More of AMD’s Brazos E-350 with the MSI X370 and Sony VAIO YB

Two More Brazos Laptops, but Only One Winner

If you feel like we’ve mentioned the HP dm1z a few too many times throughout this review, there’s a good reason for it. HP came in and set a high bar for other Brazos laptops to clear, and frankly both the MSI and Sony offerings fall short. We awarded the dm1z our Silver Editors’ Choice award, and that still stands. The only area where we really want something better on the HP is the display; put in another $50 towards a higher contrast LCD and it would go for an even $500, which would put it $100 less than the Sony YB and potentially $250 less than the MSI X370. All of the Brazos laptops we've tested are also present in Mobile Bench if you're looking for another way to compare performance. Need we say more? Probably not, but we will….

Starting with the Sony, the VAIO YB isn't necessarily a bad netbook/ultraportable/notbook (take your pick among the three terms), but it's grossly overshadowed by HP's dm1z. The dm1z is more attractive, more comfortable to use, and runs longer on the battery to boot. For all that, it's also at least $150 cheaper than the YB if you're ordering directly from the manufacturer. What do you get for your extra $150? 1GB more of DDR3 and 180GB more storage capacity. Even those benefits are dampened by Sony's choice to use 32-bit Windows 7 instead of 64-bit, a slower 5400RPM hard drive instead of the workable 7200RPM in HP's offering, and a smaller battery. We can see why AMD sent us the YB because on the whole it sends a stronger message than sending us a dm1z would; HP's been offering AMD notebooks since time immemorial and was even first on the bandwagon way back with the promising-in-theory-but-lacking-in-execution Congo platform.

If the dm1z didn't exist or at least wasn't an unusually strong design for HP, the YB would seem a lot better and could justify itself. The problem is that the dm1z does exist, the YB is not in a vacuum, and ultimately it is impossible to justify: the dm1z is directly superior on virtually every front. The only places it's lacking are in hard drive capacity and memory size, but the money you save could easily be spent to upgrade those and you would still come out ahead.

MSI’s X370 is in a different boat. As a 13.3” ultraportable, there’s certainly a case to be made for getting a slightly larger display and chassis. However, all that falls apart if the price isn’t right. We don’t have an official price on the X370, and it may never come to the North American market, but in the past MSI’s X-series has been grossly overpriced. Let’s hope MSI will listen to reason, because at $550 we’d certainly be happy to recommend the X370 as an alternative to the HP. Our engineering sample came with 4GB RAM and a 500GB 7200RPM hard drive, which means you shouldn’t need to upgrade either area short of a component failure (or a desire for an SSD). If the X370 had an industrial design akin to the MacBook Air 13, then perhaps we could justify a $750 MSRP; unfortunately, it doesn’t—not even close! Difficulties with the touchpad buttons aside (again, it’s an engineering sample), the all-plastic shell with glossy exterior is on par with what we see from budget laptops from Acer. There’s nothing inherently wrong with building a budget laptop, because certainly people are going to be happier paying $500 than $800 (or $350 instead of $500), but you can’t charge champagne prices for Pabst Blue Ribbon.

Going back to the Brazos platform, AMD has delivered what we wanted from Atom about 18 months ago. The E-350 can handle movies, web browsing, office work, and even light gaming far better than any stock Atom. Even Atom with ION fails to surpass the E-350 in most regards, and the tightly integrated Brazos platform comes off a winner. We’re still working to put together a roundup of low-power/budget platforms using budget SSDs as a follow-up to our E-350 reviews, and we’ve also got a C-50 based netbook review in the works. We should have the latter soon enough, but really the only areas C-50 wins out over E-350 are in size and price (and perhaps battery life). But with a starting price of just $330, those are important metrics, so stay tuned to see just how well C-50 competes with the more expensive Brazos and Atom offerings.