Desknote i-Buddie 4

Expert Review

ECS have been aggressively promoting their semi-mobile notebook (or portable desktop PC, depending on the way you look at it!), the 'DeskNote' in India, presumably because we are an extremely cost-conscious market. The DeskNote is a cheap and better performing alternative to the conventional laptop, and is easily upgradeable, but doesn't have an internal battery, and uses regular PC components (not custom laptop components), helping them keeps costs down. But is all of this, worth it...?

You win some, you lose some...
This is not the first DeskNote we've tested - the earlier which we tested, proved to be a fast and powerful machine, albeit one that generated a lot of heat! Using the SiS 650 integrated chipset, which supports both the Willamette and Northwood cores, the i-Buddie 4 comes with a 2.0 GHz Pentium 4 processor based on the Northwood core. It also has a 512 KB on-die L2 cache and is manufactured using 0.13 micron technology. Sure, the machine only runs on power from the mains, and does not come with a battery which will let it be truly mobile, its 400 MHz system bus speed (or FSB) makes the i-Buddie 4, the fastest quasi-mobile computing solution on the planet!The i-Buddie 4 ships with a CD-ROM drive (which was defective in our test unit, and was not working...), a 20 GB IBM Travelstar HDD, a 56K modem and 10/100 LAN both of the latter being onboard. The machine also has four USB 2.0 slots and an IEEE 1394 port, which is capable of transfer rates of up to 400 Mbps. The system also uses 256 MB DDR-SDRAM. Apart from these, you have the usual I/O interfaces like a parallel port, S-Video TV-Out, Mic-in, headphone jack and external VGA port. The accessories accompanying the package include a power cable and adaptor, video cable, telephone cable and an installation of ThizLinux, which is a Linux distribution from China! And no, the i-Buddie 4 doesn't come preinstalled with a Windows OS.



There is no question that this DeskNote is fast, but if ECS are trying to target mobile computer users, then the extra MHz it offers makes little difference in performance over the latest laptops being shipped nowadays. The software applications you are likely to carry/use on a business trip would generally not need to use all of 2 GHz which your processor has! Laptops like the and the which we reviewed earlier, would be overall better buys, as they offer a far more balanced configuration. You can also check out the CPU arithmetic and multimedia benchmark results, which will give you an idea of how this unit stands up to other systems with somewhat similar configurations. After looking at the benchmark results, you will see that a system based on an Athlon XP 1800+ actually performed slightly better, which means that the i-Buddie XP we tested earlier, might well be a faster solution for most requirements.This DeskNote also looses out big time in the graphics department. Even though it allows up to 64 MB of shared system memory for graphics rendering, it is still not able to give good FPS numbers in games like Quake 3 Arena. The DeskNote based on the Athlon XP processor running at 1.66 GHz had managed 31.7 FPS, so it would be natural to think that the i-Buddie 4 running a Pentium 4 2.0 GHz would do better, but that was not the case. We ran Quake 3 Arena at 1024 x 768 with the same settings we used for all the other laptops we have tested so far, and this machine also did just 31.7 FPS, which probably means that the integrated graphics controller on SiS 650 is the bottleneck. It may be a better idea for ECS to use the nForce chipsets instead, or find a way to use a GeForce4 series graphics processor. (The ACi Impression we tested earlier, ran a 1.5 GHz processor, but managed a stunning average of 95.1 FPS on an nVidia GeForce4 420 Go Graphics Card which had 32 MB of DDR RAM.)
The 15.0" XGA TFT-LCD on the DeskNote allows a max resolution of 1024 x 768 at 60 Hz, which is adequate. The screen size is nice and big, but the viewing angle is a bit of a disappointment, and the pixel refresh rate is also not all that impressive. Then, there was a lot of ghosting while playing fast motion video or games, which did nothing to enhance the overall experience. The keypad on the DeskNote did not feel firm either, and gave the impression of a rather poorly integrated machine.Look elsewhere
The battery-less i-Buddie 4 from ECS is priced at Rs.90,000, which does not make much sense really for a machine that is only semi-mobile. The ACi Xtreme running at 1.7 GHz (and with a battery) is barely a couple of thousand rupees more, and the i-Buddie XP is almost as fast, yet cheaper by rupees twenty thousand.Test unit sourced from Great World Tech Pvt Ltd