It's not for us to say whether Intel is guilty of underhand tactics in its battle with AMD over the consumer CPU market - that will be decided in a court of law. What is now clear, though, is that AMD does have a chip capable of challenging the Pentium M in the mobile processor battleground.
There are currently seven Turion 64 processors: three running at 25W, and four running at 35W. The former are geared towards mobility, the latter towards performance. In the 4401LMi, Acer has opted for the ML-30, one of the performance chips, although it has the lowest clock speed of the four at 1.6GHz.
It's a 64bit processor, giving it a clear advantage over any Pentium M but this is academic, since it's running a 32bit operating system and applications. We know that the desktop 64bit processors from AMD will outstrip any 32bit desktop CPUs, but the Turions only just about keep pace with the Pentium Ms.
The Acer scored 77 in our WorldBench 5 tests, which is about five points away from a respectable score. However, it isn't bad for £759.
On the whole, the TravelMate 4401LMi is well put together and has a good keyboard. But storage options aren't the best - the optical drive is only a CD-RW/DVD-ROM combo. The 64MB ATI Mobility Radeon X700 is also somewhat compromised by a poor screen that can only stretch to a resolution of 1,024x768.
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