DISPLAY:

Let me just say one thing first, the LCD on the V3614AU is absolutely gorgeous for a sub RM2k laptop (or any laptop I’ve ever owned for that matter, the M1210 included). The colours are bright and punchy, there is very little (almost to the point of non-existence) light leakage, and there are no dead pixels. It’s only problem is a tad more gamma than one really needs, something easily fixed with the driver controls.

The 14.1 inch screen comes with a glossy coating (which is called “BrightView” by HP Compaq. Think about Dell’s “TrueLife” and ASUS’s “ColourShine” – which are the same exact things – and one starts to wonder just how many other catchphrase names does a glossy TFT LCD can have). Like many other laptop LCDs, using any resolutions other then the native 1280x800 will make everything look horribly pixelated and stretched. The glossiness is another problem, as reflections from the screen can get very distracting sometimes, and it only gets worse under sunlight. Colour reproduction and contrast is exceptional though (with the whites actually looking white), and with a little gamma adjustment with the included nVidia control panel (which works perfectly in XP, thank god), everything just looks great.

And in terms of display real estate, the 14.1 inch screen strikes the sweet spot between usability and size. Using the V3614AU in long durations proved to be much easier on the eyes rather than working on my M1210’s 12.1 inch screen. The excellent colours helped as well.

In terms of defects, there’s only the very small amount of light leakage coming from the bottom of the screen, but it should be barely noticeable to normal (read: not extremely critical) eyes.

 
PERFORMANCE

Mobile AMD processors of late have been regarded as being much of an underdog, being generally technically slower than its Core 2 Duo rivals – mostly due to the lower amount of L2 cache that is has (1MB vs 2MB). It is also a fact that lately AMD processors on laptops established a dark reputation of being extremely hot after some time of use.

With all this in mind, I was pleasantly surprised that, in a day to day use scenario, the differences are not really perceptible.  Even with its meagre (by modern standards anyway) 512MB RAM, the V3614AU soldiered on with solid performance, as nothing really feels bogged down or laggy. To top it all off, the V3614AU stayed impressively cool during the duration of my testing (even cooler in fact, then its V3415AU predecessor ever was).

As usual, to test its general performance, I ran it through the normal set of tests; consisting of a run through 3DMark05, SuperPI, HDTune, FEAR and Counter Strike: Source.

First, to test the onboard GeForce 7150 chip, we go to 3DMark05.

*C2D = Core 2 Duo, HDD = Hard Disk Drive, ULV = Ultra Low Voltage.

Well, it performs only slightly worse than the HP Compaq 6515b, which is a surprise actually as the V3614AU only has 64MB RAM assigned for the graphics chip (against the 6515b’s 512MB), AND only 512MB vs the 6515b’s 2GB RAM. Even under these handicaps, the GeForce7150 on the V3614AU performs admirably. One leads to wonder just how much better the scores could be if the V3614AU was equipped with 2GB RAM (and with 128MB of that assigned to the graphics chip).

Next, we move on to SuperPI. Let’s find out if the Turion2Xs are indeed worse than Core 2 Duos.

Again, SuperPI is NOT multi-core optimised, so these scores should serve only as a rough estimate of processor performance.

Unfortunately, in synthetic benchmarking at least, the answer seems to be a resounding yes. The Turions in both the V3614AU AND the HP Compaq 6515b is a full 9 seconds slower than even the Ultra Low Voltage (and supposedly lower performing) C2D on the Satellite M100. What’s funny though, is the same time clocked by both these laptops, even though their processors are of different clockspeeds. Maybe it has to do with the amount of RAM installed?

The final system benchmark is HDTune, which posted the following results for the Fujitsu 120GB HDD on the V3614AU:

Compare that with the Hitachi 120GB HDD on my own M1210:

In short, the V3614AU’s Fujitsu HDD has a slower access time then my Hitachi HDD, but it has a slightly higher burst rate and average transfer rate.

Now, let’s try out the games. Running at 640x480 with “computer settings” set at MEDIUM and “graphics” setting set at LOW, the built in F.E.A.R benchmark ran and achieved the following results:

Next, the ubiquitous Counter-Strike: Source, running at 640x480 with the following settings:

Which produced the results below:

As can be seen from both the results, both games are very playable, albeit at the lowest resolution possible. But settings could be hiked up to medium in certain games (FULL HDR IN CS:SOURCE!) with little effect to the smoothness of the gameplay: a very good result from a sub-2k laptop with only 512MB RAM.

As for the battery life, the 6-cell lithium-ion battery given is good for around 90 minutes to 2 hours of video playing, with brightness tuned fully up, and wireless + bluetooth turned on. A solid result from the Turion, as it matches the battery performance of my C2D M1210 and its 6-cell battery. When you consider that the V3614AU has a larger screen, and therefore, more battery drain due to display; this result seems a bit more impressive indeed.

Now, let’s talk about heat produced. Under the impression that Turion2Xs are hot processors (and the fact that the previous V3415AU does get a bit hot under load), I was pleasantly surprised when the V3614AU did not generate as much heat as the V3415AU ever could. It’s most probably due to the fact that the V3614AU uses a newer processor architecture codenamed “Tyler”, which runs a lot cooler then the processor on the V3415AU. Even when playing F.E.A.R, the V3614AU became only a bit warm, much cooler then the V3415AU became when playing the same game.

Overall, the V3614AU is a pleasant performer at its price point. It’s true that Core 2 Duos are more suited to processor intensive tasks such as CAD or audio/video editing/encoding, but under normal use and light gaming, the impressive 7150 graphics chip makes up for much of the Turion2X’s performance shortcomings.

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