that's really cool

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These machines are made by Arima who also supplies the emachines notebooks. The M6811, though not quite as powerful in some areas, is a heckuva lot cheaper and should be considered by anyone looking at one of these. In fact, if you put the photos of the M6811 side by side with this machine you will see nearly everything is identical.

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These notebooks are getting larger by the minute. I have the Dell Inspiron 8200 at at just over 7 pounds it's just about too heavy and is definitely too large for a notebook.

Personally, I'd like to see a notebook with a 14.1 4/3 ratio screen, with a 1280/1024 resolution, with Athlon 64 or Pentium M and Mobility 9800 with 256MB of ram and 1Gig of PC2700 DDR SDRAM with just one combo CD/DVD drive. At 14.1" screen size, it should weigh less than 6 pounds and be much smaller than the 8200 while having twice the gaming performance.

These new gaming notebooks just don't do anything to me on aesthetic levels.

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To #3, why a 4:3 screen and a 5:4 ratio of resulution? That would look messed up and out of scale.

On page 7, the comment below the first graph is:
Battery life for the M:860 is about what we expected: a little over 2 hours, which makes it fairly comparable to other desktop replacement systems of its nature. We still have high praise for the M:855's 3-hour score, since it is really out of character in DTR notebooks.

Yes the graph shows a Voodoo M:8855 (typo) having a lower score than the M:860
The R50, T41 and 8600 are all higher than both Voodoo notebooks, and have >3hours, if the numbers are in minutes, while the M855 has a score of 131, vs 137 for the M:860.

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Misread the benchmarks, I was looking at the top graph, not the bottom one, but the typo is still there.

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Buying a notebook for gaming is a waste of money. The size of notebooks too is pathetic in many cases and I wouldn't call them mobile. But people keep buying them because they have no perspective of what is best.

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In my case my notebook is a desktop replacement that I sometimes play games on. I didn't buy it specifically for gaming.

Still, to have that capability, notebook manufacturers force you to buy the biggest, heaviest and most expensive notebooks.

Like I said, 14 or 15" 4/3 ratio screen, 6 pounds max weight is plenty enough for me. Unfortunately if I want that, I have to get an old generation video card with it. Kind of sad.

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What's so special about a Dohan? (Your cliff notes reference).

Dohan looks very much like a mobile AthlonXP to me - just try running one under load and you see power goes way up (not just playing a DVD, all modern processors can do that without breaking a sweat).

Just compare say a Barton-core mobile XP and a Dothan and tell me where the differences are - apart, that is, from the price of an XP at <$100 and Dothan more than six times as much.

Come on, I'd like to see a comparison. How about it (and don't include an Athlon64, that's a horse of a very different color).

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I own an e-machines M6805. Same platform as m:680 (and the predecessor to the e-machines M6811).

Brought it to a weekend lan party recently, and it played all my games great (doom3, call of duty, worms armageddon :), UT2004, etc). I'm in 64-bit Gentoo Linux on it right now, and I love it even more as a portable development machine.

At some Best Buy locations, you can get the M6805 for $1150 after $250 in two rebates (before tax). If you are considering the Voodoo Envy, give the E-Machines a look first. It does not match specs, but it gets damn close for literally 1/3 the price. All that really needs replacing is the 4200 rpm hard drive with a 7200 rpm. I overclocked my mobility radeon 9600 from core clock 300MHz to 450MHz, and get about 11800 in 3dMark 2001SE.

The ram, CPU, video, rom, and screen res differences are all subjective matters of preference. Both machines perform wonderfully. Also, the CPU in the M6805 is a Mobile 3000+, not a DTR, so it uses ~20 watts less at full power (but still has full 1MB L2 cache).

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#8 - If you read the context of what I wrote, I did not compare the A64 to Dothan. I put that reference in because this is our first notebook review that I have written in a few months and that is very relevant information to the industry. So I am assuming you are talking about Anand’s review: http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=2129, and Dothan is special in the sense that it is an upgrade from Banias that brings more performance benefits while lower some of the power requirements, clock for clock, at the same time. There is a reason that the big three choice system vendors choose Dothan/Banias/Pentium-M over mobile AthlonXP for at least a majority of their systems if not all: power consumption, performance, and their notebook design’s thermal budget.

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