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Today I would like to present a well researched, thourough, and excellently written review of the LG X100 Ultraportable 10.6" Notebook, by Ikariya from Overclockers Australia forums. With the advent of the Asus Eee PC, the HP Mininote, and MSI Wind, this notebook offers a slightly different spin, although it is as light as the Eee, it's a touch pricier, at $1500AUD, but it has the grunt of a normal notebook with a Dual Core CPU, discreet graphics solution, all the while maintaining an 'ultraportable' form factor.
I was initially drawn to this unit after seeing a post about it here on overclockers. Seemed like a fantastic little device that has been very much under the radar, perhaps due to its price point (and not having as much of a history when compared with Sony's Vaio series for instance). A quick look around showed retailers selling this thing for about $2800 which, like the Vaio ultra-portables, was well beyond my budget. However a couple online stores (www.onlinecomputer.com.au & www.computeralliance.com.au) have recently been clearing these out for around the $1500 mark. Still much more expensive than say an EeePC, but when you think of the possibility of a device with a 10.6" screen that may nearly compete with a full-size laptop, there is a certain cool-factor to that. Its weight is even supposed to be the same as an EeePC at just over 1kg. So, I pulled out my wallet and went for it. Here is what I found after 1 week of putting it thru its paces...
----- Packaging -----
The X100 arrived in a cardboard box with some rather plain printing on it. Nothing exciting here, though I did learn that it was manufactured on 30th Jan '08 in Korea. Confirmed the specs on the side, all good. The box already looks so small, about the size of your average ATX mainboard box except twice as thick. Time to get to the contents!
Made the mistake of tipping the box upside-down in order to get the plastic out - and the X100 promptly fell out. Oops, my bad. First thing I noticed though was that my DVD-RW drive had been removed by onlinecomputer. I have since spoken to them about this and they are shipping it to me, but unfortunately this means I haven't been able to try it yet. It is still unclear as to which items are "options" with the X100 so be careful with this! I thought the DVD-RW came by default (indeed the sticker on the box says "ODD : External DVD Super Multi (DL)" and I guess I will be receiving mine soon), but now looking at the Installation Guide it says the external drive is optional. So which is it then, LG? I also paid extra for the 3 year extended warranty, but the warranty card I got says 12 months. Well, at least I did receive the extra battery... If you purchase this unit, be sure you check with the retailer about what the package should contain.
My box contained the following:
LG X100
Standard 3-cell battery
Extended 6-cell battery (form factor will jut out)
65w AC power adapter
And in a sealed plastic bag:
LG Intelligent Update disc
LG Recovery Centre disc for Windows Vista Business (guess it's a Vista install disc of a sort?)
CyberLink DVD Suite
Microsoft Office 2007 60-day trial notice
"Limited Warranty" card
"International Limited Warranty" booklet
Large colourful "Installation Guide" booklet
A light blue cleaning cloth (For those nasty fingerprints I guess? Thanks for the consideration LG!)
----- Components -----
Exterior:
I absolutely love the look of this thing. The top is all glossy black, like a piano. Flip up the lid and you are greeted with a white surface for the keyboard / touchpad, with some shiny Intel / Vista / nVidia / etc stickers on it. Bottom is a non-glossy black (navy?) colour, but who cares about that. Construction feels totally solid, nothing is loose or weak. The lid has a satisfying spring to it when you close it. I saw someone on the forums mention that their chassis was "bent" and did not sit properly, but that may have been a manufacturing error, or perhaps the rubber pads on the bottom were not in alignment? Mine sits perfectly flat. I've still got the protective sheet on my lid though, as it looks like a surface that would attract fingerprints... But hey that's what they gave me the blue cloth for, eh? Oh and the machine is nice and light, no discomfort leaving it on my lap for extended periods.
Controls / LED's:
There's a springy power switch on the left-front side. In the same location on right side is volume control, I quite like the way you push it forward or back and it springs back to centre. It can also be pressed in to toggle mute, I like this. Behind that is the SRS sound effect button. Nice little option for those of you that may enjoy switching to "HD" mode (makes the higher frequencies sound more defined) or the virtual "surround" mode. Both the volume control and SRS toggle cause an on-screen display to come up, however I should note that after I stripped down the number of startup programs ('cause I didn't think I needed them), my OSD has disappeared and the SRS button doesn't seem to do anything. Putting the keyboard utility back has fixed this. Across the top-back of unit are LED's for power, battery charge, HDD, num lock, caps lock, bluetooth, and Wi-Fi connectivity.
