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.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
43 Comments
View All Comments
Gigantopithecus - Monday, March 14, 2011 - link
It will be interesting to see if MSI offers the X370 in the North American market; though at $700+, I can't imagine why you'd want to buy it. MSI isn't exactly known for the build quality of its netbooks, and their logo on something this thin makes me very leery.I've not handled a YB so I appreciate your comments regarding its keyboard. You don't paint a particularly compelling picture, especially since the Lenovo X120E and HP DM1Z both offer very solid keyboards. Again, it has a Sony logo on it...but is that logo worth hundreds of dollars?
I'm not sure whether these even have WWAN slots, but if they do, would you mind checking to see if they support mSATA drives? That feature on a Brazos netbook would be very groovy...
Arnulf - Tuesday, March 15, 2011 - link
Thank you for testing those older game titles !Kaboose - Monday, March 14, 2011 - link
Good to know i can do some mining while on the go for cheap, My habit is usually to find a mountain and make myself a nice cave with an extensive mine system. This type of laptop will be perfect for me because I don't go outside much anyway.ImSpartacus - Tuesday, March 15, 2011 - link
Mining is very important!.)
I like to go straight down in a cylindrical path until I hit bedrock and then move out from there. All the good stuff is deep in the ground.
Pirks - Wednesday, March 16, 2011 - link
two cubical pervs, yucknitrousoxide - Monday, March 14, 2011 - link
These two offer some overclocking features, USB 3.0 and a not-so-big-not-so-small form factor (12.1''). Can't wait for their shipment.nitrousoxide - Monday, March 14, 2011 - link
Will user experience be significantly improved?DanNeely - Monday, March 14, 2011 - link
That article is still in work, but the page 1 text says that any current SSD will help.ninjackn - Tuesday, March 15, 2011 - link
Maybe I was expecting too much but I shoved an ocz agility into my acer 1410 (with a su2300) and didn't really notice much. It booted faster but I generally sleep/resume so it was hard for me to notice any significant differences.Quizzical - Monday, March 14, 2011 - link
I've got an Acer Aspire 5253-BZ602 (upgraded with a 64 GB SSD and 4 GB of memory), which isn't one of the models reviewed here, but it should be roughly equivalent for gaming performance, as it is based on the same Zacate E-350 APU.I think the processor is likely to be the dominant factor in whether games can run smoothly. Usually, if the video card isn't terribly powerful, you can turn down video settings and be fine. (Well, within reason; people who buy a GeForce 6150 SE from Wal-Mart today are likely to be disappointed.) But if it's a processor bottleneck, you're stuck.
I tried running Guild Wars, and it ran nearly the same as it does on my desktop (capped by vsync), and at nearly the same settings (shadows off because they're annoying, everything else in game maxed, including anti-aliasing, but 1366x768 resolution instead of 1280x1024). Of course, Guild Wars is so light on processor usage that my desktop processor declares itself idle and downclocks while the game is running, and without affecting performance. The bigger impediment to gameplay was that a monitor resolution a meager 768 pixels high is awkward with the default UI, though that's adjustable.
I also tried Champions Online, which is known to be a lot more processor intensive. Even at extremely low graphical settings (safe mode in the launcher, /renderscale 0.1 for an effective resolution of 137x77), it was stuck at about 20 frames per second. I could turn up video settings quite a bit from there without the frame rate budging much.
I don't like the idea of Civilization 4 on a netbook, though. Even my desktop Core i7 doesn't run the game that well--and not nearly as well as my old Pentium II ran Civ 2. It's a processor issue, not a graphics issue; the game can render smoothly at high settings on a Radeon X1300 Pro. Civ 4 only proves that no matter how fast your hardware is, a sufficiently badly coded game can still run poorly.
So I'd expect that one proxy for whether the Zacate E-350 APU can run a game smoothly is whether a high end desktop can hit 200 frames per second or so at low settings, without running into a processor bottleneck first.