But compared with a dual-GPU notebook such as CyberPower’s Extreme M1 (May 2009), Gateway’s graphics solution shows its age. When faced with a more graphically intensive title like UT3, the P-7808u FX mustered a score of 64fps compared with the Extreme M1’s 114fps—and it would no doubt fare worse in more modern titles.

Continue reading after the jump.

Normally, aesthetics are a secondary part of a notebook review, but Toshiba forces the issue with the Qosmio X305’s wild design. Seriously, the lid’s audacious three-tone, metallic-red paint job alone is enough to challenge the interest of a potential buyer, but the X305 also sports an unusual formfactor involving curves and lips that add to both the machine’s footprint and height. And like the majority of notebooks in its class, the 17-inch X305 is heavy—although, with a carry weight of approximately 11 and a half pounds, it’s still more than a pound lighter than the CyberPower Extreme M1 we reviewed last month.

Of course, there’s more to the Toshiba X305 than its physical spectacle. The machine has the distinction of housing a 2GHz Core 2 Quad Mobile Q9000 processor, making it only the second quad notebook we’ve reviewed—the first was Lenovo’s Kick Ass ThinkPad W700 (http://tinyurl.com/al9wjn). Those two extra cores gave the X305 a healthy advantage over its higher-clocked, dual-core competitors in our application benchmarks. In Premiere Pro CS3, ProShow Producer, and MainConcept Reference, which are all heavily multithreaded, the X305 surpassed all the dual-core rigs we’ve reviewed over the last several months—including the 2.8GHz HP HDX 18 we reviewed in January—by greater than 50 percent, in most cases. Interestingly, it also scored much better than those machines in Photoshop, which isn’t heavily multithreaded. We attribute it more to the X305’s hard drive configuration: a speedy Toshiba 64GB SSD is dedicated to the OS, while applications write to a virtually empty 320GB HDD.

Continue reading this review after the jump.

 At $2,300, CyberPower’s Extreme M1 17-inch gaming notebook is the antithesis of the budget Gateway P-7811 FX we’ve been raving about for months. The most obvious extravagance you get for the higher price is dual-GPU graphics in the form of two ATI Radeon HD 3870 cards in CrossFireX. The Extreme M1’s 2.53GHz T9400 Core 2 Duo CPU is also 270MHz faster and features twice the cache as the Gateway’s proc, its 320GB hard drive is more than 50 percent bigger, and its optical drive supports Blu-ray playback.

The question is, how do these extras translate in performance? Compared with our zero-point notebook, the Extreme M1 excelled in all the benchmarks to varying degrees—not surprising, given the zero-point’s age. Against the Gateway P-7811 FX, there was a little more give and take. For example, in the ProShow Producer and MainConcept benchmarks, CyberPower’s rig had gains hovering around 10 percent, which is proportionate to the M1’s clock-speed advantage over the Gateway’s 2.26GHz CPU. But in our Photoshop benchmark, the Extreme M1 was actually around 7 percent slower than Gateway’s P-7811 FX.

 Read more about this product after the jump.

Now that Lite-On is sharing the same drive manufacturing line as Plextor (not to mention Sony, HP, and Philips), you might wonder whether there is any difference between this 22x DVD burner and the Plextor PX-850SA 22x burner we reviewed in March. In fact, the two burners are virtually the same in terms of parts and mechanics, so differences really come down to the firmware each company uses and the tweaks and optimizations each makes to the final product.
 
The first thing we discovered is that Lite-On didn’t tweak this drive with an over-speed feature. So, like the Plextor PX-850SA, the burner stayed within the confines of the DVD+R media’s 16x rating, writing 4.38GB of data to a single-layer disc in 5:43 (min:sec). Samsung’s SH-S223, which can reach 20x-plus speeds when writing to 16x media, was almost a minute faster, at 4:46.

Continue reading this review after the jump.

If you read our disc-ripping challenge on page 62, then you already know that LG’s GH22LS30 22x SATA drive is a slowpoke at copying video discs. But if that’s not an activity that interests you, this drive offsets the shortcoming with other talents. For example, the GH22LS30 turned in the fastest time we’ve ever clocked at writing data to a single-layer DVD+R disc. Like Samsung’s SH-S223 (reviewed February), LG’s 22x burner isn’t daunted by 16x media; the drive peaked at a 20.1x speed when filling the disc and achieved an impressive write-speed average of 16.31x. Thus the GH22LS30 was able to write 4.38GB of data in 4:29 (min:sec) compared with the SH-S223’s time of 4:46. The GH22LS30 read the single-layer data disc in 4:58 to the SH-S223’s 4:55.

Whether you’re copying your movie discs to your hard drive for archival purposes or queuing them up in HandBrake for a batch transcode, your optical drive’s performance can make a big difference in time spent on this menial chore. The trouble is, there’s no obvious way of knowing which optical drive will do the job fastest.

The optical drive spec that gets the most attention is the DVD+/-R write speed. It’s the spec that’s prominently featured on the packaging and often even integrated into the drive’s name. But if you assume that the newest drive with the fastest-rated write speed will also kick butt at copying the contents of your movie discs to your hard drive, you’re mistaken.

For this task, read speed is what matters. But even knowing that, you can’t judge a drive’s real-world performance at copying video files simply by looking at its read specs. Not only do the specs indicate maximum capability as opposed to average speed, but a drive’s read time with video files can differ from its read time with data files. To find out which is the fastest drive for DVD copiers, we grabbed a bunch of DVD drives, a copy of Batman Begins, and got ripping.