Pentium III Notebooks: Speed, Power to Spare

The mobile Pentium III processor brings near-desktop performance to portables.

Intel's newest PIII processors are great news for notebook users as well as for the desktop crowd. The first mobile Pentium IIIs, running at 400 MHz to 500 MHz, drive the best-performing notebooks we've seen to date.

We looked at three of the first PIII notebooks: Dell's Inspiron 7500 R500VT and HP's OmniBook 4150 (with Pentium III-500s), and a Pentium III-450based Gateway Solo 9300. Although they still trail the top desktop CPUs (see "PCs Break the 700-MHz Barrier" ), these muscular though rather heavy portables are more than ready to replace your desktop. And battery life doesn't suffer, nor do these machines run hotter: The .18-micron process used to make these chips lets them deliver better performance at the same voltage used by their predecessors.

The new process has also allowed the chips to get smaller and thinner, so even ultraportables can take advantage of them. In fact, PIII-400s are intended primarily for ultraportables, but none were available in time for our review.

The new mobile CPUs benefit from the 100-MHz system bus, which replaces the old 66-MHz bus and supports the same PC-100 memory used in most of today's desktops. AGP speed has remained at 2X versus the 4X of new desktops, but most business users won't notice the difference.

The notebooks we looked at are feature-packed desktop replacement units: Traveling weights range from 6.9 to 9.4 pounds, and prices go from $2799 to $4209. All three units turned in outstanding performance on our PC WorldBench 98 suite of business applications, with the two PIII-500 units--each also carrying 128MB of RAM--finishing neck and neck: The Inspiron 7500 R500VT scored 236, while the OmniBook 4150 racked up a 235. That tramples the 202 set by the previous notebook champ, an Inspiron 7500 with a Celeron-466 CPU and 64MB of RAM. And the PIII-500 marks are nearly 20 percent better than the average of 197 for the nine Pentium II-400 notebooks we've tested. The Solo 9300, with a PIII-450 and 96MB of RAM, also broke the old record with a WorldBench score of 216.

These units don't just sprint and die, either. The shortest-lived of the bunch, the HP OmniBook, lasted 3 hours and 50 minutes on its 9-cell battery. The Dell, with a 12-cell lithium ion battery, ran about half an hour more. And the Gateway's 12-cell battery kept the power going for a whopping 5 hours and 13 minutes.

Feature Set

For top power in a desktop alternative, Dell's $4209 Inspiron is hard to beat, starting with a huge 25GB disk. A crisp, vibrant 15-inch 1400-by-1050 screen makes DVD movie viewing a pleasure (though we noted some pixelation in full-screen mode). In addition to the combination DVD-ROM and floppy drive, the unit had a 100MB Iomega Zip drive module and a built-in 56-kbps modem. But hauling the 9.4-pound Inspiron around will give you a real workout.

Frequent flyers will prefer the $4149 OmniBook 4150's 6.9-pound traveling weight and 1.5-inch profile. The OmniBook 4150 sports an ample 12GB disk and a sharp, 14.1-inch, 1024-by-768 display. Jarringly, however, color depth automatically bumped down when we opened more than one window with the display set to 256 colors. DVD playback was smooth. HP supplies both a pointing stick and a touchpad, which operate concurrently. Bay drives on both notebooks are hot-swappable.

The $2799 price tag of Gateway's Solo 9300 will attract more budget-minded power-seekers. You get a brilliant 15-inch, 1024-by-768 screen, and at a minimum 7.7 pounds the unit is fairly portable. The 6.4GB hard disk is a bit small, but you get more bay module options, including a CD-RW drive. Other nice touches include front-mounted CD-ROM controls, four one-touch launch buttons for tasks like e-mail and Web browsing, and easy-to-see battery gauge lights. We didn't get a DVD-ROM drive, but the IEEE 1394 port should come in handy for new peripherals supporting this fast connection.

Coming Up

What's next for notebooks? Intel's SpeedStep technology, due to appear by mid-2000, will allow mobile CPUs to operate at lower clock speeds when running on battery power and at higher clock speeds when using AC power. The first SpeedStep systems will probably run at 600 MHz when plugged in. But if you're buying now and portability isn't a prime concern, the Dell Inspiron 7500 is the most robust choice. Frequent flyers should give the more mobile OmniBook a close look. And the Gateway Solo is a real bargain, especially if you don't need to have a top-of-the-line machine. Desktop power has never been more mobile.

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