Introducing the Brazos E-350 Contenders

When AMD announced their Brazos offerings, the part that immediately caught our interest was the E-350. The E-240 comes with a lower 1.5GHz clock and a single core, but the same power requirement, so unless that’s priced particularly low we don’t see any reason to consider it. The two C-series parts go after the netbook market, with 9W TDP and clocks of 1.0GHz on the dual-core C-50 and 1.2GHz for the single-core C-30; at least the C-30 makes up for the missing core with a higher clock speed here. But really, it’s the E-350 with its 1.6GHz clock speed, dual cores, and higher clocked HD 6310 GPU that delivers everything we want to see. The real question is, does it deliver enough within its price bracket to match the performance and features on tap?

When we reviewed the HP dm1z a couple weeks back, we were impressed with the overall package, performance, and perhaps most importantly, the price. Reasonably equipped with 3GB RAM and a 320GB 7200RPM drive, you can grab the dm1z for just $450 with HP’s current $100 instant rebate (which looks to continue for the foreseeable future). You can even bump that up to 4GB and still spend just $480 (plus tax and shipping, of course). The overall package was so attractive that it garnered our Silver Editors’ Choice award, missing out on the Gold by virtue of its lackluster LCD, so the competition has a high bar to clear if they want to beat the dm1z.

Today, we have two more laptops sporting very similar specs, with the key difference being the amount of RAM and the capacity and spindle speed of the hard drive. The MSI X370 also mixes things up by moving to a larger 13.3” chassis, which may or may not be a good thing depending on what you’re after. Dustin has the Sony VAIO, courtesy of AMD, while Jarred has MSI’s yet-to-be-released X370. According to MSI, the X370 may not actually go on sale in North America; that would be a shame, as with the right price there’s plenty to like. And since we’re on the subject, let’s discuss pricing a bit more.

Sony’s pricing is a bit high, with an MSRP of $599; that’s not great but we can find the YB online starting at $550. With the HP dm1 going for under $500, you’d need something else to make either offering worth considering; the styling, 4GB RAM, and 500GB HDD might be enough to attract buyers away from the HP. MSI’s X370 is a bit of a wildcard, with one review suggesting an MSRP of $749. I haven’t been able to confirm that, but let’s be blunt: at $750, there’s simply not going to be a market for anything Brazos related. For less money, you can find quite a few higher performing options that offer similar or better graphics and features, with reasonable battery life. Here’s hoping we can get the X370 pricing down to $550 or less.

One thing that shouldn’t be too surprising is the performance. If you’ve read our Mini-ITX Brazos reviewor the HP dm1z review, the only thing that’s going to change performance in any significant way is the battery capacity, with the hard drive having a minor impact on a couple benchmarks. The CPU and GPU at the heart of the E-350 will determine the rest, and all three laptops are very similar as far as performance goes.

We received quite a few requests for additional testing to show exactly where the line is between acceptable performance and sluggishness, particularly in regards to older games. We don’t have comparative results from other laptops yet, but we’ll at least report our performance and impression of the E-350 in this review. The other request was for SSD benchmarks; if you want a faster laptop experience, any decent SSD will get you there. We’re working on one more article comparing Brazos to a selection of other mobile platforms, with all units running 60GB Kingston SSDs. We’ve still got plenty of tests to run, but as you’d expect having an SSD makes a noticeable impact on system boot times, application load times, and general Windows performance. If MSI wanted to ship the X370 with a similar SSD, we would be a lot more willing to pay a price premium.

With the preliminary introductions out of the way, let’s take a closer look at the MSI X370 and Sony VAIO YB before we hit the benchmark charts.

MSI’s Ultra Slim X370: Bigger Isn’t Always Better

First up is the MSI X370, an ultra slim 13.3” portable. The base model we received for testing measures less than an inch thick, making it comparable to the MacBook Air in some ways. Where it doesn’t compare is in performance or industrial design, as MSI is still using glossy plastic just about everywhere, and the frame doesn’t have the feeling of solidity and durability that you’d get from a MacBook Air or Pro 13. Here are the basic specs for our test system.

