Fujitsu-Siemens Amilo A1630 Athlon 64 notebook

Review This is a double first for Fujitsu-Siemens. Not only is it the first widescreen notebook that the company has sent us, but it's also the first Athlon 64-based machine. The Amilo A1630 is a notebook that should appeal to power users. With a mobile Athlon 64 3400+ processor, 512MB of PC2700 DDR SDRAM and a 128MB ATI Mobility Radeon 9700 graphics card this is a seriously punchy laptop, writes Lars-Goran Nilsson.

The high-end specification doesn't stop there as Fujitsu-Siemens has also managed to squeeze in an 80GB hard drive and a 4x/2.4x DVD+R/RW drive. As you'd expect from a modern notebook, there's support for wireless networking, although I have never come across the manufacturer of the 802.11g chipset in the Amilo A1630 before, a company called Ralink.

If you intend to use your laptop for watching movies, the Amilo A1630 is ideal with its 15.4in widescreen TFT display with a 1280 x 800 resolution. This resolution isn't as high as some widescreen notebooks we've come across but it still offers a reasonable amount of desktop real estate. Unusually the Amilo A1630 features a Realtek ALC655 audio codec, which allows for 5.1-channel sound. Fujtisu-Siemens has taken advantage of this by making the front audio connectors reconfigurable, so that you can hook up 5.1-channel speakers - a neat feature that you won't see on many notebooks.

The Amilo A1630 uses an SiS 775 chipset, rather than the more common VIA chipset that tends to be fitted to Athlon 64 notebooks. The SiS chipset offers similar features to a VIA solution and Fujitsu-Siemens has also used the integrated SiS 900 10/100Mbps Ethernet, rather than a third-party solution. Other features includes a built-in 56kbps V.92 modem, IrDA, Firewire and USB 2.0.

Taking a look around the chassis you'll find a single Type II PC Card slot, a four-pin FireWire port, a memory card reader that accepts SD, MMC and MemoryStick, the Ethernet and modem connectors, and two USB 2.0 ports all on the left side. Around the back is an S-Video out connector, another USB 2.0 port, the IrDA port, a D-SUB and a parallel port. Moving onto the right hand side you'll find the power connector and the DVD writer. At the front are three audio connectors - in standard configuration these provide optical S/PDIF output, line out and microphone input, with the optical S/PDIF doubling as headphone socket. The labelling could be clearer here as there is no way of knowing that the S/PDIF socket can be used for headphones, nor is it very clear that all of these ports can be configured in the audio settings to allow for 5.1-channel output.

The keyboard is comfortable to type on with most keys where you would expect them to be. Unfortunately, the Fn key has yet again swapped places with the Ctrl key, which can be a little bit frustrating if you're used to having it at the end of the keyboard. But to be fair most notebook manufacturers fall foul of this problem. The Insert and Delete keys have also been moved and find themselves at the bottom of the keyboard, although it doesn't take long to get used to this. Both Shift keys and the Return and Backspace keys are full size, which is always good to see.