MAINSTREAM
Premiere Pro CS3 (min:sec) 38:43 48:38 35:
Photoshop CS3 (min:sec) 5:48 4:12 3:ProShow (min:sec) 38:10 56:53 40:
MainConcept (min:sec) 68:11 83:10 68:FEAR (fps) 4 22 15Quake 4 (fps) 10.3 79.2 29
Battery Rundown (hrs:min) 3:26 1:42 2:I
f laptops were dogs, we’d award Acer’s
TravelMate Best in Show. The MacBook
may be the cute dog that’s the crowd fa-
vorite, but its refusal to obey commands cost
it points. And the Asus F8Sn would be stuck
in its crate in the back doing the one thing it
can do right: spin in a circle.
Things would be diff erent if we looked at
just a single category. Take gaming, for example.
Hands down, the F8Sn crushes the other
contenders with its built-in GeForce 9500M GS
videocard. The TravelMate’s discrete graphics
are no match for the F8Sn’s performance, and
the MacBook—well, four frames per second
in a game like FEAR is downright shameful,
solidifying the white laptop’s standing as a
gamer’s foe.
But the F8Sn’s gaming prowess comes at
a great cost. To keep the machine aff ordable,
Asus includes a paltry 1.83GHz Core 2 Duo
CPU. Thus, the other laptops in this category
speed past the F8Sn in nearly every othernon-gaming benchmark. And worse, the
F8Sn’s mighty graphics card sucks the battery
life during normal use.
While the MacBook owns the competition
in a few of our encoding benchmarks, thanks
to its nift y Penryn processor, the notebook
falls fl at on more memory-intensive tests. The
single gigabyte of DDR2 RAM proves to be this
laptop’s undoing once video conversion and
high-defi nition picture processing come into
play. Still, the MacBook achieves nearly three
hours of battery life—a full 20 minutes more
than Acer’s TravelMate.
So how does one decide a clear victor?
It’s not easy. Each laptop comes with little bits
and pieces that we’d like to see changed: the
TravelMate’s 160GB hard drive and inclusion
of Windows Vista Business, the F8Sn’s hor-
rifi c processor speed and lackluster battery
life, the MacBook’s lack of external connec-
tion options and poor gaming performance.
But at this price point, the midrange laptopclass is all about sacrifi ces. You’re not going to
fi nd a perfect notebook in this cohort, but you
can defi nitely fi nd one that includes most of
the qualities you’re seeking.
In that sense, the TravelMate comes out on
top by a wide margin, mostly because you don’t
have to sacrifi ce a great deal of performance to
get what you want. Its gaming prowess isn’t the
best we’ve seen, but the laptop holds its own
in our benchmarks without crushing the ma-
chine’s overall battery life. Its application per-
formance rivals the MacBook’s best, and we’d
much rather have the extra 40GB of hard drive
space, faster Premiere and Photoshop times,
and larger display—not to mention the external
connection options, where the TravelMate far
exceeds the MacBook’s limited off erings.
When it comes to mainstream notebooks,
we’d happily take Acer’s TravelMate on the
road any day of the week. But if someone gave
us a MacBook, we wouldn’t complain—we can’t
say the same about Asus’s F8Sn. –D MBest in Class: Mainstream
The MacBook wins the sprint but loses the marathon
Best scores are bolded.Apple MacBook Asus F8Sn Acer TravelMate 5720BENCHMARKSPC Notebooks vs. MacBooks
(+| MAXIMUMPC | AUG 08 | http://www.maximumpc.com