Desk Potato or Road Warrior?
Before you search for a DIY platform,
you should fi rst fi gure out what you
really want to do with the notebook.
Do you want a widescreen, 10-pound
desktop-replacement beast with the
power of a desktop and piss-poor bat-
tery life, or would you prefer a light-
weight, long-running notebook PC that
has the gaming prowess of a turnip?
These might sound like extremes, but
that’s the decision you face with most
bare-bones notebook kits.The CPU
Generally, desktop replacement note-
books lean toward Pentium 4 and
Athlon 64 CPUs, which can be cooled
and powered by the larger chassis
designs. That’s not always the case,
though, as we’re seeing more and more
large desktop-replacement notebooks
with Pentium M chips. Which should
you buy? We recommend the Athlon
64 for desktop replacements; it’s fast,
and its thermals aren’t out of control.
If you’re looking for more portabil-
ity, the Pentium M is a great CPU that
offers plenty of power at high clocks
and pretty good power savings when
purchased in lower-power-consumption
trims. What about the P4? While it’s not
too horrible at, say, 3GHz, at 3.8GHz
and 3.6GHz, it’s just too hot to handle.
We’d take the Athlon 64, a Turion 64, or
a Pentium M over a hot-running, high-
clocked Pentium 4.Far Cry or Yahoo Chess?
As with the CPU, you need to weigh
your needs for graphics. Graphics chips
soldered on the mobo, such as Intel’s
alleged “Extreme” integrated GPU, are
as genuinely extreme as a Mountain
Dew ad. If you want the best battery
life, however, integrated is the way to
go. At the other end of the spectrum
are discrete mobile solutions, such as
nVidia’s GeForce Go 7800 GTX. It offersgaming performance that’s faster than
many desktop machines. It’s fast, but
it’s also power hungry and hard to cool.
Because it’s so hard to cool, you’ll only
fi nd this part in large notebooks. In the
middle, you have nVidia’s GeForce Go
6600, which offers pretty good gaming
performance and middle-of-the-road
battery consumption. A good rule of
thumb: The faster your 3D card, the
more juice it’s going to suck.Upgradeable Graphics
There are currently two standards for
PCI Express graphics modules: nVidia’s
MXM and ATI’s AXIOM. Neither is com-
patible with the other, and it’s almost
impossible to tell who’s winning the
standards battle. The upshot is that
upgrading your nVidia-based note-
book with ATI graphics, or vice-versa,
probably won’t happen. (And even if
you could get your hands on a faster
card for your notebook, is the chas-
sis capable of keeping it cool?) You
should assume that any graphics
upgrade path will be limited to the
vendor you begin with.Hard Storage
Depending on what notebook you buy,
you’ll either have the old-school (but still
quite capable) parallel interface or the
more modern SATA connector. Don’t get
hung up on this as the interface doesn’t
really matter. It’s the actual speed of the
drive that matters most. Your choices
range from 4,200rpm (slow) to 5,400rpm
(medium) to 7,200rpm (fast). And just like
every other component, the faster the
spindle speed, the more power it con-
sumes. Once you choose the interface
and speed, select a drive with enough
capacity for your needs. There’s one
more catch, though: Some notebook
chassis will only accommodate drives of
a certain height—so make sure the drive
you buy is thin enough to fi t into your rig.Don’t Leave
Home Without It
A move was made last year to fi nally
replace the ancient PC Card interface
with the much faster ExpressCard.
ExpressCard hooks into PCI Express
and USB and offers about 500MB/s
maximum theoretical throughput, ver-
sus a CardBus PC Card’s 33MB/s.
We like more speed, but unfortunately
haven’t seen many peripherals that
need that kind of bandwidth. Even
worse, a majority of ExpressCard note-
books do away with PC Card slots alto-
gether, so you won’t be able to use your
legacy hardware. However, if you have
special needs, such as FireWire 800 or
Gigabit, ExpressCard is the way to go.44 MA XIMUMPC APRIL 2006
Continued on page 46 ËBEFORE YOU BUY
You’ve decided you’re ready to build your own laptop, but it’s a little different than
building a desktop. Before you purchase the first part, you must read our buyers guideLAPTOP
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