Month: January 2019

In addition to the consumer focused products announced this week at CES, Acer has also announced a new business notebook this week. The TravelMate X3410 is a 14-inch notebook aimed at professionals, with several options depending on the budget and performance requirements.

Unlike the Acer Swift 7 just announced, the TravelMate X3410 is more function over form. The 14-inch laptop offers a 1920×1080 IPS display with Acer’s ComfyView matte coating. Without the thin bezels of the higher-end models, the TravelMate X3410 is quite a bit bigger, with dimensions of 328 x 239 x 20 mm (12.9 x 9.4 x 0.8 inches) and a rather hefty weight of 1.6 Kg (3.53 lbs).

Acer offers a range of processor options, from the base model Intel Core i3-8130U, which is a dual-core part with a frequency of 2.2 GHz, to the Core i5-8250U quad-core, up to the Core i7-8550U quad-core. Interestingly, Acer has chosen to outfit the laptop with DDR4 SODIMMS rather than the more typical LPDDR3 we’d see in Ultrabooks, and Acer offers 8 to 16 GB of DDR4, but with SODIMMS that can be upgraded later as well. SSDs are all SATA based, from 128 GB at the low end to 512 GB at the high end.

As a slightly thicker device, Acer has found room for a Gigabit Ethernet port, to complement the 802.11ac wireless, and there is quite a wide range of ports as well, including three USB 3.0 ports, one USB 3.1 Type-C port, HDMI, and even VGA. For those that appreciate it, there’s also a SD card reader.

Acer rates battery life at up to 15 hours with the 5170 mAh battery, which should be right around 60 Wh total capacity. Acer ships a 65 W charger which should allow for a fast refill as well.

Although not as jaw-dropping as the Acer Swift 7, the TravelMate X3410 comes in with a much lower price, starting at $899.99 USD.

ASUS’ latest TUF gaming laptops may look about the same as before, but under the hood, it’s a new ball game. Rather than packing Intel and NVIDIA parts, the 15.6-inch FX505DY (above) and 17-inch FX705DY (below) are all AMD, with a 12-nanometer, four-core Ryzen 2 3550H APU and Radeon RX 560X discrete graphics. Both models also have 1080p FreeSync displays, with the 17-inch model hitting up to 60Hz, and the 15-incher maxing out at a decent 120Hz.

Both models are designed to survive falls and “extreme environments” thanks to the mil-spec toughness and hexagonal bottom design. They both pack beefier-than-usual LED keyboards with full number pads and 1.8mm of key travel. Other features include 7.1 channel virtual surround sound, onboard ethernet, a 512GB PCIe SSD or 1TB Fireuda SSHD, up to 32GB of RAM, HDMI 2.0 output and three USB ports.

ASUS’ move to AMD for its low-end gaming laptops is an interesting one. The current TUF laptops pack Intel eighth-gen CPUs and NVIDIA graphics (up to GTX1060), so don’t expect to see improved graphics performance with the RX 560X chip (the same one Apple uses in the MacBook Pro). It’s more likely that ASUS is trying to drive costs down, as the current models have generally been panned for having poor performance for the price. ASUS has yet to tell us the cost of the new TUF models, but they’ll arrive sometime this quarter.

When the first Chromebooks were released in 2011, they were aimed at the lower end of the market and carried matching price tags. After Google launched its Pixel laptop in 2013 and proved that it was possible to address the premium segment, other makers of PCs followed on with more advanced Chromebooks that were more expensive. Eventually, Chromebooks somewhat moved away from being exclusively in the low end of the market, and towards a broader market covering multiple price ranges. With the low end market diminished by not forgotten, HP has announced that it’s going to take another shot at this segment with its new Chromebook 14. Coincidentally, the Chromebook 14 is also the first ChromeOS-powered PC featuring an AMD processor.

As the name suggests, the HP Chromebook 14 features a 14-inch SVA display panel with a 1366×768 resolution and anti-glare coating. The notebook comes in a fine-looking chassis with a textured finish and a 1.8 cm (0.92-inch) z-height, though HP hasn’t specified what kind of material it is made of. Given the thickness, it is reasonable to guess that some sort of a plastic was used (I would assume polycarbonate).

Moving on to the guts of the system. The HP Chromebook 14 is based on AMD’s A4-9120C processor, a relatively unknown SoC featuring two Excavator cores running at 1.8 GHz and the GCN 1.2-based Radeon R4 iGPU with 128 SPs operating at 720 MHz (more information about the SoC is available in Ian’s AMD at CES 2019 coverage). Being fabbed on a 28 nm process and a low-end chip overall, this SoC is cheap enough to that AMD and HP can still turn a profit even with the low-end pricing of the system. All told, do not expect too much from this APU (and therefore the Chromebook 14 as a whole): it can handle productivity apps, VP9/H.264/H.265 decode, play some games, but that is about it.

The Chromebook 14 is equipped 4 GB of DDR4 RAM and 32 GB of local eMMC storage, just like early Chromebooks. As for I/O, it has a Qualcomm 802.11ac Wi-Fi with Bluetooth 4.2 controller, two USB 3.1 Gen 1 Type-C ports, two USB 2.0 Type-A ports, a microSD card reader, a dual microphone array, B&O-badged speakers, a webcam, and so on. Overall, hardware wise the laptop looks pretty much okay.

As for battery life, HP says that its Chromebook 14 lasts for nine hours and 15 minutes on a single charge in their mixed use case workload. The company is using a fairly hefty 47.36 Wh battery here, driven in good part by the need to light up the relatively large 14-inch display.

Finally, while HP is announcing the laptop today, they aren’t announcing pricing or an ETA for the device. We may find out more on AMD’s Wednesday keynote; competing AMD-powered Chromebooks are due in February, so AMD is just about ready themselves.