Multivision Solus 1010 review

Mobile technology may be getting more and more powerful, but it's difficult to get excited about that kind of thing if you haven't got thousands of pounds to spare. Luckily, both Time and Multivision have become sympathetic to those on a tight budget, and have packed their latest affordable desktop replacements with powerful Athlon XP Mobile 2500+ processors at a fraction of the usual cost. So which one should you go for?

In terms of styling, neither is likely to cause passers-by to double-take, but at least Multivision has made an effort with its appealing black casing and silver trim. The Time, meanwhile, with its garish, plastic, bright-silver case looks more like a poor man's Apple PowerBook, although it feels slightly more solid than the Multivision.

But looks aren't everything, and both machines offer an impressive array of connectivity, including serial and parallel ports for those still using legacy peripherals. Both also sport four-pin FireWire, S-Video and infrared ports, as well as high-speed USB 2 ports, although the Time has four ports compared with the Multivision's two.

Ergonomically, both machines have sturdy keyboards, although the Time's keyboard is marginally more comfortable, being closer to the screen, and its mouse buttons feel more solid than the Multivision's non-indented plates too.

You'll also find 15in SXGA+ TFT screens on both notebooks, which are perfectly usable considering the price, although the Time's is slightly brighter and has better viewing angles.

So far, it's all fairly equal, but there was a clear winner when it came to performance. Despite their similar innards - 1.86GHz Athlon XP2500+ processors, 512MB of PC2100 DDR RAM and 60GB hard disks - the Multivision stormed the field. With an overall 2D benchmark score of 1.41, the Solus positively trounces our previously A-Listed value notebook, the Hi-Grade Notino 4400-1800 (see issue 101 page 66), which scored 0.86. However, considering how close the Time's and the Multivision's specifications were, we were disappointed by the Time's lowly score of 1.19.

A large reason for this is the graphics chipset. The Time uses the ferocious-sounding 32MB S3 Graphics ProSavageDDR, which in reality steals 32MB of memory from the system and struggles with any DirectDraw heavy work like our Excel tests. It also has snail-like 3D capabilities, so it was hardly surprising to see the woeful 3DMark2001 SE score of 624 in 32-bit XGA and a 7fps slide show in the Unreal Tournament 2003 demo.

In total contrast, Multivision's 64MB Mobility Radeon 9000 graphics chip not only boosted 2D performance, but also managed to achieve a very impressive 3DMark2001 SE score of 7,199 at the same resolution. What's more, Unreal Tournament 2003 ran at an extremely playable 89.36fps during the flyby demo and 52.16 during botmatch.

AMD's Athlon XP Mobile is certainly a top-performing chip, but this was never an issue for AMD; the bigger problem has always been battery life, and the new 2500+ shows no improvement. Both of these notebooks lasted for around one hour under heavy use, and all the tests were a fair way off what we've had from Pentium-M machines. However, the Multivision edged ahead in our light-use test, with 165 minutes over the Time's 135 minutes. It also had the upper hand in our DVD movie test - lasting a feature-friendly 105 minutes compared with the Time's impractical 87 minutes.

So, in terms of performance and battery life, the Solus is ahead of the Traveller by some considerable margin, but do the Time's extras make up for this? In a word - no. You get a mini-PCI 802.11b WLAN card in the Time, which is certainly good for the money, but the Time also costs £50 more (enough for a separate WLAN adaptor), and the rest of its specifications can't compete.