Contrary to many of our previous performance based Labs, consumer notebooks are a little bit different, more similar to our business roundup last month, but with the focus really being on price, followed by performance and features. While it's important to know how much performance a machine is capable of before laying down your money, it's how much money you're going to have to let go of that has really caught our attention this month. We've taken sixteen of the best notebooks available under $2500 including operating systems and all the goodies you'll need to get up and start working or playing without delay.

Benchmarking

As always, our primary goal when benchmarking is to be able to demonstrate real-world performance, reproducible by users through a series of thorough and more importantly relevant utilities to show the capabilities of any given hardware. This month we've cast aside SYSmark2002 in favour of running PCMark04 and graphs capability benchmarking with 3DMark01SE Pro. SYSmark02's laborious run times combined with its frequently unexplained falling over during benchmarking forced us to move to the significantly more reliable and faster PCMark04, which uses real-world open source alternatives to SYSmark02's proprietary Microsoft Office 2000, Adobe Photoshop, Premier and Macromedia's Dreamweaver web creation software. PCMark04's workload covers text and spreadsheet editing, mathematical calculations, real-time anti-viral scanning and media encoding and decoding. Exactly the sorts of tasks consumer notebooks are designed to handle. While performance comes in a close second to value for money, it's certainly not the most determining factor as you'll see in each unit's final score breakdown, with our usual weighted scoring system leveraged heavily by each notebook's price to the tune of 50 percent value for money and 25 percent each for performance and features. Once again due to cross-platform incompatibility issues we calculated the Apple iBook's scores independently and have attempted to make scores comparable to that of the PCs tested. wWe used MobileMark02's full productivity workload function to test the capabilities of each unit's battery by running the unit dead from a full battery charge. This returns a productivity score and gives an accurate measurement of time in minutes. Each of the units was tested for PCMark04 while being powered by the AC adaptor, eliminating power scaling and processor throttling.

The results

We received a bit of a mixed bag of notebooks this month, with plenty of different hardware configurations, all with slightly differing focuses. While some are processor heavy, allowing them to score well in productivity testing, their graphics are often neglected, resulting in them being less suitable for entertainment usage or gaming. On the other hand, we did receive five units which boasted one of either ATI's Mobility 9600 or 9700 flavoured graphics, both of which feature dedicated video memory, perfect for gaming or high quality DVD playback on the included optical combo drives. Integrated graphics will serve you well for 2D and basic 3D usage, but as our graphs indicate, hovering around 2000 3DMarks range, it's unlikely you'll have a playable number of frames per second in the more recent first person shooters which require fast screen redraws.

Although in fifth place for PCMark04 and MobileMark02's battery test, the Labs winning MSI MegaBook M510C's first place 3DMark01SE score helped propel it higher up the performance ladder. Although dead on our cap for price, it's above average performance, feature and high value for money score helped it secure the top place overall, narrowly pipping the Asus M24N notebook by a single overall point. Our closest finish to date in the Labs.

Interesting enough two of the top five overall places went to units which feature integrated shared memory graphics.

Given the price ceiling we imposed on participants and our focus on value for money over specifications, we were more than pleasantly surprised with the calibre of the notebooks available in the marketplace under $2500 especially when comparing with last year's hottest tech at the same price point. Your first step when considering purchasing a laptop computer is the intended purpose and majority usage to identify the hardware you're likely to require. While DVD writers and 128MB dedicated video memory is brilliant, if you're spending more than you need to for functions you're not currently using and see no immediate future use for, you may wish to re-evaluate your options.