Gateway ID49: Mixing the Bag
by Dustin Sklavos on September 23, 2010 2:46 AM ESTCan It Hit Gateway's Six Hour Claim?
Gateway claims a six hour battery life on their site for the ID49C, no small feat for a unit that boasts mainstream parts. To be fair, they do have a couple of aces up their sleeve: the GeForce GT 330M's Optimus technology allows it to power off completely while on the battery and let the Intel HD integrated graphics do the work, and the notebook can shut off power to the optical drive.
Also included is power optimization software that threatened to ruin our benchmarking sessions: with this software installed, even if you set the screen not to dim or turn off, it still will. The best part? There's no control panel to tweak those settings! Hot on the heels of the dismal keyboard comes my next pet peeve with the ID49C: software that takes control of the computer completely out of your hands and leaves you no recourse other than to uninstall it. Mercifully, this software is separate from the software that handles turning off the optical drive while running on the battery.
Well, if you leave it completely idle and don't touch anything, you can scrape nearly six hours out of the battery, and that's not too shabby. Once you start using the ID49C for other tasks, the battery life becomes somewhat less exciting. Internet usage knocks it down to a decent if unexciting 216 minutes, or about three and a half hours. That's not bad at all, but it's not great either, and it places the ID49C near the bottom of our charts.
Things do pick up when HD playback is introduced, where the ID49C is able to cull nearly three hours of running time: more than enough for most movies unless you were aching to watch The Lord of the Rings on a 14" screen. In fact, under this metric the ID49C ranks near the top of our charts and is only bested by notebooks that have the privilege of bigger batteries.
When you talk about battery life and power consumption, just how much a notebook needs to run the fan is introduced. Units like the Lenovo ThinkPad X100e will let the processor run uncomfortably hot to keep fan speed and noise down, so how does the ID49C fare?
To test thermals, we set the ID49C to loop 3DMark06 for more than an hour and left HWMonitor running in the background. There's a lot of information to break down here.
First, the good news is it's nice to see a notebook that doesn't threaten to cook the GPU: the 71C full load temperature for the 330M is actually pretty good comparatively speaking. If you remember, the ID49C also keeps the memory and hard disk under the palm rests, and while the hard disk isn't very fast, thermals remained excellent: a top temperature of 33C is fantastic, and you could install a faster 7200 RPM disk without worrying about making your palms sweat.
The bad news is that the processor is peaking awfully high. 92C is very hot, near spec for the chip. Fan noise when the system is under load is a little obtrusive although not as bad as some of the other units (the Studio 17 can get pretty loud, for example.) The real thermal issue is where that heat localizes. The exhaust is located on the left side of the unit, right under the keyboard, and the surface of the notebook can get uncomfortably hot. This hot surface is also perilously close to the WASD keys, meaning that while you're gaming you may find your left hand getting hot after prolonged gaming sessions. When the system is idling or not doing much, it's fine, but place a gaming load on it and it starts to become a real issue.
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Dustin Sklavos - Thursday, September 23, 2010 - link
I'm not sure I have such a low opinion of the average consumer that I would assume they'd have to buy this thing just because it has a glowing touchpad. While I do like some of the styling (it's nice to see aluminum on a notebook at this price point), I take issue with the fact that rather than choosing to invest in putting together a more well-rounded machine, Gateway whiffed and just gave us a crappy screen and a touchpad that lights up.There was potential here. Dedicated volume controls are common from most manufacturers, they didn't need to replace useful document navigation keys with them. Instead, they somehow managed to make a bad keyboard worse (and a regular consumer checking out units on the shelf may very well test the keyboard), and again, burned their budget making the touchpad light up instead of improving something...ANYTHING else.
AnnonymousCoward - Saturday, September 25, 2010 - link
$849 for this POS? Negativity was not overzealous. Your 1st paragraph isn't supported by the rest. In the rapist rapper's voice, Welllll, obviously, most people won't notice the shitty screeeen, and the crappy keyboard. He's climbin in your windows...I would never pay $800 for 1366x768 and a crappy keyboard, even if there's a quantum CPU with data crystals inside.
Minion4Hire - Monday, September 27, 2010 - link
I wouldn't expect you to buy this. As I said, this model of laptop is not designed to target Anandtech readers in the least. But its target audience is known to lower their resolution (while remaining entirely ignorant of aspect ratio) in order to get larger text. As such 1366x768 isn't a problem in the least. As for the "crappy" keyboard, while it does flex when under pressure I think the key layout is acceptable, and unless you pound your keyboard while typing you'll never notice said flexing; it takes a decent amount of force (more than any typist would use) in order to cause the keyboard to bow.Even Dustin admitted that its "pricetag is justifiable". It's not a great laptop, but the flaws that we see often do not exist in the eyes of the consumer, either because they don't care (don't know better) or view said flaws as positives (ie. 1366x768 resolution) so it's all very relative.
AnnonymousCoward - Monday, September 27, 2010 - link
There's no question that this laptop, like any crappy product, is acceptable to the average consumer. When it comes to average/bad products, I'm sure you'd agree that AnandTech should lean zealously negative. When poor design choices are made that affect things that AnandTech readers care about, it should be a big deal.andrepang - Thursday, September 23, 2010 - link
Not too sure if you guys have noticed, this particular gateway notebook have very similar physical design compared to Acer's timelineX 4820TG....Looking at the side ports, DVD tray and even the back cover plus and the battery's shape looked the same.. And of course not forgetting the keyboard.......
I wondered if its a design copy or are they sourcing the design from the same OEM...
Just my thoughts...
infodan - Thursday, September 23, 2010 - link
Acer owns gateway, so thats not a surprise, but in the US the gateway brand is more popular, unlike in europe (and especially the UK) where the gateway brand is all but dead.Roland00 - Thursday, September 23, 2010 - link
The big differences between the two (besides looks)Is the Acer TimelineX either uses intel i3/i5 integrated graphics or has an ATI HD5650. The Gateway ID series either uses intel i3/i5 integrated graphics on their cheaper models, on their more expensive models they use nvidia Optimus with the GT330m (this is what Dustin reviewed).
Also the TimelineX comes with a Six-cell, 6000mAh (up to 8 hours in mobile mark with intetgrated graphics ) or a Nine-cell, 9000mAh (up to 11.5 hours in mobile mark with integrated graphics). The Gateway ID series comes with a Six-cell 4400mAH battery (up to 6 hours in mobile mark with integrated graphics).
So Timeline X gives you bigger battery with ATI (and the faster video card) whilethe Gateway gives you a smaller batter with Nvidia Optimus.
Roland00 - Thursday, September 23, 2010 - link
I have seen and operated one and it is a good laptop for the money.I just hate they keyboard, hate, hate, hate...
One thing that wasn't mention by Dustin is that when you click the touchpad (which is one large button), the button actually lowers, it actually deepens. For a person who loathes touchpads and always carries a mouse, I found this option to be intuitive and better than most touchpads I have operated.
zoxo - Thursday, September 23, 2010 - link
Seriously, how much extra would it cost to have a decent screen?Pirks - Saturday, September 25, 2010 - link
judging by MacBook Pro prices - about a grand extraforget about it, PC user