NiniaPimp Magazine

Summary: I wanted a light-weight, highly portable, bigger than a netbook with a SSD hard drive. I’d purchased a 2010 MacBook Pro 13″ and intended on putting in a 160GB Intel X-25m before the Air refresh. I’m glad I chose the Air.

The price is very reasonable for what you get: the most solid ultra-thin on the market. Between the flash memory, higher resolution screen and size/weight it is definitely worth the extra $100 to go from the 13″ MacBook Pro to the Air. The flash-based memory is very fast and extremely responsive. 12-15 second boot times, nearly instant launching of applications and fast read and writes make the Air feel many times faster than the Pro to the average user. My regular use consists of internet, media streaming, MS Office applications and IE based work applications which force me to use a virtual machine. The 4GB RAM option is a must if you intend to do serious work on the Air, honestly I don’t see why Apple didn’t make it the base configuration with a 6 or 8 GB option. I can smoothly run Windows XP (I don’t like the newer renditions) along with MS Word, Excel and Powerpoint, a silly amount of browser tabs, email, iTunes, etc; simultaneously. And while the difference in resolution doesn’t seem huge, it is… you have the same resolution as the base 15″ Pro and everything is still very readable. There is a lot more screen space than the 13″ Pro and I don’t think I could readjust to 1280X800. The screen is of typical Apple quality, that is to say excellent. It isn’t the best available but it is excellent indeed.

The 256GB model costs $300 more, which again is a very reasonable price for the increased memory: 256GB SSDs run about $300 more than their 128GB comrades. I simply do not need that much memory on a laptop, especially when a home server with TB-sized memory can be built inexpensively. Everything else on this model is the same except for the optional CPU upgrade.

There aren’t really any irritating or disappointing aspects to the Air as a laptop, everything is executed practically flawlessly especially at the user level where experience is always different than benchmarks predict. What is irritating (extremely so) is some of Apple’s decisions on options and pricing. The removal of the back-lit keyboard is unexplainable, it doesn’t take more thickness (previous renditions of the Air had it). If cost was the issue as Apple likes to maintain their ridiculous profit margin, they should’ve at least made it a built to own option! It isn’t hard to get used to the lack of it, nor do I ever look at the keyboard to type even in the dark (though it is nice for the function keys, not having to center your hands to know where keys are and also making certain key combinations) but why take away something so forward thinking and generally awesome? The most irritating aspect by far is the lack of CPU upgrade option for the 128GB model. There is no reason whatsoever for not offering it for both models and I seriously doubt the 256GB model is that more profitable to push it’s sales harder. I simply do not need that much space and I’m not paying for what I don’t need (like an optical drive!) but it sure would’ve been nice to get the faster CPU. The 1.86ghz CPU that comes standard works just fine, especially with Apple’s wonderful hardware and software integration along with the flash memory… but again it would’ve been nice to have the option. The matte screen option’s absence was to be expected as the 13″ Pro lacks it as well, but again the option would’ve been nice. I don’t see why it is so damned difficult to give people more options!

Overall I’m very impressed with my new MacBook Air. It has everything I want: sturdy, well utilized CPU; SSD memory; high resolution and not ultra-stupid-glossy display (it isn’t matte but it’s better than the Pro). It also lacks everything I don’t need or want: optical drive (seriously think about how often you’ve used yours, I think I burned a few CD’s before I had my car adapter for iPod), heaviness, thickness, moving parts! I would highly recommend it to anyone, though I’m sure in about a year Apple will do a refresh and add a bunch of the things I’ve complained about! I still wouldn’t wait though.

Amid competition from slim-tower PCs and all-in-ones, the tried-and-true midtower PC might seem like a dated platform. Still, we can’t help but have some appreciation for HP’s Pavilion p6720f. This $599 desktop has few feature highlights, but it’s a capable budget PC with an expandable base for a reasonable price.

HP’s Pavilion midtower design should feel familiar if you’ve gone PC shopping in the last few years. Its glossy black, gray-trimmed exterior conforms to apparent industry aesthetic standards, and although its outside is plastered with stickers, we’re more willing to forgive a midtower for that design offense. Unlike smaller slim-tower PCs, a standard midtower desktop isn’t that likely to wind up in your living room hardware stack.

