Verdict: We won't give up on our quest for a budget-friendly, sub-£1,000 gaming laptop. However, our first specimen failed to impress us. The Mobility Radeon X1800 has had its day - while you can play games on the Amilo, you'll have to forego the eye candy. Add in the clumsy keyboard, and it's clear that, while the Amilo Xi 1546 is a nice laptop, it doesn't quite get the balance right when it comes to gaming.
In the days of yore, the only way to play the latest games at full detail while on the move was to buy a high-end, uber-expensive gaming laptop. However, they were usually heavy, hot and underperformed. In more recent times, good gaming laptops such as the Dell XPS M1710 (see Issue 36, p40), the Rock Xtreme CTX PRO (see Issue 38, p42) and the Evesham Voyager C720DC Plus (see Issue 40, p41) have helped to change our opinion of laptop gaming, but they all had hefty price tags. We were keen to see if a more modestly priced laptop, such as Fujitsu Siemens' Amilo Xi 1546, could provide the power necessary to play modern games.
The silver and black styling of the Amilo is business-like without being totally boring. The laptop's most notable characteristic is that the chassis is thinner and less cumbersome than the majority of high-end laptop cases but, although it feels lighter than the Rocks and Eveshams of this world, it actually weighs a very similar 4kg.
The Amilo sports a widescreen 17in TFT display, much the same as the excellent but pricy £1,749 Evesham. Given its mid-spec ATi Mobility Radeon X1800 graphics card, the Amilo's screen has a sensibly modest resolution of 1,440 x 900, which is lower than the sharper and more graphically demanding 1,680 x 1,050 resolution more often seen on gaming laptops.
Despite having fewer pixels, the Amilo's display offers a clean, sharp image. Our test DVD of 'The Fellowship of The Ring' looked great in the bright outdoor scenes, with good contrast and colours, thanks in part to the glossy coating on the TFT. However, the flipside of this is that the screen was very reflective in a brightly lit environment. Also, on closer inspection, we detected some unwanted artefacts in the film. Green and red discolouration crept into the darker shades of grey, and during dark, shadowy scenes - not infrequent in the 'Lord of The Rings' movies - slight ghosting was apparent. Admittedly, you'd have to look very closely to notice these faults, and it certainly wasn't enough to ruin our enjoyment of the film.
Our review Amilo had a dual-core 1.83GHz Intel Core Duo T2400 CPU. Although Amilos with faster, more up-to-date Core 2 Duo CPUs are available, choosing this older CPU helps to keep the price of the laptop down to a reasonable level. The Core Duo is essentially a dual-core Pentium M, and its short pipeline should mean it's well suited to gaming, although it will suffer in DVD encoding.
The CPU has been partnered with 1GB of dual-channel PC-4200 DDR2 memory, which is pretty standard for this price range. One area that gave us cause for concern was the hard disk. The Amilo's 80GB Seagate hard disk offers a decent amount of storage space, but a relatively sluggish 5,400rpm spin speed.
The optical drive is a Philips DVD writer, which is capable of writing dual-layer DVD-R9s at 4x speed. Situated next to this are audio ports including line in and microphone, plus a third port that you can use for headphones, or as a mini-jack S/PDIF output for surround-sound speakers. This is just as well because, not surprisingly, the Amilo's built-in 2.1 speakers are woeful with anything more demanding than the Windows start-up jingle. Having said that, the Amilo has built-in Intel HD Audio, so it sounded great when we hooked it up to analogue desktop speakers. There's also a built-in 802.11b/g wireless network adaptor, plus Bluetooth, and an Express Card expansion slot.
PERFORMANCE
We've been somewhat spoiled of late when it comes to speed. Sticking a GeForce 8800 GTX graphics card inside a PC means that you can whack up the resolution and AA settings to ludicrous levels in just about any game on the market. Running our benchmarks on systems kitted out with overclocked Intel Core 2 Extreme X6800 CPUs is like watching Fatal1ty align a crosshair with an opponent's head - it doesn't take very long. Of course, with this modestly priced laptop, matters were quite different. With a score of 0.92 in both our Paint Shop Pro and DVD encoding test, it's clear that a low CPU clock speed and a sedate hard disk spin speed isn't the best combination for slick performance. This isn't to say that the Amilo is slow though; after all, 0.92 is only slightly below the score achieved by our 2.8GHz Pentium D 820-equipped desktop reference system. The Amilo's decent score of 1.24 in our multitasking test shows that you also get a significant benefit from having two cores.
Gaming performance wasn't as justifiable, however. While the Mobility Radeon X1800 is AMD's second most powerful mobile GPU, it has only 12 pixel processors and 256MB of GDDR3 memory, so it seems basic by current desktop standards. Considering that in terms of pixels the Amilo's 1,440, x 900 display is basically 1,280 x 1,024 stretched horizontally to a widescreen ratio, we expected the Mobility Radeon X1800 to be able to cope with Need for Speed: Most Wanted at full detail with low AA and AF. Unfortunately, this wasn't to be; the Amilo didn't even come close to delivering playable frame rates. A minimum frame rate of only 9fps made it almost impossible to control the car. With AA and AF turned off, the performance was smoother, managing a minimum of 22fps, but this is still essentially unplayable. Switching to a 1,024 x 768 resolution allowed us to ramp up the detail and provided an enjoyable game, but it resulted in two vertical strips of black on either side of the screen, wasting the extra space that a widescreen panel offers.
F.E.A.R. was a similar experience. In order to get a decent frame rate without butchering the resolution, we had to refer to Daniel Emery's F.E.A.R. Tune Up guide (see Issue 28, p90) to find out which details needed to be dropped. After dropping in-game objects to minimum, and completely turning off high-end features such as volumetric lighting, we managed to obtain a playable frame rate, but the sheen was noticeably absent from the graphics, and much of the game's foreboding atmosphere was lost. The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion also required a good half-hour of tweaking to achieve a decent frame rate at the native resolution of the panel. In the end, we had to lower detail significantly, and turn off many high-end features, including HDR.
The Amilo's keyboard layout isn't ideal for gaming either. The right-hand side of the keyboard is too cramped, in order to accommodate an arguably superfluous numeric keypad. Furthermore, the 'Fn' keyis located where 'Ctrl' should be, which causes no end of frustration in F.E.A.R., as you can't assign it a task. The keys were sluggish and unresponsive for games that require precision, and the number of times we pressed 'Insert' rather than 'Delete' in Word was just silly, as the two keys are so close together.
