More of AMD’s Brazos E-350 with the MSI X370 and Sony VAIO YB
by Jarred Walton & Dustin Sklavos on March 14, 2011 4:50 PM ESTTwo 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 $330, those are important metrics, so stay tuned to see just how well C-50 competes with the more expensive Brazos and Atom offerings.
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lammers42 - Tuesday, March 15, 2011 - link
"Contrary to what you might expect, the 64Wh battery actually more than doubles battery life, suggesting the cells may be higher quality than in the 4-cell option."I've been telling everyone this for a long time . . . if you have the choice choose the higher capacity battery . . . they seem to use better performing cells.
It still doesn't explain why there is such a big difference between the different manufacturers in the quality of batteries of approximately the same capacity used which is evident from the relative battery life chart you show. As you get more Brazos systems to test it will be interesting to see if that will hold true.
Tasslehoff Burrfoot - Tuesday, March 15, 2011 - link
Brazos platforms should be under 350$ and at least under 400$. These manufacturers are getting carried away and they're even making fail noteboooks to top that off -_-All Zacate notebooks I've seen this far have either had disappointing specs (too little memory or too small resolution with too large display size or usin some lower processor model than the E-350) or horrible looks...
...or both.
Where is my all black matte ~12'' brazos lappie with sturdy chassis, 1440x900 resolution and an outstanding battery life? Why can't anybody get this simple thing right?
blacklist - Tuesday, March 15, 2011 - link
the closest approximation to what you want is probably the lenovo x120e. or just wait for the upcoming lenovo s205.silverblue - Wednesday, March 16, 2011 - link
3GB is more than enough for something this size, in my opinion. You're not going to be throwing massive workloads at the thing. I don't see why you'd want a 1440x900 resolution unless you're not gaming or the games aren't particularly tough on the hardware to begin with; what would you personally use a Brazos machine for, if I may ask?heraldo25 - Thursday, March 17, 2011 - link
I'm wondering how the E-350 and C-50 would fare against the first generation of Pentium M processors, are there any benchmarks like that?L. - Friday, March 18, 2011 - link
The first generation of pentium M processors were extremely bad iirc.If this beats a cheap C2D , it beats a pentium M. (or I don't remember which one is the pentium M, either way beating a cheap C2D is decent performance indeed).
But in all fairness, comparing the brazos to a pentium M is an insult to the brazos because the pentium M was a p3-P4 design mix, two designs that never handled multithreading in a decent fashion, and never got close to either AMD in that regard, or the subsequent C2D, which in most non-single-thread applications was much much faster.
So if you want comparisons, start with a decent chip, like a cheap C2D, or if you want to go back even more, barton athlons (yes, because those could do multithreading).
silverblue - Saturday, March 19, 2011 - link
I'd be more interested in comparing to Athlon 64s, both the single core variants and the X2s, considering AMD said Brazos should be close in performance to a similarly clocked Athlon 64 (90% I believe).JarredWalton - Saturday, March 19, 2011 - link
I suppose it depends on which Athlon 64 chip you're looking at. The K625 is actually clocked at 1.5GHz compared to 1.6GHz on the E-350. If we just focus on tasks that are pure CPU benchmarks:Cinebench 10 Single-Core: K625 is 47% faster
Cinebench 10 Multi-Core: K625 is 47% faster
x264 First Pass: K625 is 40% faster
x264 Second Pass: K625 is 29% faster
If they were aiming for 90% of the recent K10.5 Athlon II X2 chips, then, they didn't come anywhere near their goal. However, K10.5 is around 5-10% faster than K10, and K10 is probably another 15% faster than K8, so 90% of the original Athlon X2 parts is probably about right.
GTKevin - Tuesday, March 29, 2011 - link
Has anyone released a brazos platform laptop with a rotatable touchscreen so that it can be used as a tablet? I know the form factor will be bulky compared to a dedicated tablet, but for someone who is currently tabletless and likes to read ebooks in his free time, such a product would be very useful.aop - Tuesday, April 5, 2011 - link
Any hope on you guys taking apart a Fusion laptop like HP DM1z and make article about it's internals? It would be nice to see how the cooling is done and what kind of layout do the motherboards have etc.