E6500 Review - "a glimpse into the future of laptops"

According to CNET Australia. FYI:

http://www.cnet.com.au/laptops/laptops/0,239035649,339291554,00.htm

 

HOLY CRAP!! a 9/10? thats the highest cnet review i ever seen

 

That is an incredibly glowitng review by cnet!

 

I think that all the CNET review can tell us is "they liked it alot".

Whether it's actually good or not is still highly debatable. My point is that I don't trust CNET reviews but read them when b/c sometimes they're the only people who have a review at all, and they usually have it first.

They weren't very happy with the Treo Pro, which is decidedly against the grain of most everyone who has handled it. Same old for many other items.

The biggest problem is that their reviews contain alot of repeats from packaging / website material (b/c of their targeted audience, I guess), so most of it is fluff and there isn't all that much info.

 

I'm anxiously waiting for a different review as well.

Those PCMark and 3dMark scores for the E6500 really suck. It barely puts up a fight against the T400, let alone the T500. Perhaps it is a driver problem, but I can't see it beating the T500. I guess gaming is out the window.

 

I guess you gotta go with the lenovos if gamings really important.

 

Keep in mind that it's a business laptop...not a gaming one.

 

Ack!

<yoda>A **** good business laptop it is!
Gaming you not need, young padawans!</yoda>

 

Well errr... quote from the review:

"Battery life was pretty miserable, although considering our super-specced hardware and the high resolution screen, this is unsurprising."

The guys at cnet are idiots, methinks. A business laptop with miserable battery life is worth a metric ton of bull for people who carry their laptop with them on business travels. An then: I have an Dell Inspiron 8600 with also 1900*1200 resolution, 7k HDD, 2GHz Pentium M. And it gives me about 2:30 h video playback on the main battery and 3-4 hours with the bay battery. Besides raw CPU/GPU performance, the glimpse of the future is beaten by the past.

 

The problem is how they tested the battery life...

They let the T9400 (35W TDP CPU with 2.53 GHz) forcedly run at its full core speed, bumped the two CCFLs up to their desktop-LCD-level brightness, disabled everything Dell and Intel have engineered to save power - and watched a DVD, making the DVD drive and the dedicated GPU (also at full speed, meaning nothing less than 580 MHz) suck lots of power out of the battery. Now who's surprised by that machine consuming more than 50 watts under these conditions? The display itself is rated at 13 watts according to Dell, and the CPU's und GPU's TDP also shouldn't be far from their maximal power consumption they almost reach during this test.

But this is not what the typical battery life test is meant to be. It should show how power-efficient this strong system can be if you do light stuff on it, like typing documents in Word or surfing around the net. I assume that they were just over-eager to try out how many juice is consumed by the pure power stuffed into that box.

And now there's me, who has decided to go for either an E6400 or E6500 as my primary computer for university, as my expectations are high and one of those two fulfils them best. As a high-res freak I might be going for the WUXGA display, but not if its two tubes with the big inverter bump the usual idle consumption with IGP up to 20 watts just because of possible loss of inverter efficiency at low brightness or something like that. This would be the dealbreaker for me, sticking with the WXGA+ LED even though the vertical resolution is a lot below my last notebook which had SXGA+, which means more scrolling for me when writing, surfing, or coding.

The question of power efficiency still has to be answered by a second review with that display, and I'm surely not the only one who's waiting. The WXGA+ LED display is superb, according to the first look by John (E6400/E6500 shouldn't be much different) - but how about the really-high-res option?