MSI X370 Specifications
Processor	AMD E-350 (2x1.6GHz, 40nm, 1MB L2, 18W)
Chipset	AMD Hudson FCH
Memory	1x4GB DDR3-1333 @ DDR3-1066 CL7
Graphics	AMD Radeon HD 6310 IGP (80 Stream Processors, 500MHz core clock)
Display	13.4" LED Glossy 16:9 1366x768 (Samsung 134AT01-G01 Panel)
Hard Drive(s)	500GB 7200RPM (Seagate ST9500420AS)
Optical Drive	-
Networking	Realtek RTL8168/8111 PCIe Gigabit Ethernet Realtek RTL8188CE 802.11b/g/n Bluetooth 2.1 (Windigo BTM01C2AC)
Audio	Realtek ALC269 HD Audio Stereo speakers Headphone and microphone jacks
Battery	4-Cell, 14.8V, 2.15A, 32Wh battery 8-Cell, 14.8V, 4.3A, 64Wh battery
Front Side	Speakers Indicator lights
Left Side	Exhaust vent SD/MMC reader HDMI Gigabit Ethernet VGA
Right Side	Exhaust vent 2x USB 2.0 Headphone and microphone jacks AC adapter
Back Side	N/A
Operating System	Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit
Dimensions	4-cell: 12.99" x 8.94" x 0.82"-0.88" (WxDxH) 8-cell: 12.99" x 8.94" x 0.82"-1.78" (WxDxH)
Weight	4-cell: 3.37 lbs. 8-cell: 3.81 lbs.
Extras	1.3MP webcam Flash reader (MMC, SD/Mini SD) 87-key keyboard
Warranty	1-year limited warranty (?)
Pricing	Unknown at present

Other than the hard drive and the battery, a few differences in port selection and location, and coming with 1x4GB DDR3 memory, the X370 has the same basic specs as the HP dm1z. Keep in mind that despite having a single 4GB SO-DIMM, since the Brazos platform uses a single 64-bit memory channel there’s no advantage to two memory slots other than expansion. Total system memory bandwidth is just 8.5GB/s, which could be part of the reason some games struggle to reach playable frame rates. The other part of the reason is that, while the Bobcat core can easily beat up on Atom CPU in terms of performance, it’s no match for faster architectures like Core 2 or K10—in fact, even a 1.3GHz CULV is faster than the E-350. What you end up with is significantly better than Atom performance (particularly on the GPU side), with nearly Atom levels of battery life, and good (for a netbook/ultraportable) graphics. Or put another way, you get a much better IGP than Intel’s GMA 4500MHD that was commonly paired up with CULV processors, with similar power requirements but lower CPU performance.

One other area where MSI’s X370—along with most other Brazos laptops—beats Atom is in the networking options. Like the HP and Sony, we get Gigabit Ethernet along with the standard 802.11n networking. Considering there’s no internal optical drive and I like to install games and applications over my GbE network, I definitely appreciate the extra $0.25 MSI spent here. On the other hand, it comes with just two USB 2.0 ports, both on the right side; a third (or even fourth) on the left would have been nice to get.

Moving on to the design and construction, the very thin body is comparable to Apple’s MacBook Air on a superficial level. Of course, outside of the thinness, there’s very little that the two platforms share in common. The X370 is predominantly plastic in construction, which is similar to the basic MacBook, only you get black with a pattern instead of glossy white. The MacBook is also slightly thicker and weighs more, but it comes with an optical drive and larger 63.5Wh battery by default. As we mentioned up top, performance is also heavily in favor of the MacBook, even with an aging Core 2 P8600; the GeForce 320M IGP is quite a large step up as well, even if it lacks DX11 support.

There’s another catch with the size and dimensions: the ultra slim form factor is only there if you use the 4-cell battery, which checks in at just 32Wh; MSI shipped us an 8-cell 64Wh battery wedge as well, which as expected doubles (slightly more) the battery life but bumps the thickness up to nearly 2” at the rear. Ideally, we’d like to get the higher 64Wh battery capacity while maintaining the slim form factor, but as far as protruding batteries go this 8-cell unit isn’t bad. It’s flat and wide, so you can still comfortably use the X370 on your lap or other surfaces. Still, there’s no sense in shipping a laptop with a 32Wh battery these days; it may last “long enough” for most users initially, but you know that a year or so down the road it will only hold half of its charge and suddenly you’re dealing with a 1-2 hour battery life at best. Spending $100 extra for the larger 8-cell doesn’t sit well either, considering the target market. Sony also goes with a smallish 38Wh battery, but HP packs in a 55Wh battery. Notice a pattern yet?

The keyboard works reasonably well, and while MSI doesn’t use the entire width of the chassis for the keyboard, it’s comfortable enough to use for hours at a time. There’s a small amount of flex if you type really hard, but nothing that causes me any concern. The touchpad also works well, with the standard multi-touch features. What doesn’t work well are the mouse buttons; MSI uses a rocker-style chrome (plastic) button, which may or may not please your sense of aesthetics. My issue with the buttons is that they don’t register very well, particularly the right button, where you have to put some thought into pushing it hard enough and in the correct spot. However, in disassembling the X370 we discovered the real problem with the right button: the button fails to register unless you put some flex on the PCB beneath the touchpad. Remember that this is an engineering sample; we’ll assume any final models will have functioning hardware, but we’d still prefer discrete left and right buttons.

