Lenovo X300 gets benchmarked, shown off on video
By Donald Melanson 
posted Feb 22nd 2008 12:38PM
posted Feb 22nd 2008 12:38PM
We've already heard Walt's take on the Lenovo's slim new X300, and even seen it splayed wide open, but if you still haven't made up your mind you can now check out some benchmarks and plenty of video courtesy of NoteBook review. As you might expect, there's not a lot of surprises on that former front, with the X300 trailing both the MacBook Air and Sony Vaio TZ in processor tests, but edging them both out quite handily in overall system performance (thanks in no small part to the X300's SSD drive, which the Air in question wasn't equipped with). Likely of more interest is the ample supply of videos, which show off the X300 from every angle and compare it to the Thinkpad T61 and X61. Hit up the read link below to check out those.
Digg this!!
http://digg.com/hardware/Lenovo_X300_gets_benchmarked_shown_off_on_video
I've got thinner laptops than the X300 or MacBook Air.
Just because something has a bevelled edge and advertises themselves as "the world's thinnest laptop" doesn't mean it's true.
google for toshiba R100 for example.
I have Toshiba R100 and it really is very thin. Also 12" and only 1.8 pounds, it literally is the size and weight and thickness of a notebook (granted, in that configuration it won't last an hour). If Air is thinner, it's not by much - and R100 is 4 years old. R100 was as thin as practically possible while retaining Ethernet and PCMCIA. I still haven't seen a laptop worthy to replace it. Even this X300 has way too slow of a processor - come on, in 4 years most you can get is 300MHz bump in speed and another core (yeah I know clock for clock C2D beats Pentium M but still)? If it had the Air's 1.6G and the price with SSD was $2000 at most, I'd buy it now.
The R100 is thinner than the MacBook Air. The R100 is .65 inches ( http://www.mobiletechreview.com/notebooks/Toshiba_Portege_R100.htm ), while the Macbook Air is as thick as .76 inches.
my dad has a portege 2000. Same deal as r100, in fact replacement parts are the same. It got really slow though, 800mhz was not enough for his office 2003 needs. The hard drive crashed and i took a HDD out of my buddies old dead ipod and popped it in, worked like magic. Now it is running ubuntu, ultra fast and it is the guest computer at my parents house.
Cool story on how we got ubuntu on it. Didn't have the external drive so I booted into the defunct windows XP install and downloaded a program that allows you to install ubuntu by plugging in the cat 5 and rebooting. Starts up a text based OS with internet support in the RAM and allows you to format the HDD and download a crisp ubuntu install. It was cool
Don't Google!
http://notebookcritic.com/2004/06/27/review-toshiba-portege-r100/
It was also published on the Inquirer and NBR as well. June 2004!!!
These go for about $400 now - and they play CS!!!
About 100 people came over to read my old Libretto review. Thanks engadget - my puny little blog is most appreciative.
Odd that the SSD drive should help the X300 so much when the overall system performance for the macbook air with the SSD was only marginally better in most cases and worse in a few.
Yeah, I think they did the Mac a favor by using the traditional hard drive.
Actually, it would make perfect sense depending on the read/write speeds of the two drives. Anyone got any numbers?
Yeah I was wondering the same thing why the Air's SSD with faster processor barely made any difference when it made such a big difference on the x300 even when the x300 is 400mhz slower than the slowest Air. could be read/write speeds as you said.
So I wonder why the Air didn't go with a faster drive then; I mean in the highest configuration they cost the same and I'm sure anyone willing to drop $3k on a laptop wouldn't mind dropping $100 more for a faster SSD. Maybe Apple will do that in the future.
I'm also interested in read/write speeds of the two drives.
The MBA might be limited in the motherboard as to drive performance possibly leading to their use of the super slow micro drive.
The SSD drives on Macbook Air and X300 are not the same. Air using a Pata lane SSD, X300 using a Sata lane SSD.
WHAT THE F*CK is the point of a LAPTOP if you can't use it to do the things you normally do with a computer?
I'm using a LENOVO X60 Tablet.
With the exception of a lack of a DVDRW and no webcam, this is probably the thinnest, best laptop I've ever used. The damn thing's battery lasts 7 and a half hours.
PLEASE DON'T COMPARE THAT ELITIST MACBOOK AIR PIECE OF SHIT to a LENOVO.
I guess that'd depend entirely on who the 'you' was in the phrase "...things you normally do with a computer." wouldn't it?