Screen:
I am happy with the screen. It is sharp / bright enough. Have not tested in sunlight, as I am an indoors person. Kind of wish there wasn't a 2cm border around the edge, if the screen filled out the entire area it would have been awesome but oh well. 1280x768 resolution is great, particularly for games that run at 1024x768 (Worms anyone?), or playback of 720p HD videos. The screen however does not seem to have its own scaling method! This means by default my games running at 4:3 resolutions were stretched out by the nVidia scaler. I used the nVidia Control Panel to fix this, changing the flat panel scaling to "Use NVIDIA scaling with fixed-aspect ratio". I also noticed an analog look to the screen, evident as some subtle noise when displaying darker colours. While playing videos / games there is an odd "horizontal scanline" look whenever there is motion. This is all very subtle though, and I don't think most users would even notice it. NOTE: I am just now seeing some odd flickering / shimmering at the bottom of the screen. Weird, but not enough to annoy.
Keyboard / Touchpad:
The keyboard is fine to type on, though I have small hands which makes it easier. Keys have good tactile feedback. Touchpad is accurate, and scrolling with it works fine too. Not much else to mention, other than the nice feature of Fn-F1 and Fn-F2 being assignable to open programs for you. Dunno how common this is.
Ports / Connectors:
There are 2 USB ports on the left side and 1 on the right. Haven't had any problems here. There is a modem port and gigabit LAN port on the right, haven't tested these yet as I only really use Wi-Fi on this thing. On the front edge are CF card slot (untested) and MS/SD/XD card slot. SD worked fine, though I found it difficult to remove my SD card afterwards! Couldn't find an ejection mechanism, but perhaps it's just a fault of my old SD card (do newer ones have an edge to grip onto?). The audio I/O is on the right side. Did not test microphone or line in, only headphone out. Plugged in my studio quality Audio Technica AD1000 open headphones, and quality seemed reasonable (free of noise). I did have to crank all volume levels to max though, to get a moderate listening volume. Was not surprised by this, headphone outputs on small devices don't tend to have much amplification. Small ear buds would work better. I believe the very same output can actually be used for S/PDIF digital but I didn't bother testing this. Finally, the D-sub output worked fine when hooked up to a 24" monitor at 1920x1200. Picture looked a little bit fuzzy but I think this particular monitor is to blame for that.
Speakers:
Hmmm, what would you expect from such a tiny laptop? Probably not much. They're not bad though, reasonably clear. Think they're located at the front. If it's sitting on your lap, the sound becomes a little muffled and has more bottom end. Hold it in the air and it sounds crisper but with less bass. Not that you can get much bass from speakers this size anyhow. I guess it's fine for dialogue in movies, but for music some external speakers certainly wouldn't hurt. I didn't like the "HD" SRS mode (too sharp), but the "surround" one was kind of cool.
Microphone:
I tested the in-built microphone which resides next to the LED's. It seems about average, once I turned the recording volume up to 100 (default is too low to be usable). There was a bit of static, maybe when I moved the machine around. The mic is also placed very close to the fan, bad idea I think. Would have been better up the top of the screen. I switched on the noise suppression option in Realtek HD Audio Manager and tried again. There was certainly less noise, but the audio fidelity went pretty bad - voices muffled etc. Did not test acoustic echo cancellation.
Fan:
Fan exhaust is on the left side. I think the intake is underneath, so it could easily be blocked if you sit this on a pillow or something. But that's pretty normal. Fan is audible most of the time, but not annoying. If you play a game for half an hour, expect some hot air to blow out and the bottom of the unit to get quite hot!
Battery:
I was kind of disappointed with the battery performance, though I know the CPU and GPU must be eating considerably more than in a low-end UMPC. Under basic usage (web browsing etc) with low brightness I am getting 2 hours out of the standard 3-cell. From what I've seen of power drain while running under load (gaming), I wouldn't be surprised if this drops to only 1 hour! The 6-cell battery should in theory give double the time, but I have not yet tried it. If you go out with both batteries then, expect 3-6 hours total dependent on usage. Charge time seems to be about a couple hours for the 3-cell, haven't timed it. If you use the 6-cell, expect the weight distribution to shift to the back.
