Recommend an Ultrabook?

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grandmaster

Limp Gawd
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Apr 19, 2006
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For four years I've been using a Dell XPS M1330, and I've made a number of upgrades - CPU upgrade from 1.5GHz dual core to a 2.1GHz dual core, 512MB to 4GB and I've ripped out the optical drive to add a 500GB mechnical drive and put a 256GB SSD into the main HDD slot. The screen on this thing is miles better than most of the TN rubbish I see.

But it's getting old and after an ultrabook loan, I feel a change is in order. Even the 1.6GHz Core i5 ULV annihilated Windows perf of my system. QuickSync decoding from the Sandy Bridge CPU meant I got at least four hours watching video from the Acer Timeline Ultra M3 I borrowed. Battery life was revelatory in comparison.

My laptop gets really hot in the summer and battery life of three hours (1.5 to 1.75 watching 720p vids) is annoying. This thing has an 8400GS in there running at 60 degrees celcius - and it's basically not doing anything aside from running a 2D display.

The thing is, I can't find an ultrabook that gives me everything I want:

* OS running completely from SSD
* Space for mechanical HDD
* 6-8 hour battery life (4+ hours h.264 video)
* Good quality 13.3" screen
* Backlit keyboard
* USB 3.0 port
* No discrete GPU - don't need it

Any recommendations? It's the SSD+HDD combo that seems to trip up most of the ultrabook contenders I've seen. The Acer let me do that, but it's a 15-inch monster with poor screen, no backlit keyboard etc.
 
I don't think there really is an ultrabook that matches all those specs, at least if you need room for an HDD + SSD. A lot of the ones that come close have garbage LCDs.

You could get one of the new 13" Macbook Pros and swap the optical bay for a secondary HDD...? That checks all of your boxes, although it's a bit hefty.

Another idea is the ASUS UX32VD. It has a mechanical hard drive + a 32gb SSD cache. I'm not sure if it's using m-SATA for the SSD. If it is, then you could probably swap it out for something bigger and put the OS on it. ASUS does like to use proprietary stuff in their laptops, so you'll definitely want to double check whether you can swap that SSD.
 
Thinkpad X1? For some reason the site appears to be down as I type this, so I can't double check if it's got space for both an HDD and an SD. But it's 13.3" and I think it meets your other requirements.

Also the Thinkpad x230/x220 isn't technically an Ultrabook, but it is 12.5" and a wonderful little machine that should meet your other needs quite nicely. I know it has space for both types of hard drives.
 
I second the UX32VD, except that it has a discrete GPU, but you don't have to use it.

The SSD is soldered onto the board and therefore not removeable and it's only 32 GB, but you can swap out the HDD.
 
What about those new Vizios? They look very impressive and the prices are good. There should be some reviews of those things coming out shortly.
 
Why do you want an HDD? Forget that and you're set. Get an external backup drive.
 
OrangeWolf said:
Thinkpad X1? For some reason the site appears to be down as I type this, so I can't double check if it's got space for both an HDD and an SD. But it's 13.3" and I think it meets your other requirements.

Also the Thinkpad x230/x220 isn't technically an Ultrabook, but it is 12.5" and a wonderful little machine that should meet your other needs quite nicely. I know it has space for both types of hard drives.
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Thanks everyone for your input.

The Acer I was loaned had a 20GB SSD, with 16GB for caching and 4GB reserved for the hibernation partition. It was OK and reasonably fast, but nowhere near as fast as a native SSD system - so for that reason I'm not so keen on the Asus.

The X1 looks interesting but I'm quite intrigued by the x220, particularly as it has the IPS screen! 13.3" MBP is an option but I'm not so keen on paying the Apple tax when I'd only be using Windows on it - I just don't get on with OSX.

I want the option for HDD so I connect an HD capture card and record HD video from video games. 720p60 in a lossless codec requires 2-3GB per minute, so SSD won't cut it.
 
grandmaster said:
Thanks everyone for your input.

The Acer I was loaned had a 20GB SSD, with 16GB for caching and 4GB reserved for the hibernation partition. It was OK and reasonably fast, but nowhere near as fast as a native SSD system - so for that reason I'm not so keen on the Asus.

The X1 looks interesting but I'm quite intrigued by the x220, particularly as it has the IPS screen! 13.3" MBP is an option but I'm not so keen on paying the Apple tax when I'd only be using Windows on it - I just don't get on with OSX.

I want the option for HDD so I connect an HD capture card and record HD video from video games. 720p60 in a lossless codec requires 2-3GB per minute, so SSD won't cut it.
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I'd look for something with an eSata port. It's fast enough for that, and external.

The issue with an 'ultrabook' is they lack the space inside the form factor to really have a HDD and a SSD. There just isn't enough room.

If you're willing to go "just" outside the ultrabook type system, a 13" MBP or a Thinkpad T430 is your best bet. Both have easy to find ODD->HDD caddies and are good fast systems.

If you're against OSX (as you said) I would probably go the T430. It's a bit bigger then an ultrabook, but it's got the room inside for what you want, without being expensive.
 
grandmaster said:
I want the option for HDD so I connect an HD capture card and record HD video from video games. 720p60 in a lossless codec requires 2-3GB per minute, so SSD won't cut it.
Click to expand...

Why won't an SSD cut it?

Seriously doubt you're going to find an ultrabook with room for both a bootable SSD and a spinning hard drive.
 
SSD won't cut it because an hour's worth of HD capture will be 200-300GB.