It practically goes without saying that the LCD panel is mediocre, with limited vertical viewing angles, mediocre colors, and a poor contrast ratio. If you need to get at the internals—for example, if you want to upgrade to an SSD or access the memory slot, though the 4GB unit we received will likely never need the latter—you run into another problem: there’s no quick access to the internal components. Instead, you have to get through the keyboard (secured by three clips), and then remove the top plastic panel (including the palm rest, but strangely enough not the chrome plastic border). It’s not particularly difficult, and you can safely ignore the “Warranty Sticker – Void if Tampered” label on one of the screws in the battery compartment, as you don’t need to remove those screws. All of the important screws (seven of them) are under the keyboard.

Somewhat perplexing is that after disassembling the laptop, I had some real difficulties getting the front plastic clips (near the touchpad) to snap back together properly. Ultimately, I had to remove the touchpad rocker button so that I could get the two clips underneath it to snap into place. It was an annoying process and the numerous plastic clips would very likely break if you were to access the internals more than a few times, but this should only be necessary if you want to replace the HDD. Of course, we want to do exactly that as an SSD will definitely improve the overall experience, but that’s another story.

Assuming the MSI X370 is priced similarly to the X350, we have some serious concerns with the product line as a whole. The X370 doesn’t have the greatest build quality as the whole laptop feels a little cheap, and the difficulty of upgrading the components doesn’t help, but it comes reasonably equipped. Unfortunately, the X350 had an MSRP of $800 for a CULV design, which is about $200 more than we’d be willing to pay for the overall build quality and package. If the MSRP of the X370 is indeed $750, that’s once more at least $200 more than we can recommend. Dustin feels the Sony VAIO’s MSRP of $600 is too much (and it is!), but anything north of $650 for a plastic-shelled E-350 laptop is ludicrous. At $700+, the MSI X370 will be DOA.

Sony's VAIO YB Ultraportable

Our next entrant aims to compete with both MSI's X370 and our reigning champion, the HP dm1z. Sony's been playing the style game since well before HP finally got the message, but the competition here is a lot more interesting. The YB is the weapon of choice that AMD sent us to show off Brazos, and it's pretty easy to see why: it's a slick-looking Sony netbook/ultraportable. The message is loud and clear: Brazos is a big enough success for even OEMs that are usually gun-shy with AMD (like Sony) to take notice. Here's how the YB we were sent is specced:

Sony VAIO YB Specifications
Processor	AMD E-350 (2x1.6GHz, 40nm, 1MB L2, 18W)
Chipset	AMD Hudson FCH
Memory	3GB (2GB+1GB) DDR3-1333 @ DDR3-1066 CL7 (Ships with 4GB standard)
Graphics	AMD Radeon HD 6310 IGP (80 Stream Processors, 500MHz core clock)
Display	11.6" LED Glossy 16:9 1366x768 (Samsung 116AT04-S01 Panel)
Hard Drive(s)	320GB 5400RPM (Hitachi Travelstar 5K500.B) (ships with 500GB standard)
Optical Drive	-
Networking	Atheros AR8131 PCIe Gigabit Ethernet Atheros AR9285 802.11b/g/n Bluetooth 2.1+EDR
Audio	Realtek ALC269 HD Audio Stereo speakers Headphone and microphone jacks
Battery	4-Cell, 10.8V, 38Wh battery
Front Side	Speakers SD/MMC reader Wireless switch Indicator lights
Left Side	AC adapter VGA HDMI Exhaust vent USB 2.0
Right Side	Headphone and microphone jacks 2x USB 2.0 Kensington lock Ethernet jack Power button
Back Side	N/A
Operating System	Windows 7 Home Premium 32-bit
Dimensions	11.42" x 7.99" x 0.99"-1.25" (WxDxH)
Weight	3.23 lbs
Extras	1.3MP webcam Flash reader (MMC, SD/Mini SD) 83-key keyboard
Warranty	1-year limited warranty
Pricing	$599 MSRP Online starting at $539

Right off the bat, even before you get to the build of the Sony YB, there are two red flags: the MSRP of $599 and the Windows 7 32-bit install. Hopefully this is a price tag we're not going to see carry over into retail, and at least my local Fry's (as well as several online vendors) knocks it down to a still onerous $549. Perhaps the retail models will also ship with 64-bit Windows, though we haven’t confirmed that. $600 gets you a beefier specced version than the one we were sent by AMD, with upgrades to 4GB of DDR3 and 500GB of hard disk capacity. However, that still doesn't completely take the stank off of that asking price when HP is willing to offer what amounts to more laptop (with a faster 7200RPM hard drive and a bigger battery) for less money. Otherwise, the YB's configuration is par for the course until the faster Zacate chips arrive: gigabit Ethernet and wireless-n party alongside the standard AMD E-350 processor with a single 64-bit channel of memory and the Hudson FCH.

Style-wise, the YB is well built but the current Sony shell is starting to seem stale. Historically we've harped on other vendors to update their designs, and we'd be remiss not to do the same here. That's not to say Sony's current designs aren't attractive—quite the opposite actually—and the only glossy plastic on the YB is used for the VAIO logo on the lid: the rest is an attractive matte silver.