----- Performance -----
CPU:
Now we get to the interesting part! I knew the Core 2 Duo U7700 is the fastest "low power" Intel CPU available at the moment, 533 MHz rated FSB (133 quad-pumped) with max 10x multiplier for 1.33 GHz CPU clock. At first glance this looks like a desktop Core 2 with the FSB cut in half... sounds too good to be true. But upon running some benchmarks, it seems to really work like that! Super Pi calculation to 512K places took 18 seconds, whereas my desktop Core 2 Duo E6600 2.4GHz did it in about 9 seconds. Amusingly, the little X100 is almost as fast as my housemate's Opteron 170 dual-core desktop! A little research has suggested that this CPU is more than twice as fast as the Atom (as found in the latest batch of EeePC / Wind), and then there's 2 cores. That gives it a significant performance advantage - if you can afford it. Not sure about the TDP though, I bet it chews a lot more power than the Atom.
Memory:
Have not benched the memory but I did encounter 2 surprises here. Firstly, I was expecting to see two 1GB sticks present. Instead I found one Hyundai 2GB stick with the second slot free. Thank you LG! Now if only I can figure out how to open the unit... Anyway, my other observation was that the RAM is apparently PC2-5300 (333 MHz) but it is running underclocked at 266 MHz. This puts it quite a lot slower than my desktop RAM at 400 MHz. I can't think why they would have done this, unless there was a board limitation, or perhaps the aim was to run the memory synchronous - FSB : DRAM ratio is 1:2. Standard practice these days is to ignore that ratio in most cases though...
HDD:
As others have already stated, these 1.8" 4200 rpm drives are slow. Boot time feels like it takes at least 60-80% longer than a desktop machine, and even after logging in the HD light continues flashing like mad for upwards of a few minutes. Might be something to do with Vista's caching. I benchmarked it, and to put things in perspective: My desktop 3.5" 320GB drive can sustain read/write speeds of 80 MB/sec at the start of drive, down to 40 MB/sec towards the end. This Toshiba 1.8" 100GB drive does 30 MB/sec down to 15 MB/sec, and the random access time is 60% longer too. I am trying not to be harsh, as the drive is undeniably tiny. But I can't help but think, if only LG could have packed in a 2.5" drive or an SSD (at the risk of sounding greedy!). No matter, once things load up the performance is perfectly tolerable. Game load times were actually reasonably good. System tweaking to minimize running processes can go a long way here, and once again I feel eager to drop in another 2GB stick of RAM to eliminate any swapping to disk.
Graphics:
Now this is what sets this ultra-portable a cut above the rest. GeForce 8400M G with 128MB of dedicated memory, mmm. While some would say "Why do you need this?" I'm sure there are plenty of you who would welcome this with open arms. It's hard to find a machine of this size with a beefy 3D accelerator! No, it's not really that fast. I would guess less than half as powerful as the 8600M GT in my girlfriend's 17" Dell laptop, and an even smaller fraction of the average desktop card these days. But for those WoW addicts out there who need their fix anytime, anywhere (not saying I am one!) this will do the trick and is much better than the Intel GMA chips. I was able to run Doom 3 on medium quality, and even held 30+ fps in UT2004 at max quality and 1280x768 resolution. This means games about 4 years old should play nicely, newer ones maybe (if you turn down the details), and most MMO's should be ok too. Novelty factor just went up.
Connectivity:
While I've only tested the Wi-Fi, I was impressed with its performance. I've had problems with other devices in the house (my Wii in particular can barely even hold a connection) but the signal strength is strong with this one. There is almost no lag when browsing network shares. One oddity though, is that file copy speed seems to max out at 1.5 MB/sec (12 Mbits/sec) which is only a fraction of the actual connection speed (54 Mbits/sec) and what the HDD is capable of. Anyone know why this is?
