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We also expect Intel to deliver an improvement on the Atom netbooks soon!
Their Atom with on chip memory controller and integrated graphics card will reduce power consumption (by a watt or 5 or so), and will probably outperform the Atom with Intel GMA chipset (That is, if separate paths are chosen for the video data to be relayed from the CPU to the IGP).
If the videodata from CPU to GPU still passes the FSB, there might actually be a decrease in performance. Ofcourse, intel knows, and is not planning on bringing an even worse performing product than the Atom to the market.
And it would be nice to compare it to the ION platform indeed!
Most likely Intel's Atom processor with IGP will deliver near to ION performance, while keeping the powerconsumption of the whole system down by at around 3 to 5 Watts less (which is a rough guess).
Ofcourse, it'll depend if Intel spend enough thought on the newer processor.
Their Atom with on chip memory controller and integrated graphics card will reduce power consumption (by a watt or 5 or so), and will probably outperform the Atom with Intel GMA chipset (That is, if separate paths are chosen for the video data to be relayed from the CPU to the IGP).
If the videodata from CPU to GPU still passes the FSB, there might actually be a decrease in performance. Ofcourse, intel knows, and is not planning on bringing an even worse performing product than the Atom to the market.
And it would be nice to compare it to the ION platform indeed!
Most likely Intel's Atom processor with IGP will deliver near to ION performance, while keeping the powerconsumption of the whole system down by at around 3 to 5 Watts less (which is a rough guess).
Ofcourse, it'll depend if Intel spend enough thought on the newer processor.
I like it. No too big on vista just for the spects but overall not too bad. I think the atis X1270 is slightly better than the intels x3100. The larger screen, higher res, and full size keyboard is key. I own an msi wind with win 7 and that alone would be a major upgrade.
Besides no 400 dollar laptop is going to weigh less than 3.5 lbs.
Besides no 400 dollar laptop is going to weigh less than 3.5 lbs.
anonymousdude
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- Jun 20, 2009
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This is completely awesome. HP sells a small notebook with a 12-inch screen using an Athlon Neo processor, they include an external DVD burner, but they charge about $700 for it. This Gateway takes the cake. If this is available at Best Buy, and they're doing upgrade vouchers to Windows 7 on any Vista-based computer purchase... that seals the deal.
bobdoleknows
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- Jun 24, 2009
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The argument of the HT Atom performing better that the single core Athlon isn't exactly accurate. Intel's Atom processor is the first Intel chip NOT supporting out-of-order processing since the original Pentium. The can seriously impact multitasking. Yes HT and DC Atoms will perform better in multi-threaded applications. I think you'll find for average user experience the Athlon will feel faster because it doesn't have to wait for one application to finish with the proc cycle. The Atom, however, will probably have better power management and run cooler. As far as this gateway goes, sign me up! Ditch Vista for XP, Mandriva or SLED and that would be one great little lappie.
anamaniac
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- Jan 7, 2009
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Looks nice so far. Might be happy as long as it easily supports 4gb of ram (with the pricing and availability of RAM these days, why not 4gb?).
I've heard that a 1.6ghz atom, with the clock efficiency in mind, is equal to the power of a 900mhz athlon. Would this hold true in this scenario? If so, I'm even more interested.
Plus this also looks decently sexy. Something I don't care about in a poerhouse PC, but I would take into mind for a laptop.
By the way... if I ever got this, Windows 7 home or ultimate would be on this, no questions asked. SE can be for the atom rigs...
I've heard that a 1.6ghz atom, with the clock efficiency in mind, is equal to the power of a 900mhz athlon. Would this hold true in this scenario? If so, I'm even more interested.
Plus this also looks decently sexy. Something I don't care about in a poerhouse PC, but I would take into mind for a laptop.
By the way... if I ever got this, Windows 7 home or ultimate would be on this, no questions asked. SE can be for the atom rigs...
paardengel
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- Apr 11, 2009
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I would probably buy this. Anyone have any idea how good the HD and regular video play back will be?
laweinhander
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- May 3, 2009
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I'm typing this from my new Gateway LT3103u. I walked into Best Buy earlier today and asked about it, they said they just received it in from the warehouse on Wednesday.