What's problematic is that the chiclet keyboard used for the YB just isn't very good. Sony's uniform design runs into problems when you get into a chassis this small, and the wasted space above and on the sides of the keyboard really bears that out. The fact remains that HP is able to fit what amounts to a full-size keyboard on the dm1z while the keys on the YB feel noticeably smaller and more cramped. If you have smaller fingers you're less liable to run into problems, but mine are pretty slender and spidery and I still wound up fat-fingering the YB's keys. You'll also note that where MSI fits in dedicated Home/End/PgUp/PgDn keys, Sony and HP both use Fn+Cursor combos. The keyboard is probably my biggest issue with the YB; the touchpad is comfortable enough if the buttons feel a bit stiff, but it's a long way from being the worst we've used.

Fortunately, popping open the bottom of the YB is easy enough and you can upgrade the memory and anemic hard drive as needed. Any more RAM than the 4GB the retail model ships with is probably overkill for AMD's E-350, but a hybrid drive like the Seagate Momentus XT or especially an SSD would go a long way towards making any Brazos netbook/laptop feel snappier. Sony also offers an extended battery for the YB (along with most of their other notebooks) to replace the middling 38Wh standard issue battery, but they have the audacity to charge $249 for the privilege, and even getting a replacement battery from them is an absurd $199. Compare that to the spare 6-cell, 55Wh battery for the dm1z HP is willing to sell you for just $105 and it's hard not to feel a little cheated.

Application Performance: Better than Atom, Worse than CULV

We’ve already covered AMD’s E-350 twice: once on the desktop in Mini-ITX form, and a second time in the HP dm1z. Anand’s review uses some different benchmarks as well as an SSD, but if you’re interested in a preview of my SSD testing with the X370 that’s a good place to start. Using conventional HDDs and running the same test suite as we use with other laptops, all of the E-350 units are within spitting distance of each other, just as you’d expect. I’m switching up the list of laptops in our benchmark suite from the HP review, just to give a broader picture of the market. This time we’ve got single-core and dual-core CULV, single-core and dual-core Atom (both nettop and netbook models), an Arrandale ULV laptop, a couple ION equipped models, AMD’s Nile and Danube platforms, and even the 2010 MacBook Pro 13 running Windows 7 (note that this is the same as the current MacBook, only with a better LCD and chassis).

The E-350 systems post numbers that are relatively close, though not quite as close as we would have guessed. The PCMark results do more HDD related tests, so a difference there isn’t as surprising. We see the 7200RPM drives in the HP and MSI systems push ahead of the Sony; Vantage is more particular about your storage, representing an updated suite that’s more indicative of modern OS performance, so it looks like the 500GB Seagate 7200.4 beats the 320GB Western Digital Black. In PCMark05, though, WD turns the tables and the HP is back in the lead. Cinebench is nearly a pure CPU test, so seeing the MSI and HP leading the Sony by as much as 10% is a bit of a surprise. Oh, but wait... the Sony has a 32-bit version of Windows 7 on there, which can easily account for the PCMark Vantage and Cinebench results (two tests where we normally use 64-bit executables). x264 encoding is also heavily dependent on the CPU, particularly the second pass, but again we see variance with the MSI taking an 8-9% lead over the other two E-350 laptops. Still, even a 10% lead isn’t going to be particularly noticeable in day-to-day use.

When we start comparing E-350 with other platforms, things get interesting. Atom is clearly drawing the short stick, with the single-core variants placing at the bottom of our application performance charts. Dual-core Atom doesn’t fare much better, as even in heavily-threaded workloads like Cinebench SMP the E-350 is still faster, though x264 encoding is one area where the 330 and D525 manage to take a slight lead—it’s close enough to call it a draw, really. In single-threaded apps, though, all those extra cores go to waste and E-350’s Out of Order execution engine manages roughly double the performance of Atom. So, as far as Atom goes, even with ION the AMD E-350 is a superior platform—let’s not even bother with the 3DMark results.

Shift to CULV and things start to get a bit more difficult. CPU performance is in favor of the dual-core SU7300 across the board (PCMark05 factors in a decent amount of GPU performance, so toss out the 10% lead for Brazos there). PCMark Vantage puts the SU7300 almost 30% ahead of the E-350, though in turn Brazos leads the single-core SU3500 by a similar 35% margin. The other CPU tests give SU7300 a lead of anywhere from 28 to 38% over E-350, so the lead is pretty consistent. The single-core CULV actually leads in the single-threaded Cinebench result (not too surprising), but in multi-threaded tests the E-350 is anywhere from 30 to 70% faster. The problem with CULV is that you’re typically stuck with Intel’s GMA 4500MHD graphics; they’re enough for basic video decoding and Windows work, but in graphics the HD 6310 is three to four times as fast. We ran the Firefox 4 Beta/RC on both platforms, and it performed quite nicely on the E-350. While there’s no denying the fact that CULV is a faster CPU, as a platform we give the edge to E-350, especially when priced like the HP dm1z.