----- Software -----
OS:
I was pleased to have Vista Business instead of one of the Home editions, as it doesn't have so many technical limitations. Media Center is missing, but I never use it. The games like Solitaire and Minesweeper are also missing, but it's probably possible to copy these from my Vista Ultimate machine if I want them that badly. Didn't come with Service Pack 1 so I installed it and system responsiveness seems to have improved a little. All in all the system handles Vista just fine (including Aero glass) if you can tolerate the sluggish boot time. Windows Experience Index scores were as follows:
Processor 4.5, Memory 4.2, Graphics 3.9, Gaming Graphics 4.4, Primary HD 3.9
Everything looks fine, and I have had no system instability or need to update drivers or anything. Am also happy that LG left the OS in an almost completely default state with mainly just the drivers and core utilities installed (unlike Dell who messed with stuff like DPI and installed piles of junk on my girlfriend's laptop).
Utilities:
LG scores more points here, the biggest plus being the Smart Partition tool! Shortly after powering on the machine for the first time and running through some configuration, you will be presented with a pretty little partition tool to split the drive. Default setting is 30GB for Vista and the remainder becomes your D drive. I went with this as it is what I normally do. Thank you LG, for catering to people who like things to be organized and easier to format later! Other bits and pieces are as follows:
Microsoft Office 2007 60-day trial - Haven't used it, might remove and install full version Office 2003...
BatteryMiser 5 - Some sort of power management tool, can do things like auto-adjust brightness down during inactivity. Seems to be pretty good and uses little memory so I have kept it.
LG Intelligent Update - This may be an easy way to update drivers and such, but at the moment there is just a manual available for download. Haven't used it.
LG Magnifier - Utility for magnifying areas of the screen, can't see myself ever using it.
On Screen Display - Puts a "Fn" icon in your system tray. I originally removed it from startup, but later discovered it is required for special Function shortcuts to work and to get the nice OSD when changing volume and SRS effects. In fact SRS button doesn't work at all unless this "HotKey.exe" is running. Fair enough.
In the end I cleaned up my system tray by removing Intelligent Update and Magnifier from startup. They can still be launched from menu anyways. If you want to do this:
1. Run "regedit"
2. Go to "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\Cur rentVersion\Run"
3. Remove these two entries:
LG Intelligent Update REG_SZ "C:\Program Files\lg_swupdate\giljabistart.exe" Gilautouc
LG Magnifier REG_EXPAND_SZ %ProgramFiles%\LG Software\LG Magnifier\MagnifyingGlass.exe
Finally, there is a special Vista gadget from LG - the Smart Indicator. Can see display brightness, volume, battery status, wireless, etc. I have kept it.
----- Tweakability -----
BIOS:
Wow, what an empty BIOS screen. There are a few useful settings in here (e.g. regarding "Fn" key), but nothing for performance tweaks. CPU/FSB is locked, and so is memory. Guess the mem is underclocked for a reason and we can't touch it.
Upgrade:
I can see two panels on the under-side of the unit, look like they might be removable but I'm a bit scared to force them open. There definitely should be a free slot for RAM, and the 1.8" HDD might be accessible too for an upgrade to one of the newer Toshiba 5200 rpm drives (though 1.8" drives are impossible to find in any decent capacity). Perhaps an SSD is an option too as prices come down, I'd be interested to hear if any other X100 owners have had success opening the unit. I assume LG would void the warranty if we do it.
----- Conclusion -----
I guess the question at the end of the day is whether or not I regret spending $1500 on this thing. Answer is no! I love my X100 to bits, there was nothing overly disappointing about it. Here's my summary...
Pros:
- Incredible processing power in such a small form factor. Probably the best you can get at the moment, in the under 13" category.
- Pretty exterior, I've already been receiving comments like "Hey, that's cute!"
- Possibility of some light gaming.
- Bundle it in a carry bag with a mouse, and you've got yourself a great lightweight travel companion.
Cons:
- HDD speed can sometimes get you muttering "Come on..."
- Battery goes pretty fast. Make sure you've got space in your bag for that extra battery.
- There is no web cam (I don't really use them, but some of you may see this as a flaw considering even the cheapest little laptops include one these days).
- Price might be too high for some?
I wouldn't consider this a desktop replacement. More of a miniature counterpart. If you need ultimate portability without too much compromise in performance, this may be the best buy for you. If you're a gadget freak with wads of cash and want to see the smallest "game-capable" laptop around, this might be for you too. If you only want to do some word processing or web browsing and don't care about games, you'd probably be better off paying much less for an EeePC or Wind.
Some stores are still selling this at discount price, better hurry while they last!
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