The Gateway’s DX4840-03e and HP’s own Pavilion p6510y are two of the last midtowers we’ve reviewed, both from July 2010. Neither is available anymore, but they still provide relevant points of comparison for the Pavilion p6720f, in that they let us see how the value proposition has changed over the last nine months or so.

The differences between the two HP systems are more prominent than between the Pavilion p6720f and the Gateway. The newer HP unit boasts a faster, more advanced AMD quad-core CPU than the older one, as well as a larger hard drive, more RAM, and wireless networking. Granted, the newer model costs $70 more than the older one, but even taking that price jump into consideration, the newer Pavilion seems like a definite improvement.

The matchup with the Gateway model isn’t as black and white for the Pavilion p6720f. The two are more or less identical in terms of core features, although the Gateway offers more RAM and a dual-core Intel Core i3 chip with a faster core clock speed than the HP. The two models trade performance wins on our benchmark tests, making neither an obvious winner, but we’ll give HP credit for offering more expandability than the Gateway. The Pavilion gives you a free PCI Express graphics card slot, as well as three 1x PCIe slots for other card upgrades. The Gateway offers only a graphics slot and a single 1x PCIe input. Although free slots don’t translate to instantly usable out-of-the-box functionality, we’re willing to pay more for upgrade potential.

Cinebench
(Longer bars indicate better performance)

Rendering multiple CPUs  

Rendering single CPU  

We weren’t surprised by the Pavilion p6720f’s benchmark results given its quad-core AMD CPU. Though it drags behind the Asus and Gateway systems on clock-speed-focused tests, the newer HP handles multitasking and multicore-friendly apps well. With more and more programs like media creation apps, games, and even Windows 7 itself supporting multiple processor cores, you may see a noticeable benefit from a system like the HP with four CPU cores. Intel’s Sandy Bridge CPUs might upend the HP’s fast Phenom II X4 chip when they emerge in this price range, but for now, casual computer users should be satisfied with the Pavilion p6720f’s overall performance.

We mentioned the HP’s card expandability. We should add that if you want to upgrade to a discrete graphics card, the Pavilion’s 250-watt power supply will prevent you from adding anything beyond a lower midrange GPU. Other upgrade options include a spare RAM slot, as well as a free hard-drive bay, but, as usual with the midtower Pavilion, the clunky hard-drive cage makes adding a second storage device harder than it should be.

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The Lenovo H320 is a worthy entrant in the higher-end slim-tower PC category. It boasts a fast, previous-generation Intel Core i5 CPU, a discrete graphics card, and a Blu-ray drive, all for $749. We have the same reservations about this system as with the Gateway SX2851-41 regarding the impending obsolescence of its CPU and the less-than-inspired design, but at least in the current PC environment, the H320 is competitive. We recommend it to anyone interested in an upper-tier slim tower for general home computing or for bringing content into your living room.

The H320′s design is similar to that of most other Windows-based slim towers. Its trim chassis measures 11.5 inches high, 4 inches wide, and 15.5 inches deep, putting it in between HP’s larger Pavilion Slimline and Gateway’s smaller SX-Series case in terms of overall volume.

Like the SX-Series chassis, the design of the H320 is suitable for living room display, but Lenovo got carried away in applying external decals. Not only does it come with Windows, Intel, and Lenovo logos on the front, but Lenovo has also plastered the top and right side of the H320 with labels highlighting the machine’s various features. Of course, the glut of stickers is not new to PCs. It’s also comparatively easy to take them off. For slim towers such as these with serious living room aspirations, though, it’s time for vendors to lay off the visual bloatware and put more thought into compelling system design and no-hassle setup.

From a value standpoint, the Lenovo H320 competes very well with HP’s Pavilion Slimline S5660f. The S5660f is an older model at this point, but even the more recent S5670T will require you to spend $50 more for the same configuration as the H320. We can’t think of anything else we’d expect to find for this price, although in a quarter or two we expect Intel’s new Sandy Bridge Core i3 2100-series CPUs will emerge at this price point. Even without those new CPUs, though, this system will play HD movies from the Web or the included Blu-ray drive, and most PC games, with little difficulty.