Comparing AMD’s Brazos to the recent Nile and Danube platforms, the story is similar to CULV: better CPU performance for the older platforms, but better graphics performance for Brazos. The K625 is anywhere from 30 to 50% faster than E-350, and the Phenom II N660 widens the gap to 60% to over 200% faster—yeah, that 3.0GHz core clock with a faster CPU architecture will get you there—but unlike CULV the battery life proposition isn’t all that compelling with Nile and Danube. Even with the CPU deficit, E-350 posts 3DMark results that are 30 to 115% higher than the K625 + HD4225; the lead over the faster N660 + HD4250 ranges from a scant 4% to as much as 62% depending on which 3DMark you look at.

Finally, let’s look at some of the newer and faster options with better graphics. The MacBook is twice as expensive as the HP dm1z, it’s also 50 to 150% faster in CPU/application performance. In the graphics tests, the 320M with P8600 is roughly twice the performance of the E-350. While we can certainly recommend the HP dm1 as an alternative, the higher priced Sony and MSI start to look very questionable. Arrandale ULV paired with a G 310M is likewise a better performing platform in every test. It provides 50 to 80% more CPU performance, and it also leads by 30 to 60% in 3DMark.

While perhaps the ASUS UL80Jt price is too high to be in direct competition, with Sandy Bridge now starting to show up we expect to see discounted Arrandale laptops for the next six months. One example of this is the recently launched ASUS U31Jg-A1; for $700 you get a Core i3-380M and NVIDIA GT 415M, plus NVIDIA’s Optimus Technology and the U-series’ 84Wh battery standard. If you can afford the extra $200 (40% higher price), and you’re not interested in an 11.6” chassis, such laptops are really going to put the squeeze on Brazos E-350. With a lower price than the MSI X350 (and presumably X370), we can’t come up with a single reason why anyone would skip the U31Jg and instead go for the MSI.

What About the Games?

Our HP dm1z review already covered gaming, so we’ll start with a retread of the current status quo for modern games. While the 3DMark results on the previous page may be somewhat useful, they’re no replacement for real games. First up is our usual suite of eight titles from the last year or so, many with support for advanced rendering features like DX11. While the HD 6310M does technically support DX11, so far we haven’t found any games where the feature is beneficial, as performance is too slow with it enabled.

Here are the minimum detail performance results for our test laptops, compared to a recent selection of other laptops. We have everything from Arrandale’s HD Graphics and Sandy Bridge’s HD 3000 Graphics to discrete GPUs like the GT 335M and HD 5650. We’ve also got AMD’s older IGPs (HD 4225 and HD 4250) for comparison, and the MacBook’s 320M thrown in for good measure. This isn’t going to be very pretty….

So running at the native 1366x768 found on so many consumer laptops today, the E-350 manages to break 30FPS in exactly zero out of eight games. Ouch. Scores from all the E-350 laptops are close enough that we won’t worry about it too much—the biggest gap is the dm1z lead of 19% in SC2, while there’s also an MSI X370 lead of 15% in DiRT 2; the other titles are single-digit percentage differences. E-350 does manage to beat the HD4250 and HD4225 laptops in every game, with the exception of StarCraft II where the CPU bottleneck is bigger than the GPU bottleneck at minimum details. E-350 is also generally faster than Atom + ION, but ION does lead in ME2 and Stalker. Another interesting comparison is the Dell E6410 with Intel’s HD Graphics; we’re looking at a CPU that’s easily twice as fast as E-350, but with a slightly slower IGP. The result is that (similar to the HD4250 with P660) the only case where E-350 loses in terms of gaming potential is StarCraft II, and even there HD Graphics is only 14% faster.

Move up into the next category of performance, though, and HD 6310M can’t compete. Sandy Bridge is faster than Arrandale, with roughly double the IGP performance, so the high-end i7-2820QM has an easy lead over E-350. Going off the numbers of the newer MacBook Pro 13, the dual-core Sandy Bridge models will be a bit slower than the quad-core in terms of GPU performance, but still 35 to 120% faster than E-350. More importantly, the dual-core SNB managed to break 30FPS in six out of eight titles. (Vivek didn’t test Mafia II or Metro 2033, but you really need a discrete GPU to come anywhere near playability in those games.) Similarly, the 2010 MacBook/MacBook Pro 13 is much faster than E-350, posting frame rates that are 63 to 150% higher. We hardly even need to mention discrete GPUs like the HD 5650, but we will: it’s up to 260% faster with a P520 CPU, and 315% faster with the i7-640M.

It would be interesting to see just how far the HD 6310 could go if it were untethered from the Bobcat core. Ultimately, once Llano launches in a few months it won’t matter, but for now many modern titles need something more than the current AMD IGP. But what about older games? You asked, and I’ve been pulling out a bunch of older stuff to put the E-350 through its paces….

