23. Conclusion

As demonstrated by the test on the Yakumo Q8M Power64 XD, AMD's Mobile Athlon64 can make for very powerful notebooks. The result would have been even better if Yakumo had equipped the portable desktop replacement with fast DDR400 RAM instead of DDR266 memory and a BIOS that supports DDR400. This omission cost the product60% percent of the theoretically possible memory bandwidth of 3.2 GB/s that the Mobile Athlon64 offers.

What's really annoying is that the device only runs at a low fixed CPU speed. In principle, nothing speaks against this, since this sort of measure generously extends running times in battery mode. However, the customer should always be made aware of this "feature" in no uncertain terms when buying the device.

THG approached the manufacturer on this issue and was assured that in the future the buyer would find a statement to this effect on this packaging. In our opinion, it would have made more sense and been fairer to the customer if the device had been equipped with a BIOS that recognized the PowerNow functionality (offered, let's not forget, by the Mobile Athlon64, too) without limitations in battery mode.

AMD's latest mobile CPU has not proved to be a supreme energy-saver. With its huge number of transistors and a 1 MB full-speed L2 cache, we hadn't really expected it to be. The question is whether the user of a CPU designed for use in desktop-replacement notebooks expects battery life of four to five hours? We don't think so. This clientele operates on battery life of up to 3.5 hours, made possible by the Q8M Power64 XD. Performance counts more than mobility for this target group.

And thanks not least to its high-performing graphics subsystem (ATI Radeon 9600 64 MB), this hammer notebook has plenty of performance. A 15" TFT display with a higher native resolution than XGA would infuse a whole lot more fun into the portable desktop PC.

All in all, the Mobile Athlon64 represents high performance potential in the 32 bit domain. Given that there are no OS, applications or device drivers to take advantage of its 64 bit capabilities, we thus chose not to carry out any tests under a 64 bit operating system.

As far as the effectiveness of PowerNow in battery mode goes, limitations posed by the test device meant we were unfortunately unable to come to a firm conclusion. The fact is that the Mobile Athlon has this functionality and uses it, as we founded out when we operated it from the mains.