Cinebench
(Longer bars indicate better performance)

Rendering Multiple CPUs  

Rendering Single CPU  

Among other small PCs, the Lenovo H320 40411FU is a very strong performer. Its Core i5 650 CPU is a dual-core chip that comes with Intel’s HyperThreading technology to help it simulate two extra processing threads as necessary. That can’t help the H320 compete on applications that use true quad-core chips like the Phenom II X4 in HP’s s5660f, but with its fast 3.2GHz core clock speed, the Core i5 CPU in the H320 posted some impressive scores. On Photoshop CS 5 image processing, iTunes audio encoding, and even when playing a QuickTime movie while encoding audio files in iTunes, the Lenovo H320 posted the fastest scores in its category.

As mentioned earlier, the H320 is also a more competent gaming PC than we’re used to at this price. It won’t let you play every game at maximum image quality, but it played the Dragon Age II demo at 1,920×1,080-pixel resolution smoothly. The Crysis 2 demo was, perhaps unsurprisingly, more challenging for this PC. We had to drop the resolution down to 1,280×720 pixels, and even then the frame rate was only passable. As long as you keep your expectations reasonable, gamers should get some enjoyment out of this system, at least with current titles.

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The Lenovo H320 is a worthy entrant in the higher-end slim-tower PC category. It boasts a fast, previous-generation Intel Core i5 CPU, a discrete graphics card, and a Blu-ray drive, all for $749. We have the same reservations about this system as with the Gateway SX2851-41 regarding the impending obsolescence of its CPU and the less-than inspired design, but at least in the current PC environment, the H320 is competitive. We recommend it to anyone interested in an upper-tier slim tower for general home computing or for bringing content into your living room.

The H320′s design is similar to that of most other Windows-based slim towers. Its trim chassis measures 11.5 inches high, 4 inches wide, and 15.5 inches deep, putting it in between HP’s larger Pavilion Slimline and Gateway’s smaller SX-Series case in terms of overall volume.

Like that of the SX-Series chassis, the design of the H30 is suitable for living room display, but Lenovo got carried away in applying external decals. Not only does it come with Windows, Intel, and its own Lenovo logo on the front, but Lenovo has also plastered the top and right side of the H320 with labels highlighting the machine’s various features. Of course, the glut of stickers is not new to PCs. It’s also comparatively easy to take them off. For slim towers such as these with serious living room aspirations, though, it’s time for vendors to lay off the visual bloatware and put more thought into compelling system design and no-hassle setup.

From a value standpoint, the Lenovo H320 competes very well with HP’s Pavilion Slimline S5660f. The S5660f is an older model at this point, but even the more recent S5670T will require you to spend $50 more for the same configuration as the H320. We can’t think of anything else we’d expect to find for this price, although in a quarter or two we expect Intel’s new Sandy Bridge-generation of Core i3 2100-series CPUs will emerge at this price point. Even without those new CPUs, though, this system will play HD movies from the Web or the included Blu-ray drive, and most PC games, with little difficulty.

Cinebench
(Longer bars indicate better performance)

Rendering Multiple CPUs  

Rendering Single CPU  

Among other small PCs, the Lenovo H320 40411FU is a very strong performer. Its Core i5 650 CPU is a dual-core chip that comes with Intel’s HyperThreading technology to help it simulate two extra processing threads as necessary. That can’t help the H320 compete on applications that use true quad-core chips like the Phenom II X4 in HP’s S5660f, but with its fast 3.2GHz core clock speed, the Core i5 CPU in the H320 posted some impressive scores. On Photoshop CS 5 image processing, iTunes audio encoding, and even while watching a QuickTime movie while encoding audio files in iTunes, the Lenovo H320 posted the fastest scores in its category.