Gaming, Circa 2006

I’m still in the process of benchmarking other test systems, and it will probably be a couple of weeks, but I have nearly completed testing of 23 older/less-demanding games running on the E-350. I also tossed in a few titles that are neither old nor undemanding, like Civ5. All of the reported figures are generally from “Low” detail settings, though a few games have slightly modified settings. I also tested many of the titles at slightly higher quality settings to see what would happen. The table below summarizes the performance.

AMD E-350 Performance in Older Games
Title	Detail Setting	E-350 FPS	Notes
Batman: Arkham Asylum	Low	29	Sluggish at times and appears mostly CPU limited; anything more than "Medium" is out of the question.
Battlefield 2	Low	50.8	Easily playable at Medium detail as well with >30FPS.
Civilization IV	Medium	27	The game is playable and cursor input is separate from the frame rate; however, CPU performance can make later turns in large games take a long time.
Civilization V	Minimum, DX9/DX11	9.0/11.8	Even at minimum detail, performance is pretty bad, although DX11 outperforms DX9 at minimum detail. Like several other games in our list, mouse input is handled separately from frame rates, so technically the game is playable. The opening video also stutters and has issues, but it can play back fine in Windows Media Player. Given the slow CPU and GPU performance in this title, I'd recommend skipping this on Brazos.
Company of Heroes	Low	44	Average frame rates are good, but performance can drop into the low teens at times.
Crysis: Warhead	Minimum	21.6	There's nothing to do for Crysis; it's too much for E-350.
Fallout 3	Low	32.9	Minimum frame rates can drop into the 20s, but in general the game is playable.
Far Cry	Low	49.6	Definitely playable; Medium detail still averages nearly 40FPS.
Far Cry 2	Low	21.3	Even at minimum detail, FC2 runs poorly on E-350.
F.E.A.R.	Minimum	100	Minimum frame rates were 40; you can definitely increase detail levels.
Half-Life 2	Low	31.9	This is one of the demanding sections (the Strider battle in City 17); elsewhere the game runs faster and is very playable.
Half-Life 2: Episode Two	Low	26.8	Episode Two is also playable, but as indicated here you'll get some choppiness in some areas.
League of Legends	Low	21.7	22FPS may seem low, but the game is playable since mouse input is separate from the frame rate; too slow for competitive players.
Minecraft	Far + Fast	22.5	This is an outdoor test where frame rates were low. Mining, you see performance into the 60+ FPS range. Drop the view distance to "Normal" and you basically double the frame rate.
Need for Speed: World	Low	33.5	You get periodic hiccups where the frame rate will drop severely; this seems to be server related, though, and most of the time you'll get 30+ FPS and can definitely play the game.
Oblivion	Low	20.2	Ultra Low settings will improve performance but look really poor. This is an outdoor area with lots of trees, and even at 20FPS Oblivion is manageable.
Quake 4	Low	57.3	No problems at low detail, as Q4 is one of the first id games to support SMP; at higher settings it still breaks 30FPS.
STALKER: SoC	Static + Min	53.2	Turn off static lighting and performance plummets into the 20s.
Supreme Commander	Low	12.6	Far too CPU intensive to run on the E-350/Bobcat core.
Team Fortress 2	Low	37.8	Even at maximum detail, performance didn’t change. This may be a driver bug, but you can at least play TF2 casually.
Torchlight	Netbook	45.7	Netbook mode runs great; at maximum detail without AA, you'll still get 22FPS, so somewhere in between minimum and maximum detail is the sweet spot.
Unreal Tournament 3	Low	29.7	UT3 is too demanding on the CPU for competitive play, but you can game casually. You'd want to go for UT2K4 for optimal performance from an Unreal Tournament game.
World of Warcraft	Fair	49.6	I played through level 25 without trouble; even with Fair settings and maximum view distance I didn't have any problems. I can't speak to the performance in later raids, but casual players should be fine.

You can see the results of testing a broader selection of games are about as expected. Unreal Engine has always been a bit harder on the CPU than the GPU, so performance is lower than other games of that era. Quake 4 is the other side of the spectrum: it wants more GPU memory bandwidth than CPU performance, and the E-350 delivers enough to make everything besides anti-aliasing viable (at least for single-player). Several of the titles have somewhat low frame rates, but they’re still enjoyable because of the way the game is designed. Both Civilization games fall into this category, along with League of Legends.

Out of the 23 titles tested above, only three are definitely not playable at native resolution: Crysis, Far Cry 2, and Supreme Commander. [Update: Civ5 should probably be skipped as well.] The former two are somewhat newer titles, but I had requests to run them so that’s why they’re in the list. (Dropping to 800x600 might bring performance up to 30FPS, but I doubt many users are really interested in going that route as there are plenty of other options.)

