Hi-Grade Notino M300

The Notino M300 from Hi-Grade is a Centrino with a difference. Behind the butterfly logo sits the recently released Celeron-M processor. To lower costs, Intel has taken the Pentium-M and reduced the amount of expensive on-die cache. In this case, there's 512KB of Level 2 cache, against the 1MB of the Pentium-M; otherwise, it's identical.

This price saving enables Hi-Grade to offer a notebook based around a 1.3GHz version of the chip for an impressively low £739. Overall, it performed well in our benchmarks, scoring 0.94. As we'd expect, multimedia encoding and graphics performance suffered a little, but we had no complaints during general use.

Elsewhere, Hi-Grade has opted for somewhat functional specifications. The 15in screen runs at a pedestrian 1,024 x 768, leaving little room for manoeuvre with multiple windows, but it benefits from reasonable brightness. As on the majority of notebook TFTs, viewing angles are nothing to write home about, particularly in the vertical plane, but the poor contrast is more of a problem - for example, light greys merge with white. It's perfectly usable for everyday tasks, though.

Should you wish to take advantage of the combo drive for the occasional movie, it will handle the job reasonably too, with few distracting artefacts and an acceptable amount of motion lag. But forget about 3D gaming: with Intel's 855GM graphics chipset in place, the Notino only managed 2,159 in 3DMark2001 SE.

There are also signs of penny watching with the keyboard. The spongy dip in the centre is distracting, although the good key depth and sensible layout make up for it to a point. The rest of the build quality is thankfully of sterner stuff, with the screen in particular enjoying robust protection from the sturdy lid.

The chassis itself includes a parallel connector at the back, alongside an infrared port and two USB 2 ports. Aside from FireWire and a Type II PC Card slot, that's about it. It's enough for most situations, but we'd like to see more USB ports. The usual contingent of 10/100 Ethernet and V.90 modem join the built-in WLAN.

Battery life fell in line with our expectations of Centrino machines, achieving 216 minutes in our light-use test, and dropping down to just over two hours under intense processing conditions. Portability is also helped by its 2.85kg weight and a relatively streamlined chassis.

The savings made with the processor make the Notino great value, even if the lacklustre keyboard and mouse mean we can't wholly recommend it. Nevertheless, if your priorities are mobility and price, the Hi-Grade is the best choice around.

Author: Ross Burridge