As mentioned earlier, the H320 is also a more competent gaming PC than we’re used to at this price. It won’t let you play every game at maximum image quality, but it played the Dragon Age II demo at 1,920×1,080 smoothly. The Crysis 2 demo was, perhaps unsurprisingly, more challenging for this PC. We had to drop the resolution down to 1,280×720, and even then the frame rate was only passable. As long as you keep your expectations reasonable, gamers should get some enjoyment out of this system, at least with current titles.

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One of the surprise laptop stars of 2011 has been AMD’s new Fusion platform, combining a CPU and GPU on a single chip, and providing a low-cost and decent performance upgrade to Intel’s Atom platform. We’ve seen it most commonly in 11-inch laptops so far (although we’ve also seen a version in a larger Toshiba C655), and the few models we’ve tested to date have felt like much more useful machines than Atom-powered 11-inch laptops.

Sony was one of the last PC makers to enter the Netbook market, and the company has made some decent (if expensive) ones. Sony is also one of the first PC makers to unofficially ditch the Netbook, and at CES 2011, it introduced the Fusion-powered Vaio YB 11-inch, but no new or even updated Netbooks.

The Vaio YB is similar to HP’s Pavilion dm1, but adds more RAM and a bigger hard drive, along with a more high-end chassis. That also leads to a more high-end price, and the Vaio YB, in its single currently available configuration (with either pink or silver lids), is $599 versus $449 for the HP. In our benchmark testing, the two systems each came out on top in different tests, but the HP had better battery life.

If it were $100 less, the Vaio YB would be a no-brainer. As is, it’s a well-made 11-inch that will provide nearly mainstream performance in a pricey, but portable, package.

Many of the classic Sony Vaio design traits are found here, such as the large rounded hinge with a lighted power button on one side and power plug on the other. The body is mostly plastic, but feels stiff and solid, and though our review unit has a pink lid, which extends to the inner screen bezel, a more muted silver version is also available. This is a smart-looking laptop, and looks more expensive than the otherwise similar HP Pavilion dm1 (which makes sense as it is more expensive).

Some recent Vaio laptops have had a series of quick-launch buttons above the keyboard, but this smaller model has only a single button labeled “Assist.” That launches a suite of system and diagnostic tools that isn’t indispensable, but is still pretty handy.

While many Vaio laptops have excellent keyboards and touch pads, the Vaio YB makes a few too many compromises. The island-style keyboard is solid, with well-spaced (but smallish) keys, but a handful of important keys get overly miniaturized. The right Shift key is painfully small, as is the Tab key, making accurate typing a slog at times. The touch pad is a good size, with a pleasing matte texture and two large buttons, but the two-finger scrolling gesture control is so wonky as to be unusable.

The 11.6-inch display has a native resolution of 1,366×768 pixels, which is standard for most laptops between 11 and 15 inches. The screen is crisp and bright, with excellent off-axis viewing, and works fine for personal video viewing.

In addition to the usual collection of ports and connections, because this is a Sony laptop, you’re also going to find a Memory Stick slot as well as the normal SD card slot. Other features we expect in this price range, such as Bluetooth and an HDMI output, are also here. One nice touch in this area is the color-coded audio jacks. The headphone jack is black, whereas the mic jack is red, so even in low-light situations, you can plug into the correct one.

AMD’s new Fusion platform has quickly become a favorite of ours, offering first a combo CPU/GPU that outperforms standard integrated graphics, and also good all-around multitasking. The AMD E-350 CPU in this model isn’t on par with standard voltage Intel Core i3 CPUs, but the experience is still far better than you’d get with an Intel Atom Netbook (even a dual-core one), and fine for most mainstream use. You can, however, get largely similar performance from something like HP’s Pavilion dm1 for $150 less, by giving up some RAM and hard-drive space.

The graphics part of the Fusion experience is actually an ATI Mobility Radeon HD 6310 GPU. Similar to the HP Pavilion dm1, it ran Unreal tournament 3 at 27.2 frames per second and Street Fighter IV at 26.1 frames per second, both at 1,366×768 pixels. That’s not exactly hard-core gamer-ready, but it shows us that one could dial back the settings a bit and get a playable experience from many midlevel games.

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