Overall, gaming in the 2006 and earlier era is very doable on E-350, and you can even play some recent less-demanding games. Need for Speed: World for instance ran well enough that I played it for a few hours without any serious complaints—network lag was a bigger problem than frame rates. If you’re looking for gaming options, you might consider checking out the March issue of PC Gamer where they list their top 100 games of all time. At a quick glance, I’d say at least 80% of the games they listed would run well enough on E-350 to be enjoyable.

Battery Life: Great for Portability

Our initial E-350 laptop review proved that Brazos is a viable option as an all-day computing device. The two newcomers reinforce this finding, although battery capacities mean the HP dm1z is generally the better option. MSI sent both a 32Wh and 64Wh battery, and we tested with both to show the difference. Contrary to what you might expect, the 64Wh battery actually more than doubles battery life, suggesting the cells may be higher quality than in the 4-cell option.

With the 8-cell battery, the X370 lasts just slightly longer than the HP dm1z. The combination of a slightly higher capacity battery with a larger LCD makes it a wash in terms of battery life, but if you have to pay an extra $150 to upgrade to the 8-cell (leaving you with a spare battery that might not see much use) the HP is clearly the better buy. Drop to the 4-cell battery and the HP offers slightly more than twice the battery life.

Sony proved with their EE34 that they know how to tune for better battery life; that particular laptop shipped with a smaller battery and still managed to run longer than other AMD K10.5 systems. So how does the Sony YB fare? It does reasonably well, but the capacity is a concern. There’s again a smaller-than-normal 38Wh battery, which is still better than MSI’s 32Wh default but not up to the 55Wh in the HP. Even with a 45% higher battery capacity, though, HP’s dm1z doesn’t always outlast the YB by a similar margin. The best result is in our Internet test, where it does come out 48% ahead of the YB. Our H.264 playback test has the lead drop to 21%, and in the idle battery life test the margin is only 12%. Sony is clearly ahead in some areas of power management; now all we need is improved Internet battery life and higher capacity batteries (as stock options rather than $250 upgrades).

We ran a few other tests of battery metrics on the MSI X370 to give you an idea of how it fares. Somewhat surprisingly, battery life while gaming (looping 3DMark03 and 3DMark06—the latter used slightly more power) was only slightly worse than the H.264 playback test. We measured 270 minutes in 3D03 and 255 minutes in 3D06 with the 8-cell battery. Cranking the backlight intensity to maximum dropped the Internet battery life result from 201 to 164 minutes; put another way, that works out to an increase power draw of around 2.2W—about a 23% increase for the Internet test, 27% increase at idle, and only a 15% increase in H.264 decoding.

Recharge times for the MSI X370 are pretty long at 141 minutes for the 32Wh and 286 minutes for the 64Wh battery; the charging circuit is the limiting factor here, as even with the laptop off (so it’s not putting a load on the power adapter) we measured power draw at the wall of just 18W. It’s a 40W adapter, and even under full load we never came anywhere near the AC adapter limits: powered on, recharging, and running the SMP Cinebench test we still only registered 39W at the outlet, and accounting for efficiency (we guessed 85%, which is generous) that means the 40W adapter should have at least 7W of headroom remaining. At least that means the recharge times are consistent albeit slow.

So far, a highly optimized Atom netbook like the ASUS 1001P still offers superior battery life, but it comes with a hefty toll in performance. Other Atom netbooks like HP’s 5102 and 5103 don’t do nearly as well, with E-350 actually surpassing them in relative battery life. In general, Brazos offers better than ION battery life, better than ION performance (helped by the CPU), and a similar cost, making it the better choice as a balanced netbook/ultraportable platform.

Temperatures: Bigger Doesn't Mean Cooler

MSI X370 HWMonitor

Sony VAIO YB HWMonitor

Interesting to note is that HWMonitor doesn't pick up anything beyond the chassis, HDD, and GPU on the Sony VAIO. On the MSI, we get those same areas along with the usual battery report. Despite having a 13.3"-screen chassis, the X370 actually has higher temperatures on the CPU, GPU, and HDD. The reason for that is pretty simple: the single fan near the front of the MSI chassis doesn't have much in the way of good intake or exhaust vents. Even though it runs hotter, it's also far from being a concern, with surface temperatures rarely breaking 30C.

Noise levels are pretty consistent on the X370 as well, with the fan somewhat audible but not particularly loud. We measured 32dB idle and a slightly higher 35dB under load. Unfortunately, Dustin doesn't have the same testing equipment or environment so he can't reliably measure anything below 40dB right now. Subjectively, the VAIO also runs reasonably quiet and never got annoyingly loud.