A few things about it: screen is 1366x768, which I find absolutely wonderful considering most netbooks have been 1024x600 until recently. The 2GB of RAM is one module, and there's only one slot. Most people probably don't want to spend $175 on a 4GB module when the whole computer cost $400. The 1.2GHz Athlon 64 does perform MUCH faster than any Atom I've ever used (I've got three friends with Atom-based netbooks and one has a Celeron-based, all of whom have upgraded to 2GB of RAM). Surprisingly to me, the hard drive in this unit is a standard 2.5" SATA drive. The keyboard is highly comfortable, and the touchpad is very responsive. I have relatively large hands, and the palmrest is pretty much perfect in design.
I think anybody looking at buying a netbook should look into this one. Seriously. I'm copying all my music and documents onto its hard drive at the moment, and when that's done I'm going to pop in a different hard drive and throw 64-bit Win7 at it to see how that runs. I will report back in a few hours.
A few things about it: screen is 1366x768, which I find absolutely wonderful considering most netbooks have been 1024x600 until recently. The 2GB of RAM is one module, and there's only one slot. Most people probably don't want to spend $175 on a 4GB module when the whole computer cost $400. The 1.2GHz Athlon 64 does perform MUCH faster than any Atom I've ever used (I've got three friends with Atom-based netbooks and one has a Celeron-based, all of whom have upgraded to 2GB of RAM). Surprisingly to me, the hard drive in this unit is a standard 2.5" SATA drive. The keyboard is highly comfortable, and the touchpad is very responsive. I have relatively large hands, and the palmrest is pretty much perfect in design.
I think anybody looking at buying a netbook should look into this one. Seriously. I'm copying all my music and documents onto its hard drive at the moment, and when that's done I'm going to pop in a different hard drive and throw 64-bit Win7 at it to see how that runs. I will report back in a few hours.
Well, I am not a great fan of the netbook genre, but when I saw the Gateway LT3103u sporting an AMD Athlon 64 instead of the usual Intel Atom I thought it had to be worth a shot, I need a small format notebook and with the 11.6” screen and 2GB of RAM it seemed to fit the bill quite nicely, so off I trot to Best Buy (not exactly my favourite store) and put down my $400 and walked away with what I am now convinced was a serious bargain. First thing to do was scrap all the apps that come with it (Norton and MS Office) , easy to clear them up and leaving me with a reasonably clean install for all my apps. After removing the apps and going through the obligatory upgrade and restart were off and running.
So what apps can this thing run, first thing up was Open office, why? Because it’s free, quickly followed by Nmap, a must for everyone in my opinion, as they both performed remarkably well I thought I would push the boundariess a little further, Nessus slipped in next and a quick scan ran nicely, nowOKk, this thing is not breaking any speed records, but as a $400 netbook (I think sub-notebook would be a better description) it does it’s job very nicely.
Well so far so good, so I look through my list of essential/favourite apps and up comes VMWare server, I run a Backtrack image and couple of bare linux images for various tasks, can this little baby run VMWare server? Hell yes it can, again, no speed records but it chews through 512MB Backtrack Image no problem whatsoever, running two images at the same time is to slow (for my tastes at least although it did load both) but the single image ran well and was very usable.
So what about the hardware, the keyboard is flat, not my favourite sort of keyboard, it tends to feel a little cramped but I can live with it, the wireless worked right off the bat, I would be surprised if it did not, the screen is very nice, at 1366x768 this screen is sharp and easily readable, a little fade at the angles but again, nicely done. My only complaint is the mouse-pad, yeah OK it’s a small thing but I hate the single button rockers, two separate buttons would not have broken the bank, maybe not as fancy looking but certainly more functional. Still testing out the battery life so I wont comment on that for now, but all in all this is an exceptionally portable, well produced (even if the flat keyboard does feel cheap) little number, certainly easier to lug around than the laptop, and with enough power to provide a useful tool, I think Gateway has done us a service by providing a netbook with a kick, the Athlon64 may be old in the tooth but in a netbook it’s a real nice CPU.
I would seriously recommend this to anyone thinking of buying a netbook.
So what apps can this thing run, first thing up was Open office, why? Because it’s free, quickly followed by Nmap, a must for everyone in my opinion, as they both performed remarkably well I thought I would push the boundariess a little further, Nessus slipped in next and a quick scan ran nicely, nowOKk, this thing is not breaking any speed records, but as a $400 netbook (I think sub-notebook would be a better description) it does it’s job very nicely.
