iBUYPOWER Battalion 101 FX-924Z 15.4-inch Thin and Light Laptop PC

May 19 2009 - iBUYPOWER's Battalion 101 FX-924Z is a very powerful 15.4-inch laptop costing under $1100. This performance comes from the use of the newer Core 2 Duo T9550 processor with its higher clock speeds. The downside to this high performance processor is that it draws more power than the P series resulting is less battery life. The company does offer a wide variety of customization options for those looking to alter some of the components. It is also free of trialware found on many laptops but it also lacks any bundled software.

May 19 2009 - Performance of the iBUYPOWER Battalion 101 FX-924Z is very strong thanks to the use of the Intel Core 2 Duo T9550 processor with its high clock speed. The downside is that the T series processors are not as energy efficient as the P series models. Because of this, the laptop has a below average battery life. It is also held back slightly compared to some newer laptops that use DDR3 memory compared to the older DDR2 memory used.

Storage is pretty typical of what is found in laptops in the $1000 price range. A 320GB hard drive spinning at 5400rpm provides a fair amount of storage space. It is slower at reading and writing data compared to laptops using faster 7200rpm drives. A dual layer DVD burner provides playback and recording of CDs and DVDs.

Graphics are handled by a 15.4-inch LCD panel combined with an NVIDIA GeForce 9600M GT graphics processor with 512MB. This combination allows it to easily play 3D games up to the 1280x800 resolution of the display without any issues.

Many people will be happy to know that the Battalion 101 FX-924Z only comes loaded with the base operating system that is free of the various trialware applications found on many other laptops. This definitely is a plus as it keeps the system free of applications that waste memory and drive space, but the downside is that the system does not include any base applications for productivity, security or multimedia.

iBUYPOWER offers a wide range of customization of the components within the Battalion FX-924Z. This includes options on the processor, memory, hard drives and accessories. Since they use a whitebook base from MSI, components such as networking, optical drive and video are fixed and can't be changed.