Other than heavy photoshop work I do on my iMac, the MacBook Air could do pretty much everything else I ever do in terms of computing.
Don't make the mistake of thinking the way YOU use a computer is the way everyone else does.
www.geekistry.com
Funny... I have the opposite perspective. I was a diehard thinkpad lenovo fan for the longest time - I wouldn't use a laptop if it didn't have a trackpoint etc - but now I have both an x41t and an MBA and it's really not a fair comparison. While the hardware on the x300 may be superior (wireless options, optical, etc) - the user interface provided through osx makes using the laptop much more enjoyable.
Why not install osx86 on the x300 you ask? You're welcome to and it will probably give you 90% hardware compatibility but I and many others are willing to pay for that extra 10% (speaking from experience, I have my x41t running 10.4.10 with full tablet support).
Ubuntu/other distros are another story entirely..
/my 3 cents.
So what you're saying is the MacBook Air is a pile of crap COMPARED to everything else on the market?
Oops, I just compared the piece of shit elitist MBA to other laptops. My apologies.
You know I'd buy a Thinkpad over any other laptop if they weren't that fugly. Why can't lenovo hire some people to work on it. Just make them look nicer, don't have to be fancy or anything.
I agree 100%. (Gee, "lowest rank" me too, y'all!)
I'm honored...
I am using a thinkpad right now, and I would have to disagree on the "ugly" part (eye of the beholder etc.) This has me wondering why thinkpads are considered so much uglier than dell or HP notebooks. Besides, there are things you can do about the appearance if you don't like it.
I love my ThinkPad and I love the way it looks too :)
Now, that's positive -- a self-confident comment from a proud user/owner -- instead of low-ranking someone!
I really like the X300 and I'd consider switching to it from my Macbook if at some point it comes with a regular HD option to get the price down.
But, one thing I thought I would never say before I started using a Mac, was that I now really like the one trackpad button. Right clicking is so easy by just putting two fingers down on the trackpad and clicking the button.. Is there a way to configure a thinkpad to respond the same way? And also the two-finger scrolling for webpages?
"Is there a way to configure a thinkpad to respond the same way? And also the two-finger scrolling for webpages?"
No.
At least in Linux, you can set it so that tapping with two fingers at once is a right-click, and three fingers at once is a middle-click. Not sure about Windows, though.
how does the sz sony series compare to these?
Wouldn't a fairer comparison be with the MacBook instead of the MacBook Air? 13" screen, optical drive, >1 USB, etc?
I really like the smooth finish on the surface of Lenovo's. Anybody knows what's it called? Elastomer coating maybe?
Fragile? Do you know anything about ThinkPads at all?
Take your comment spam elsewhere. Your link doesn't even work, so you're not getting any Pagerank out of it.
Spoken like someone suffering from cranial rectal inversion.
I just don't get why people blab about crap they don't understand. Why don't they teach the difference between subjectivity and objectivity in schools these days?
If you dont get it, it wasn't meant for you. However, it was meant for someone, not no one.
The Macbook is way too heavy to be considered an ultraportable so it's an even worst comparison. If Apple made a lightweight Macbook then maybe that would be true.
Both of these are to large and heavy to be Ultra portables.
@Chris
I thought anything under 4lbs was fair game for an ultraportable. Both the x300 and Air are 3lbs, give or take options. The Macbook is 5lbs if I'm not mistaken so it's out of the question. Okay fine, some say anything with a screen bigger than 12.1" is not an ultraportable, but that is not a factor of weight.
I'd rather see SSD vs. SSD
"Rather?"
You're really quite polite! Are you British?
The lack of PCMCIA is a big problem. I could be sticking an extra, swappable, 64GB CF card in there.
What an amateur review. The benchmarks aren't even sorted, and the computers aren't even started at the same time in the "boot up comparison" video, let alone that their operating systems differ.
Not sure when but, Lenovo posted a sneak peak at the X300.
http://shop.lenovo.com/SEUILibrary/controller/e/na/LenovoPortal/en_US/special-offers.workflow:ShowPromo?LandingPage=/All/US/Landing_pages/ThinkPad_notebooks/2008/X300&ipromoID=wna00190&
...still no specs but, the promise of a 10 hour battery life is insane!
the highly mac-biased Ars Technica has run tests that show that the SSD option barely shows any improvements in performance. so it's safe to say that the x300 SSD beats the macbook air with SSD.
You can run Linux on Air now. I don't mean the laptop either.