Group test: Dual-core notebooks

Unless you’ve had your head buried in binary, dual-core notebooks are now rife and are set to become the dominant type of architecture over the next year.

Like any new technology, dual-core notebooks currently impose a price premium. However, there are entry-level models available starting from less than £700.

Obviously these are aimed at the home user but as the technology becomes more common, prices will fall very quickly. So what can you expect from today’s budget offerings?

We asked six manufacturers to send us their lowest-priced dual-core model. While we left the AMD/Intel decision open, every notebook arrived using Intel’s new Core Duo architecture, which shows either how popular these new processors are, or how successful Intel’s marketing push has been.

As always, we’ve put every notebook through a series of exact and demanding benchmarks to see how they cope with the kind of assault that today’s software applications exert.

We’re also looking for the best mix of features against price and performance, so the lowest-priced model won’t automatically win.

We’ve explored the benefits of using a dual-core notebook, which shows that it’s not just ‘power users’ who can benefit from two cores, especially with the glut of multimedia applications demanding our attention.

So let’s get down to business and, to coin a very bad pun, let the dualling begin.

This article is part of a group test on dual core notebooks: Other articles include:
Acer Travelmate TM4202
Evesham Voyager C550
Other reviews can be read via our PDF downloads above

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