If you need a business notebook, you're probably expecting to pay handsomely for it. And you'd be right, if you buy the HP Compaq nx8220. It has the type of components that guarantee good performance and quality, but overall we think you could get a much better deal.
Pound-for-pound Intel's Pentium M processors offer unrivalled 32bit performance, and the 2GHz clock speed, 533MHz front-side bus and 1MB of Level 2 cache of this system's Pentium M 760 is a very powerful setup. Combined with 2GB of DDR RAM it propelled the nx8220 to a respectable WorldBench 5 score of 87. This arrangement doesn't drain the battery excessively, either – we got the HP to run for four hours and 49 minutes in our tests.
While it's big enough to be powerful and have a 15.4in widescreen, it's also light enough (2.8kg) to be portable. The sturdy design and black finish complement the great screen, which stretches to a resolution of 1,680x1,050. And though the Mobility Radeon X600 card has only 64MB of memory, it does a very good job with the graphics. We got the HP to run Halo at a rate of 30.5fps (frames per second) at a resolution of 1,024x768.
Windows XP Pro comes preinstalled, while antivirus and HP's business software tools are also bundled. But there's no office suite, and we were also disappointed by the length of the warranty – at this price you really should be getting more that one year's cover.
Comments