Well so far so good, so I look through my list of essential/favourite apps and up comes VMWare server, I run a Backtrack image and couple of bare linux images for various tasks, can this little baby run VMWare server? Hell yes it can, again, no speed records but it chews through 512MB Backtrack Image no problem whatsoever, running two images at the same time is to slow (for my tastes at least although it did load both) but the single image ran well and was very usable.
So what about the hardware, the keyboard is flat, not my favourite sort of keyboard, it tends to feel a little cramped but I can live with it, the wireless worked right off the bat, I would be surprised if it did not, the screen is very nice, at 1366x768 this screen is sharp and easily readable, a little fade at the angles but again, nicely done. My only complaint is the mouse-pad, yeah OK it’s a small thing but I hate the single button rockers, two separate buttons would not have broken the bank, maybe not as fancy looking but certainly more functional. Still testing out the battery life so I wont comment on that for now, but all in all this is an exceptionally portable, well produced (even if the flat keyboard does feel cheap) little number, certainly easier to lug around than the laptop, and with enough power to provide a useful tool, I think Gateway has done us a service by providing a netbook with a kick, the Athlon64 may be old in the tooth but in a netbook it’s a real nice CPU.
I would seriously recommend this to anyone thinking of buying a netbook.
As an update, with a heavy load (copying a series of large files - approx 2GB each, playing music, surfing, running a network scan using nessus and typing) you seem to get around 3:45 to 4 hours, and it can handle that no problem. I did try to play a movie on it, the image quality is really good, however there is noticeable stutter, so it's safe to say playing videos is unlikely (this was using an MPEG4 movie in iTunes). Music playback with some decent headphones is really nice. For general work it's a nice system, guess I will have to keep the iTouch for movies though.
I purchased the netbook last Sunday so I have had a few days to work/play with it. Keep in mind that this replaced a 9in Acer Aspire One with XP and Jaunty dual boot and my main system is a Mac.
Like jstall I removed norton and msoffice and installed many of the same applications. Even so I thought Vista was a bit sluggish to start. I have no idea what all the hard drive thrashing is for the first few minutes after a boot (superfetch maybe?). I disabled indexing (took over an hour btw) and tablet input as my only tweaks so far. Once its up and running it is snappy. Hulu at "low res" stutters at full screen even when plugged into the mains (full performance) in Vista-I havent tried in Ubuntu yet.
I installed Jaunty through Wubi since I wasnt sure how the ATI video would fare with the open source driver, however, it works fine for me. I did need to install the linux-backport modules for the wireless to work. Havent tried the card reader since I dont use it and since its installed through wubi I cant test hibernate. Jaunty looks gorgeous on the screen. It really does have a beautiful display. One disappointment was that CPU scaling doesnt seem to be supported and Jaunty chews through the batter pretty quick (linux isnt known for the best power management to begin with). Jaunty is fast on this machine but how much of that is due to the processor maxed all the time I cant say. Either way its a very fast linux machine if you dont need more than 2:30 minutes of battery life. I wish Vista were as snappy and quick.
A few things that differentiate it from some of the other netbooks I have owned. Booting from a USB requires changing the bootorder in the bios as far as I can tell. That was a big disappointment. The Pheonix bios is very, very limited. No cool and quiet setting (is that still used anymore?) etc. Setting he boot order, security, and a few other things are about all you get AFAIK. Hopefully Gateway/Acer will come out with vastly improved bios we can flash on.
Overall, my impressions are mixed but I am happy with it until the genre matures a bit more. I miss the long battery life of my AAO but will trade it for the larger screen and improved system performance. I would like to boot from USB since I am a bit of a linux junkie and enjoy tweaking several distros. Vista ... Vista.... I torn. I dont particularly care for it and it seems to take a long time to get going... but when it does it is acceptable.
Like jstall I removed norton and msoffice and installed many of the same applications. Even so I thought Vista was a bit sluggish to start. I have no idea what all the hard drive thrashing is for the first few minutes after a boot (superfetch maybe?). I disabled indexing (took over an hour btw) and tablet input as my only tweaks so far. Once its up and running it is snappy. Hulu at "low res" stutters at full screen even when plugged into the mains (full performance) in Vista-I havent tried in Ubuntu yet.
