Synnex is one of Australia’s ‘white box’ notebook builders. The company is a distributor of IT products but it has its own brand of build-to-order notebooks called Mitac. Our review unit is from the TW3A series and sports the punchy name QTW3A945PM01.
It has a 15.4-inch, 1280 x 800 LCD with a glossy coating. It’s not particularly well lit in the top corners and graphics look somewhat speckled. Vertical viewing angles are poor while horizontal ones are mediocre but it’s adequate if you’re sitting directly in front of it. We were impressed with the lack of lag when watching HD movies and playing games and colours looked quite good too. However, the speakers aren’t very loud, are very tinny and suffered from distortion at high and low frequency extremes, limiting its multimedia credentials. The keyboard is rather rattly but we had no complaints with the trackpad mouse.
Inside is a 1.66GHz Core Duo T2300 with 1GB of RAM. These, and the spacious 80GB hard disk combined to score 0.76 in our benchmarks: 24% less than our speedy desktop reference system but it will cope with all applications thrown at it.
Synnex also includes a GeForce 7400 3D graphics chip, which is a nice touch for a value notebook. However, even with our low settings, it’s a poor performer. At 1024 x 768, with no antialiasing, it managed 15.7fps in Call of Duty 2 and 13.8fps in Far Cry. You’ll need to drop detail and effects settings to play games.
Other features are good though and include 802.11a/b/g WiFi and a dual-layer DVD writer. There are also four USB 2 ports, mini FireWire, Gigabit Ethernet, an Express Card slot and a media card reader which supports SD/MMC cards and Memory Sticks. VGA and S-Video ports provide video out.
It lasted a modest two hours 23 minutes in our light use test and one hour 43 minutes under intensive use. These figures and a 2.8kg weight mean portability is mediocre.
Synnex includes a decent two-year RTB warranty with the QTW3A945PM01 and this, with the features on offer, make is good value at under $2000. It’s hardly a luxury laptop, but if you need a cheap notebook, it’s adequate.
