Compaq Presario 1215

Compaq's latest notebook might well strike fear into the hearts of certain people in the PC industry. Why? Well it's not the menacing black curves of the design, but rather what lies at the heart of the beast: the new mobile Athlon 4 processor.

The people having sleepless nights will, of course, be the good staff at Intel. While it has bravely weathered the Athlon storm in the desktop processor market, Intel has taken some comfort from the lack of serious competition in the notebook arena. But not any more. The Athlon 4, the first chip based on AMD's next-generation Palomino core, takes the Thunderbird Athlon architecture and reworks it with mobile computing in mind.

While there have been performance enhancements - support for 52 new SSE instructions and a new data pre-fetch mechanism - the key feature of the Athlon 4 is low power consumption.

At the same clock speed, the new chip drains 20 per cent less power than the old Athlon. In addition, AMD has included PowerNow technology. While Intel's SpeedStep technology switches the processor to a lower clock speed when unplugged, PowerNow adjusts the frequency and voltage of the processor on the fly according to the needs of the software that is running. Theoretically, it's a perfect compromise between improving battery life and maintaining high performance.

As it shares the same socket and form factor as the desktop Athlon, the Athlon 4 is currently more suited to life in desktop replacements like this Presario than ultra-portables, and there could be other reasons for that. It might just be Compaq's design, but the 1Ghz chip inside our system is, literally, hot. You can feel the warmth spreading through the rubberised palm rests, and the base of the unit is far too warm for comfortable laptop use.

As a desktop replacement, however, it's a very usable machine, with a good sized keyboard and a comfortable 14.1in TFT display. It's not the brightest screen we've seen, and the viewing angle isn't huge, but the combination of the screen size and its 1024 x 768 resolution won't cause you eye strain.

The specification is also desktop standard, with an ATi Rage Mobility M1 graphics chipset, 128Mb of PC133 SDRam and a 20Gb Hitachi hard disk controlled by Via's KT133A motherboard chipset.

The Presario ships with a 3.5in floppy drive and an eight-speed Toshiba DVDRom drive installed, and you can use the latter for smooth DVD playback thanks to InterVideo's WinDVD software.

Built-in connectivity is another key desktop replacement strength, and the Presario doesn't disappoint. On the rear you'll find parallel, PS/2 and two USB ports, plus D-SUB and composite video outputs. There's also a 56K modem and integrated 10/100BaseT Ethernet, plus one Type II or III PC card slot, giving you everything you'll need for communicating. The only thing missing is a FireWire port - the Presario would have been great for mobile DV editing.

That's all very good, but the Presario's chief selling point is the power of the Athlon 4. Should Intel start worrying? Well, there's no doubting the Athlon 4's power; with a SYSmark 2001 score of 101, the Presario can rival some of the 1Ghz desktop PCs we reviewed in August. Amazingly the battery life is pretty impressive for a notebook this fast. Our rundown test reported a time of two hours and six minutes.

That said, the size and weight alone means that this isn't a notebook for regular road use and will probably spend much of its life connected to the mains. What you've got here is a very impressive desktop replacement system, and the Presario's combination of powerful components, a solid feature set and a reasonable price make it a good buy for power users.

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