BenQ’s v40 is the bigger brother of the v11 — our best, value notebook. The v40 uses exactly the same chassis and screen but the innards are beefed up: it’s BenQ’s first Core 2 (1.66GHz T5500 CPU) notebook and has 1GB of RAM (v11: 512MB). It scored 1.04 in our 2D benchmarks — 26% faster than the Core Duo-based v11. It also sports Nvidia’s GO 7400 3D chip for gaming. However, this struggles to play games at even 1024 x 768. The extra power hits battery life -- intensive use dropped 40mins while light use dropped almost 2hrs!
Hard disk and DVD writer are the same but Bluetooth 2 makes an appearance. It’s not an earth-shattering upgrade, but it is noticeably more powerful, which could make the $600 premium worth paying. Indeed, it’s noticeably cheaper than Asus’ A-Listed A8JP but check out Lenovo’s N100 first.
