Introduction

It has only been a few months since WinBook released their first thin and light notebook featuring the Intel Pentium-M processor with the W160. With the release of Intel's latest Pentium-M processor, codenamed Dothan, WinBook is rebuilding their W series notebooks to take advantage of the new CPU. The people at WinBook were kind enough to loan me a pre-production unit to evaluate the changes made to the system.

Specifications

Below are the specifications for the intended shipping unit that should be available in June of 2004:

WinBook W360

The only major difference between the evaluation unit that was sent to me and the unit planned for production is the optical drive. The evaluation unit included an older and slower DVD-RW drive rather than the intended DVD+RW drive.

The W360 is a major improvement over the W160 in a number of areas. The most notable improvement is the use of the new Pentium-M processor. This is a Pentium-M core designed around the 90nm manufacturing process and includes a 2MB cache over the older 1MB cache. It also runs at a slightly faster speed of 1.7GHz over the previous units 1.6GHz.

Other improvements include:

• PC2700 memory over PC2100 DDR
• 80GB over 60GB Hard Drive
• 15.4" Wide Screen 1280x800 LCD over 15.2" Wide Screen 1280x854 LCD
• ATI Mobility 9600 w/64 over NVIDIA GeForce Go 5200 w/64MB

WinBook W360 Side Panels (Front, Back, Left, Right)

Physically, the W360 looks very similar to the older W160 unit, but the layout of connectors and parts is quite different. Previously the W160 carried most of the connectors on the back of the unit. Since this is now occupied by the Li-Ion battery, many of the connectors were repositioned or dropped. The front panel lacks the audio controls of the W160, but has the added benefit of the 3-in-1 (SD/MMC, Smart Media and Sony Memory Stick) card reader. The FireWire port has also been moved to the front. The left side panel now supports the VGA, S-Video, one USB 2.0, Ethernet, Modem and PC Card Slots. The right panel continues to hold the optical drive.

Benchmarking

For the purpose of this preview, all benchmarking of the W360 is compared to the scores that were rendered from benchmarking the W160 WinBook notebook. As a result, the same benchmarks were used as closely as possible. General system performance is tested using FutureMark's PCMark2004 and SiSoft Sandra MAX 2004. Graphics benchmarks were taken via FutureMark's 3DMark 2001 Special Edition and 3DMark03. Game testing was conducted using the HardOCP Unreal Tournament 2003 Benchmarking Utility version 2.1. Optical drive performance testing was not conducted as the pre-production unit does not come equipped with the same drive and the final unit.

PCMark 2004

FutureMark's PCMark2004 is a general system benchmark that looks at CPU, memory and disk performance and generates an aggregated score for the system performance. The test was run three times to generate a median score that best reflected the performance of the WinBook W360. The overall aggregated score was 3,369 PCMarks. The previous 1.6GHz Pentium-M based W160 scored 3,265 PCMarks. This represents a less than 3% performance increase. Since FutureMark is an aggregated score, the performance of the CPU may very well be muted due to the disk performance.

Sandra MAX 2004

Unlike PCMark2004, the SiSoft Sandra MAX 2004 benchmark utility allows for the individual components to be tested to give a more accurate representation between two components. This demonstrates what performance increases we can see from the W360 over the W160. Below is a table showing these results:

Based on these results, it does not appear that the 2MB of cache seems to generate a very significant increase in performance. The additional 100MHz in speed between the two units is only producing between a 4.3% and 6.7% increase in CPU performance. The memory and hard drive changes are producing much greater results. The hard drive performance is increased a very large 36%.

3DMark2001 Special Edition

FutureMark's 3DMark2001 Special Edition is getting to be a fairly old 3D Benchmark, but with the number of games still using DirectX 8.1 functions, it is still valid. The W360 features a dedicated ATI Mobility 9600 graphics processor that should provide very respectable performance. Below are the results compared to the W160 featuring the NVIDIA GeForce Go 5200:

This move from the NVIDIA to ATI graphics processor has provided a very good boost in performance for the W360 notebook. This makes the W360 an even more viable platform for mobile gaming over the previous W160.

3DMark2003

Unfortunately due to driver issues, I was unable to get FutureMark's 3DMark2003 benchmark to successfully complete on the new W360 unit. This is likely due to the pre-production status of the evaluation unit that I received and the relative status of the drivers for the unit. It would have been nice to compare these numbers as this is one of the few available benchmarks to use some of the DirectX 9.0 functions.

Unreal Tournament 2003

Of course, no testing of video game performance for a computer system would be complete without testing it with an actual game. To test this performance, the HardOCP Unreal Tournament 2003 Benchmark version 2.1 was used with the Unreal Tournament 2003 demo. All frame rates are reported based on the average recorded frame rates using the high detail settings. Below is a table comparing the W160 to W360 performance. For the numbers on each of the maps, the first number is the W160 while the second number is the W360.

The performance gains from the new hardware in the W360 has produced a very remarkable improvement over the W160. Benchmark scores are anywhere from 39% to 72% higher. A lot of this can be attributed to the ATI Mobility 9600 graphics processor, but the faster PC2700 memory and new Pentium-M processor also play a role in these scores.

Battery Life

Battery life is an especially important feature for notebook computers. The portability of a system is only as useful as the amount of time that the system can run on its battery. To test the battery life, a standard DVD movie is played on the system to generate a consistent stream of CPU usage. All power settings are set to the standard portable configuration in Windows XP. From here, the amount of time it takes from the system power up to the time it goes into suspended mode is recorded.

During the testing of the WinBook W160 unit several months ago, it was able to play the DVD for a full three hours, a very exceptional feat for the size of the unit. It was supplied with a 6000 mA battery. By comparison, the WinBook W360 comes supplied with a smaller 4400 mA battery. This is only 2/3 the storage capacity of the W160 battery unit. Not surprisingly, the WinBook W360 unit was able to run the DVD for just under 2 hours at one hour and fifty minutes. This puts it on par for the same level of battery usage as the W160, but it has a shorter battery life due to the capacity.

Conclusions

Overall, the number of improvements to the W360 over the older W160 is very good. The performance of the CPU is a bit on the disappointing side with the overall doubling of the cache not demonstrating a significant increase. The drive, memory and graphics performance does make up for this though. The battery life is also a bit of a disappointment as the overall time of usage has dropped. It would have been nice to test the newer DVD+RW drive that is supposed to be faster than the DVD-RW from the W160's disappointing scores.

Keep an eye out for the WinBook W360 featuring the new Intel Dothan Pentium-M processor when it is released in June 2004.

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