ACi Centurion

Getting in the ring with the big corporates is a brave move for any small company, but ACi has donned the boxing gloves ready to make a damn good fist of it. Producing a Centrino notebook with Radeon Mobility 9000 graphics for £1,249 is fighting talk, and with a name like Centurion it could do some serious damage too.

Okay, so it's only got a 1.3GHz processor, but thanks to the Pentium-M's superb architecture the Centurion is still a surprisingly fast machine. With an overall 2D benchmark score of 1.17, it even outperformed the 2.4GHz Pentium 4-M-based Dell Inspiron 8500, and the battery lasted a lot longer too. Even under our intensive test, the Centurion only gave out after more than two hours, and it lasted almost four and a half hours under light use. It's not up there with the Toshiba Tecra M1, but it's close.

It just goes to show that you don't need ridiculous clock speeds to make an efficient notebook; in fact, you probably need the opposite. The Pentium-M is a great way to keep costs down and everything else up, and the Centurion is also kitted out with all the Intel goodies needed to get the Centrino badge on the chassis, so you've got an Intel motherboard chipset and 802.11b WLAN adaptor too.

The other bonus of the Pentium-M is its minimal cooling requirements, which means you can pack some serious power into a much thinner chassis. This is why the Centurion is only 33mm thick, compared with the Dell's 39mm, and at 2.9kg it's much lighter too.

The build quality is also better than the Dell's, which suffers from a flimsier plastic casing that sags when you lean on the palmrests. In contrast, the Centurion's palmrests feel sturdy and solid. The keyboard is also comfortable to type on, and the sensibly sized translucent plastic keys look pretty good too. However, it also tends to dip slightly when you're typing, so it's not ideal for budding novelists.

A stylish aluminium strip surrounds the keyboard and touchpad, but close the lid and you're in for a bit of a surprise. You normally expect to see a metallic blue-grey or black finish on the lid, but ACi has defied expectations with a pastel shade of duck-egg blue. The colour won't be to everyone's taste, but ACi is offering free corporate imaging for a limited period, which means you can have your own design printed on to the lid. Constructed from aluminium, the lid is solid enough too, although there's still a little bit of flex that you wouldn't get from a magnesium alloy lid.

As with the ACi Impression (see issue 96, p111), the Centurion's port layout has been well thought out, with the WLAN switch, infrared port and audio jacks mounted on the left, along with an easy-access USB 2 port - great for quickly plugging in a thumb drive. Two further USB 2 ports can be found on the back, along with a four-pin FireWire port, an S-Video out and the faithful old parallel port.

There's even an SD card slot hidden underneath the PC Card slot, which is good news for digital camera users, as long as your camera takes SD media. The rest of the specifications are equally impressive. A 40GB hard disk will provide you with plenty of storage space, 512MB of PC2100 DDR memory is more than enough for your average notebook, the combo drive has an impressive CD-RW speed of 24x/10x/24x, and the ATi Radeon Mobility 9000 is second only to the new Nvidia GeForce4 4200 Go found in the Dell Inspiron 8500.

While the Dell is undoubtedly the 3D king of notebooks, the ACi still offers amazing performance for the money. With a 3DMark2001 SE score of 7,223 it's even faster than the Acer TravelMate 800 (see issue 103, p58), and with DirectX 8.1-level Pixel and Vertex Shaders it will cope adequately with modern games like Unreal II as well.