check www.cnet.com battery benchmarks for each laptop you are considering.
That said, Toshiba M30 series with benchmarked 4:08 hour (4400mah
battery), 5:52 (6600mah battery) is one option (add DVD burner by
Customizing the system at www.csd.toshiba.com). Widescreen to handle
wide-format videos and lets you lay out windows. $2419 w/1.4Ghz P-M CPU
(2.0Ghz Desktop P4 CPU equivalent), DVD burner, 512MB, 32MB GeForce
Go5200, 1280x800 screen.
Compaq X1000 with 1920x1200 screen option upgrade at 4:04 hours is
another great buy. (www.fatwallet.com/forums/ -> hot deals on the X1000
thread to get them cheaper; www.hp.com) $2249 w/1.7Ghz P-M CPU (2.4Ghz
Desktop P4 CPU equivalent), DVD burner, 512MB, 80GB HD, 64MB Radeon
9200, 1920x1200 screen.
Excellent X1000 forums here to talk about it and tweak this nice laptop.
http://www.x1000forums.com/index.php
Finally, eMachines M5310 at www.tigerdirect.com refurbished for a steal!
AMD XP 2400+ (2.4Ghz P4 desktop equiv.), 512MB, 40GB HD, 64MB ATI Radeon
320M, 1280x800 screen.
----
That said, 3D graphics is not important at all to video editing, so you
don't need to worry about what graphics chip is inside unless you're
doing video games. (No, 3D rendering won't go faster either, in
general. Some exceptions.)
You'll want at least 512MB of RAM to make Windows XP happy as well as be
able to load up a video editor w/o starting swapping to disk. More
isn't necessary because you'll be editing frames of video (takes up
little ram), not some big thing that'll gobble up ram like crazy.
Better worry about HD space instead.
You'll want at least a 40GB HD, and bigger the better. DV video will
take ~13GB/hour, and you'll want 2x that for each hour of video you plan
to edit - 13GB for the original, 13GB for the edited version.
Expect the OS + Office + video editing & photo editing apps to take
about 5-7GB of space if you simply install just that and not other
games, disk hogging apps, etc.
Thus, you can estimate how much a HD will give you. eg. 40GB - ~10GB
for OS = 30GB for editing = 30/13 -> ~2.x = enough spare space to edit
~1 hour of DV video. eg. 80GB HD -> 70GB free / 13GB per hour -> ~5
hours -> can edit 2.5 hours of DV video or a movie from the HD.
---
Keep in mind that none of the above will run faster than the other -
they're all 2.4Ghz P4 CPU equivalents in terms of benchmarked performace
(see www.tomshardware.com and
http://www.tech-report.com/reviews/processors.x for actual data).
That said, while the eMachines doesn't come with a built-in DVD burner
(you can buy one for $79 for a 4x at www.tigerdirect.com and put it into
a $40 enclosure from www.newegg.com), it is a steal. When most editors
consider how often they burn a DVD, it's not too often (unless you're
only editing 3 minute videos and can whip out a project fast).
----
That said, Compaq X1000 is the perfect solution here - everything in
one, gorgeous resolution that'll let you layout editing windows w/o any
problems at all, and fits all of the criteria.
----
I've summarized the data here for convenience:
Basically, a P-M processor at 1.4 Ghz will run like a 2Ghz (+/- 0.2Ghz)
P4 desktop processor equivalent with hyper-threading on almost all
benchmarks and applications, but may run as slow as a 1.2 Ghz or
thereabouts for tasks that stress the memory pipeline within the CPU
itself due to the rather poor bandwidth within the ALU/FPU inside the
P-M processor vs. the far faster P4 desktop CPUs.
A quick calculation would put the faster 1.7 P-M processor at a 2.4Ghz
P4 HT desktop CPU equivalent.
Still, no other processor on the planet will best the Pentium 4 3.2Ghz
HT desktop processor, esp. if that's been overclocked for the consumer
buyer. (we're ignoring Xeon and other high-end server CPUs for now, as
well as overclocking, etc.)
Thus, for people making decisions as to which notebook to buy, they'll
have to take these benchmarks and applications into mind.
eg. Between the similarly priced at ~$1700 Toshiba P15 running at 2.8Ghz
P4 Desktop HT v.s the Toshiba M30 running at 1.4Ghz P-M (2.0 Ghz P4
equiv.), the P15 will be the better pick for sheer performance alone,
with performance averaging about 40% faster than the M30 model.
---
See PC Direkt comparison of P-M 1.6 laptop vs. P4 2.4 Desktop with
numerous benchmarks:
http://www.hightech-journal.de/pdf/20306062.pdf
Some of the interesting benchmarks depending mostly on CPU (see report
for graphics heavy benchmarks I left out)
Office
CCWS 2003 1.0: 38.3 points, 41.4 points
BWS 2002 1.01: 28.2 points, 30.3 points
Rendering
Seti@home 3.03: 11.2 WU/d, 7.7 WU/d
3ds Max apache: 10.4 fps , 10.5 fps
multimedia
encoding mpeg from avi: 18.2fps, 20.4fps
specviewperf dx-07 : 33.2 points, 43.4 points
specviewperf drv-08 : 24.7 points, 26.1 points
--
See Tech Report's various CPU benchmarks:
Pentium 4 & Athlon desktop CPUs up to 3.2Ghz
http://www.tech-report.com/reviews/2...2/index.x?pg=1
Pentium-M & Pentium 4-M CPU benchmarks:
http://www.tech-report.com/reviews/2...z/index.x?pg=1
You can easily compare the various benchmarks for both sets of reports
to see how all four types perform.
Some of the numbers:
SiSoft Memory Bandwidth:
Pentium 4 3.2: ~4800 (FPU & ALU)
Athlon XP3200: ~2700
P-M 1.4 : ~2000 (or 1.2Ghz P4 Desktop Equiv)
P4-M 1.8 : ~1900
Linpack (Max Mflops achieved)
P4 3.2 : ~1150
XP3200 : ~1100
P-M 1.4 : ~800 (2.2 Ghz P4 desktop equivalent)
P4-M 1.8 : ~650
Business Winstone 2002
P4 3.2 : 36.5
XP3200 : 38.6
P-M 1.4 : 24.7 (2.2 Ghz P4 desktop equivalent)
P4-M 1.8 : 19.7 (1.7 Ghz P4 desktop equiv.)
Content Creation 2002
P4 3.2 : 48.4
XP3200 : 54.0
P-M 1.4 : 32.4 (2.1 Ghz P4 desktop equiv.)
P-4 M 1.8 : 27.3 (1.8 Ghz P4 dekstop equiv.)
Xmpeg Divx encoding
P4 3.2 : 185 seconds
XP3200 : 251
P-M 1.4 : 283 (2.1 Ghz P4 desktop equiv.)
P-4 M 1.8 : 297
Specviewperf info:
http://www.specbench.org/gpc/opc.sta...erf71info.html
Specviewperf dx-08
P4 3.2 : 56.96 (score)
XP3200 : 55.73
P-M 1.4 : 29.77 (1.7 Ghz P4 desktop equiv.)
P4-M 1.8 : 29.42
Specviewperf light-06
P4 3.2 : 13.84
XP3200 : 11.52
P-M 1.4 : 8.34 (1.9 Ghz P4 desktop equiv.)
P4-M 1.8 : 7.83
Specviewperf 3dsmax-02
P4 3.2 : 11.49
XP3200 : 10.01
P-M 1.4 : 4.47 (1.2 Ghz P4 desktop equiv.)
P4-M 1.8 : 4.28
