With a price beaten only by Apple's iBook, Targa's offering to the multimedia market segment could easily be confused for their budget line of products. Clocking in at only 1.5GHz, this isn't the beefiest CPU in our roundup, but the 64MB of dedicated video memory, based on ATIs Mobility RADEON 9600 generation GPU, helped carry it through. Placing last in PCMark04, it struggled to return just over 3000 marks and while this isn't a poor score, against such stiff competition it put this notebook squarely into sixteenth place.
Interestingly enough, although outgunned, Targa managed to hold its own in the graphical portion of our testing, moving up six places to sit about halfway down the pack; impressive results for the lowest clocked unit. This trend continued with both 1600 x 1200 and 1024 x 768 with four samples of full-scene anti-aliasing enabled.
As noted, this was the lowest clocked PC CPU in our roundup; a choice that helps to keep the unit's cost low. Targa hasn't skimped on other features, adding a 60GB hard disk drive, multiformat 4x DVD writer, 4-in-1 external memory card reader and 802.11b/g wireless module. Perfect for gaming, the Mobility 9600 graphics aren't the fastest available on the market, but do provide more than enough grunt for casual or serious gamers after performance on the move. We decided to put it to the test, running it through a timed demo of Doom3 to give it a good thrash. The Targa put up a very admirable fight, again finishing in the middle of the pack and beating more expensive and better specification units like the Twinhead Efio 15B-Dothan with twice the memory, a 1.8GHz 2MB cache processor and better RADEON 9700 graphics.
While a little plain Jane on the eye, the bottom line is that this comfortable to use and well-featured notebook should set tongues wagging for gamers and entertainment users looking to keep mobile without having to dig too deep into the hip pocket.