And Then We Have the LCDs…

We can count the number of inexpensive netbooks/ultraportables with high quality displays that we’ve tested on one hand: ASUS 1001P, ASUS 1005HA, and if you want to stretch things a bit, the MacBook Pro 13. Everything else ranges from average to poor, and the MSI and Sony laptops we’re looking at today definitely come closer to “poor” than “average”. If you’ve never felt hampered by laptop display quality, it won’t matter, but if you’re hoping for something better just move along.

MSI X370 Gamut

Sony VAIO YB Gamut

Sony actually does slightly better than the other two E-350 laptops in contrast ratio, but that’s about as good as it gets. HP wins for raw maximum brightness, still falling short of 300 nits (cd/m²); MSI is the second brightest and Sony is third, so despite the higher contrast it comes at the cost of outdoor usability. Given the portable nature of these laptops, we’d really like to see backlight intensity closer to the 400 nits posted by the MacBook Pro 13—yes, it will reduce battery life, but if you’re at a park (i.e. outdoors) that’s a fair tradeoff. Color gamut and accuracy are all poor across the three Brazos laptops: 40-43% gamut and 2.6 to 2.9 Delta E (after calibration!) will not win any fans around here. When you have companies like ASUS saying they’ll put IPS panels in $400 tablets, we’re not sure how much more it would cost to go from junk panels to something decent, but it can’t be more than $50. Please, make it happen.

Two More Brazos Laptops, but Only One Winner

If you feel like we’ve mentioned the HP dm1z a few too many times throughout this review, there’s a good reason for it. HP came in and set a high bar for other Brazos laptops to clear, and frankly both the MSI and Sony offerings fall short. We awarded the dm1z our Silver Editors’ Choice award, and that still stands. The only area where we really want something better on the HP is the display; put in another $50 towards a higher contrast LCD and it would go for an even $500, which would put it $100 less than the Sony YB and potentially $250 less than the MSI X370. All of the Brazos laptops we've tested are also present in Mobile Bench if you're looking for another way to compare performance. Need we say more? Probably not, but we will….

Starting with the Sony, the VAIO YB isn't necessarily a bad netbook/ultraportable/notbook (take your pick among the three terms), but it's grossly overshadowed by HP's dm1z. The dm1z is more attractive, more comfortable to use, and runs longer on the battery to boot. For all that, it's also at least $150 cheaper than the YB if you're ordering directly from the manufacturer. What do you get for your extra $150? 1GB more of DDR3 and 180GB more storage capacity. Even those benefits are dampened by Sony's choice to use 32-bit Windows 7 instead of 64-bit, a slower 5400RPM hard drive instead of the workable 7200RPM in HP's offering, and a smaller battery. We can see why AMD sent us the YB because on the whole it sends a stronger message than sending us a dm1z would; HP's been offering AMD notebooks since time immemorial and was even first on the bandwagon way back with the promising-in-theory-but-lacking-in-execution Congo platform.

If the dm1z didn't exist or at least wasn't an unusually strong design for HP, the YB would seem a lot better and could justify itself. The problem is that the dm1z does exist, the YB is not in a vacuum, and ultimately it is impossible to justify: the dm1z is directly superior on virtually every front. The only places it's lacking are in hard drive capacity and memory size, but the money you save could easily be spent to upgrade those and you would still come out ahead.

MSI’s X370 is in a different boat. As a 13.3” ultraportable, there’s certainly a case to be made for getting a slightly larger display and chassis. However, all that falls apart if the price isn’t right. We don’t have an official price on the X370, and it may never come to the North American market, but in the past MSI’s X-series has been grossly overpriced. Let’s hope MSI will listen to reason, because at $550 we’d certainly be happy to recommend the X370 as an alternative to the HP. Our engineering sample came with 4GB RAM and a 500GB 7200RPM hard drive, which means you shouldn’t need to upgrade either area short of a component failure (or a desire for an SSD). If the X370 had an industrial design akin to the MacBook Air 13, then perhaps we could justify a $750 MSRP; unfortunately, it doesn’t—not even close! Difficulties with the touchpad buttons aside (again, it’s an engineering sample), the all-plastic shell with glossy exterior is on par with what we see from budget laptops from Acer. There’s nothing inherently wrong with building a budget laptop, because certainly people are going to be happier paying $500 than $800 (or $350 instead of $500), but you can’t charge champagne prices for Pabst Blue Ribbon.

Going back to the Brazos platform, AMD has delivered what we wanted from Atom about 18 months ago. The E-350 can handle movies, web browsing, office work, and even light gaming far better than any stock Atom. Even Atom with ION fails to surpass the E-350 in most regards, and the tightly integrated Brazos platform comes off a winner. We’re still working to put together a roundup of low-power/budget platforms using budget SSDs as a follow-up to our E-350 reviews, and we’ve also got a C-50 based netbook review in the works. We should have the latter soon enough, but really the only areas C-50 wins out over E-350 are in size and price (and perhaps battery life). But with a starting price of just $330, those are important metrics, so stay tuned to see just how well C-50 competes with the more expensive Brazos and Atom offerings.