I installed Jaunty through Wubi since I wasnt sure how the ATI video would fare with the open source driver, however, it works fine for me. I did need to install the linux-backport modules for the wireless to work. Havent tried the card reader since I dont use it and since its installed through wubi I cant test hibernate. Jaunty looks gorgeous on the screen. It really does have a beautiful display. One disappointment was that CPU scaling doesnt seem to be supported and Jaunty chews through the batter pretty quick (linux isnt known for the best power management to begin with). Jaunty is fast on this machine but how much of that is due to the processor maxed all the time I cant say. Either way its a very fast linux machine if you dont need more than 2:30 minutes of battery life. I wish Vista were as snappy and quick.
A few things that differentiate it from some of the other netbooks I have owned. Booting from a USB requires changing the bootorder in the bios as far as I can tell. That was a big disappointment. The Pheonix bios is very, very limited. No cool and quiet setting (is that still used anymore?) etc. Setting he boot order, security, and a few other things are about all you get AFAIK. Hopefully Gateway/Acer will come out with vastly improved bios we can flash on.
Overall, my impressions are mixed but I am happy with it until the genre matures a bit more. I miss the long battery life of my AAO but will trade it for the larger screen and improved system performance. I would like to boot from USB since I am a bit of a linux junkie and enjoy tweaking several distros. Vista ... Vista.... I torn. I dont particularly care for it and it seems to take a long time to get going... but when it does it is acceptable.
Update. As I noted above I am not really a windoze user but have occasionally used XP that was preinstall on a aspire one. This netbook was my first experience with Vista and I think it seriously adversely impacted my review. Installed the windows 7 RC and now I think this netbook is great! I miss linux but windows 7 is fine. It is responsive (even with an aero glass theme) and doesnt nag you non-stop like vista. Battery life is also somewhat improved! I even bought an upgrade version of win 7 for this computer at the special pre-release price (50US). First copy of windows I have purchased since 3.1!!
Win 7 upgraded painlessly (all drivers work) and I am very pleased with price/performance, beautiful screen, very acceptable battery life given the screen size and performance, keyboard, and responsive trackpad.
I agree with the others now.... this is currently the one to get.. just use the system recovery to back up the OS and drivers (you will need the driver dvd for win 7) and install Windows 7 RC.
Win 7 upgraded painlessly (all drivers work) and I am very pleased with price/performance, beautiful screen, very acceptable battery life given the screen size and performance, keyboard, and responsive trackpad.
I agree with the others now.... this is currently the one to get.. just use the system recovery to back up the OS and drivers (you will need the driver dvd for win 7) and install Windows 7 RC.
I am loving the specs of this netbook, also I was thinking that I'll but Windows Xp 64-bit on here that version of Windows XP added an hour of battery life to my laptop and is the most stable release of Windows I've ever worked with.
Hi I work at Best Buy and we have about 10 different netbooks in stock. The gateway came in about 4 weeks ago and from a sales perspective; we can't keep them in stock! Every return customer that Ive talked to has loved the speed of the unit. We keep it running all day and night and it rarely gets restarted. It's never crashed and the display (on for 12 hour a day) looks great. Itll be interesting now that Samsungs getting netbooks in stores. Everyone going to have them soon.
I loves the laptop capabilities with a small foot print.
I fly a lot to Asia and those 13 hours trip sap my LT3103U battery. Luckily I found a manufacturer that has the same capacity battery and another with 1.5 times that capacity at 7800 mAh. That's a whopping 8 hours use I got out of the 7800 mAh battery. I carry 2 of those everytime I go to Asia. Here's in case you in the same boat (I meant plane):
http://www.solartorrent.com/eCommerce/products.asp?cat=13
Make sure you cut your nails before tapping on the diminuitive keyboard of any netbook. However, the LT3103U, LT3114U already have larger keyboard and screen. I looking to buy yet another netbook with laptop full features, but will compromise without a DVD drive for weigth purposes.
I fly a lot to Asia and those 13 hours trip sap my LT3103U battery. Luckily I found a manufacturer that has the same capacity battery and another with 1.5 times that capacity at 7800 mAh. That's a whopping 8 hours use I got out of the 7800 mAh battery. I carry 2 of those everytime I go to Asia. Here's in case you in the same boat (I meant plane):
http://www.solartorrent.com/eCommerce/products.asp?cat=13
Make sure you cut your nails before tapping on the diminuitive keyboard of any netbook. However, the LT3103U, LT3114U already have larger keyboard and screen. I looking to buy yet another netbook with laptop full features, but will compromise without a DVD drive for weigth purposes.
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