QDI - Alacritas 520-K8

Although the mobile marketplace has been changing in the face of Centrino and the slow but gradual tablet PC adoption rate, large form factored (greater than single spindle) notebooks are still the order of the day.

Although the mobile marketplace has been changing in the face of Centrino and the slow but gradual tablet PC adoption rate, large form factored (greater than single spindle) notebooks are still the order of the day. Centrino continues to offer the freedom and maintained productivity of the workforce without wires with integrated, compliancy tested wireless Intel modules. But many power users find the integrated 802.11b wireless and extended battery life (due to the low voltage consumption of the Pentium M processor) quickly negated by the need for higher clocked mobile and desktop processors in desktop replacement units and mains operated desknotes.

While the world still argues amongst itself over the relative need and best implementation of the 64-bit platform, high-end processor hungry users are wondering whether it’s time to ditch the 32-bit (if only partially) which has served them so well and opt for the new and fastest thing on the silicon block.

As yet, there’s no native software for 64-bit support, with only an evaluation early alpha piece of Windows XP 64-bit code floating around, riddled with driver immaturities and stability issues, as one would expect with such early software.

This is where we introduce you to the QDI - Alacritas 520-K8 - the first AMD 64 notebook to come through our Labs. And it promises only to improve with the heavily anticipated shipping of Microsoft Windows XP 64-bit and other manufacturers porting to 64-bit architecture and optimising for the hardware.

Offering seamless integration between the 32/64-bit path, chips such as the AMD 64 3200+ allow for increased 32-bit performance now, and later further improved execution with raised floating point operation and I/O results on the x86 enhanced architecture.
It doesn’t compete directly with Intel and the Centrino series given the form factor differentiation and target audience – Intel is geared towards mobility, freedom and extended battery life and AMD 64 towards power deskbound users, prosumers (3D modelling and digital media creation), gamers and technical professionals. But they both feature integrated wireless modules. Intel has opted for 802.11b and AMD for the fairly recently ratified 802.11g standard. This piggybacks on the figures AMD projects, with wireless connectivity by 2007 topping out at 70 million users worldwide. Currently attacking the less mobile hardware market, there are plans for a lower power consuming XP64-M to make its way into the marketplace, look out Centrino II.

On receiving the unit, our first impression was sceptical; this looked like any of the hundreds of other notebooks we’ve seen in the Labs at some point. We were keen to get down to the nitty gritty of benching and see what this badboy could do. Running our usual swag of benchmarks we tested with Windows XP Pro 32-bit and were more than pleasantly pleased with the results. The unit banged out an overall 243 SYSmark score, 26 marks greater than the substantially higher clocked 3.06GHz Pentium 4 under the hood of the Dell Inspiron 5150 (October 2003, page 46) and truly walloping similarly clocked 1.6 and 1.7GHz Pentium M processors by just shy of 70 marks.
Memory intensive applications like games and digital content creation benefited from the increased data I/O throughput (HyperTransport) as well as the on-die integrated DDR memory controller.

Unfortunately for a unit of this size and weight, the LCD build quality was not exactly there - flimsy and able to be contorted without much force. The display did not lock into place when adjusted, between two points of movement the panel flopped around a bit.
Good speaker audio quality combined with fair DVD playback resulted in a reasonable entertainment experience. The speakers were mounted on the keyboard side of the front chassis, while the combo DVD/CD-RW drive and the supplied copy of PowerDVD should suit all your movie watching needs.

Like the Sony VAIO PCG-GRT30P (Novemeber 2003, page 49) the Alacritas 520-K8 is another notebook to feature the numerical keypad sharing the lettered keys, with a function button needing to be pressed to alternate between the two. Unlike the Sony, this unit had no letter/number inversion issue during testing. For a full-sized keyboard and large form unit, we were surprised it hadn’t gone with the standard numbers above top row of letters keyboard layout approach so common on other notebooks. Included however was a set of six shortcut keys near the LCD hinge, these were quick press keys for the default mail client, Windows Media Player, Windows integrated search function, web browser and audio volume up or down adjustment.

Almost legacy free, bar the included parallel port and PS/2 connectivity, the chassis sported a total of four USB ports on the left hand side of the housing, a single four pin FireWire input and capacity for two PCMCIA cards.

Dissipating a reasonable amount of heat for a unit of this size and spec, the large external power supply added extra weight if you planned on travelling with it, as you would, with the unit sustaining a mere 93 minutes of full productivity functionality while operating in BatteryMark2002.

Shipped to us with 512MB of RAM, QDI does offer a model with a gigabyte of memory, although expansion after purchasing may be expensive as both DIMMS are occupied with 256MB sticks.

Although large and cumbersome for the frequent traveller, this notebook embodied all the functionality and performance power users have craved for so long, while still maintaining a level of portability. With the emergence, acceptance and eventual lowering of prices, we hope to see a lot more of these types of hybrid 32/64-bit notebooks and with the talked-about release of a lower voltage model, extended battery life and smaller form factored 64-bit laptops may be just around the corner.