When we pulled the power cord to run on battery the screen became very dark indeed so we checked the extensive Vista power scheme settings and found that the screen was set to drop to about 20 per cent of maximum brightness. We increased the brightness to 50 per cent and re-ran the battery test and found that the battery life changed by an insignificant amount. In both cases, the PCMark05 figure was very low compared to the test results that we got on mains power.
Battery power test
Time in minutes
Longer bars are better
In particular, the CPU performance was much lower on battery so we checked the settings in Vista and found that the Balanced Scheme caps CPU performance at 75 per cent, which is reasonable enough. The High Power scheme allows 100 per cent CPU performance on battery, so we re-ran our tests and found that the performance didn't budge, and neither did the battery life. The significant thing is that the power scheme suggested that the laptop would deliver full performance while running on battery yet this clearly was not the case.
PCMark05 benchmark tests
Longer bars are better
We can only conclude that either the Bios or the 965 chipset is taking precedence over the settings in Vista to decide what sort of performance you should get when you're running on battery. We don't much like that and firmly believe that he who pays the piper should call the tune.
3DMark06 benchmark tests
Longer bars are better
Verdict
Evesham has delivered impressive latest-generation Centrino Duo power and a useful Media Centre laptop. However, we didn't much like the laptop's look, and we were also troubled by the disparity in performance when we used the machine on battery, even when we had all of the performance sliders set to max.
Evesham Zieo N500-HD 17in laptop
COMMENTS
Can't actually buy it though
I ordered one of these 4 weeks ago now. Why do companies insist on advertising stuff for sale that they don't actually have?! Recently I've been told that (at last) they have the parts but are now having 'driver issues'.
If you ain't got em and/or they don't work then don't try and flog me one!
Still, am looking forwards to getting my hands on it, if its not out of date by then!
Evesham: C-, could do better if you tried!
No eSata?
Hmm, odd that it has everything else and no Sata/eSata port. Since anyone who dishes out for a high-end notebook with a tv tuner is almost guaranteed to buy an external hard drive to capture some of it, having an eSata connector makes sense and means one less piece of hardware sticking out (since they're becoming more common than firewire, and usb is noticeably slower than either competing port).
Fine review, 1680x1050 isn't surprising, it jibes pretty well with desktop 8600GT perf, which isn't amazing either. Hope updated drivers and/or bios fix the little hiccups a lot of early santa rosa laptops seem to be having.
We'll be coming back to this one ...
We want to look more closely at the Robson/Turbo Memory technology as it needs to learn which apps are used most frequently to improve caching so we'll be coming back to this laptop.
I'll also re-run the performance tests on battery and when I do I'll make sure I restart the Evesham a few times to remove the question mark over sticky settings.
Leo
Nvidia drivers...
I've found that with my Nvidia GPU, that once the power cord has been pulled out I'm pretty much stuck with low scores until I restart, regardless of my power saving settings.
If I'm in high performance mode when I pull the cord however I keep the high performance until switching power settings to a low one.
Shoddy drivers, I hope you had restarts between your tests..