I guess all I'm looking for is an ultrabook that supports mSATA drives you can boot from and has a conventional drive bay - like the Acer Timeline Ultra M3 does.

I took a look at the Lenovo Thinkpad 430 and aside from the screen being poor it looks ideal. I have a feeling that I'm going to end up getting the 13.3 MBP though - not entirely what I want but once the optical drive is out it'll fufill most of the criteria and while not an ultrabook, isn't exactly thick/fat.
 
Ultrabooks are overpriced, sure they are slim and all but they don't offer much performance and they resemble a macbook..

If I spent 1,300$ on a Ultrabook, I could've gotten a laptop with GTX 660M lol
 
Bandwidth for 720p60 video from an uncompressed source is 2.6MB per frame. You can usually compress that losslessly with a Huffman-derived codec with about 2:1 to 3:1 compression efficiency. So yes, about 200 to 300GB per hour.

I'm not talking about h.264 movie playback.
 
grandmaster said:
SSD won't cut it because an hour's worth of HD capture will be 200-300GB.
Click to expand...

this is the item you left out in your OP which explains why an SSD won't cut it, even though 512 GB SSDs are becoming very affordable.
 
Don't limit yourself to Ultrabooks. Some ultrabooks weigh more than regular laptops and have worse build quality.

The Sony Vaio S series at 13.3" is a fantastic laptop and has been getting awesome reviews. It's also as light as an ultrabook and doesn't suffer from the "glue everything" you're seeing now in ultrabooks. You can open it easily and upgrade the HDD, the optical drive, the RAM and add an additional sheet battery and it doesn't limit itself to 17W CPUs so you can get almost desktop like processing power.
 
pelo said:
Don't limit yourself to Ultrabooks. Some ultrabooks weigh more than regular laptops and have worse build quality.

The Sony Vaio S series at 13.3" is a fantastic laptop and has been getting awesome reviews. It's also as light as an ultrabook and doesn't suffer from the "glue everything" you're seeing now in ultrabooks. You can open it easily and upgrade the HDD, the optical drive, the RAM and add an additional sheet battery and it doesn't limit itself to 17W CPUs so you can get almost desktop like processing power.
Click to expand...

It's also almost 1" thick the whole way 'round, the Air, for instance, is 0.11-0.69. It's not just about weight.
It's also a full pound heavier.

Not even the same league if you're looking for thin and light.
 
Epicness said:
It's also almost 1" thick the whole way 'round, the Air, for instance, is 0.11-0.69. It's not just about weight.
It's also a full pound heavier.

Not even the same league if you're looking for thin and light.
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Why does it matter if it's slightly thicker if it's not all that much heavier? It has ports the Air lacks, a great 1600x900 display, you can access the hardware and upgrade yourself, better battery life and better performance from the CPU and on-die GPU. Would you bitch about a pound in weight (it's actually less than a pound) if you've got all of those benefits?

I understand the notion of an ultrabook but it all goes to shit if you can get the same in non-ultrabook specs and you aren't limited to ultrabook hardware. Thinner does not equal smaller footprint. Smaller footprint equals smaller footprint.

BTW, the S series existed before the Mac Air and the Ultrabook. It was the original thin, small and light laptop. This isn't to say there aren't excellent ultrabooks/ultrathins around. The Sony Z series is amazing, the T series is great too, the Toshiba ultrabooks have incredible battery life and of course there's the Asus Zenbooks. But if you can get better specs and hardware from a slightly thicker laptop at the same price (or cheaper) then it shouldn't be disregarded simply because it's .1"-.2" thicker.

Don't limit yourself to ultrabooks ;)
 
Trepidati0n said:
That is like saying an BMW 7 series is becoming affordable. You can get a reasonable laptop for the price of a 512GB SSD. /faceplam
Click to expand...

A pig in a poke. /faceplam.

Anybody in a thread about ultrabooks obviously isn't interested in a $350 laptop.
 
pelo said:
Why does it matter if it's slightly thicker if it's not all that much heavier?
Click to expand...
The first thing to note is that it *is* much heavier. 37% heavier. The second thing is it might not matter to you, but if you want an Ultrabook, it won't fit the bill.

Vaio S: 24mm... Ultrabook definition: 21mm or less
Vaio S: 3.8lbs... Ultrabook definition: 3.3lbs

It fails on both counts. I'm not saying the Vaio S is a bad machine, not by a long shot, it simply doesn't fulfill what a consumer (like myself) wants when they're aiming for thin and light.

pelo said:
It has ports the Air lacks, a great 1600x900 display, you can access the hardware and upgrade yourself, better battery life and better performance from the CPU and on-die GPU. Would you bitch about a pound in weight (it's actually less than a pound) if you've got all of those benefits?
Click to expand...
Ports/Hardware: a given, it's almost an inch thick. Of course you can fit more ports on it!
Display: Asus Zenbook Prime has 1920x1080 IPS
"Better" Battery: The same as both the Air and Zenbook Prime at 7 hours.
Weight: Asus Zenbook is 2.8lbs, Vaio S is 3.8. It's a full pound heavier- 37% heavier.

You also need to take into consideration your Vaio S does not come with a SSD, which can easily suck up a good portion of your $200-300 price difference.

You also miss the point on the performance/ports/upgradability items. I want something that has a long-lasting battery and that's thin and light. Those are the #1 priorities in an Ultrabook: if you miss those points then you miss the entire point of an Ultrabook.
There's obvious trade-offs. I won't be able to have a 17" display, either: That's a trade off for having an Ultrabook.

pelo said:
BTW, the S series existed before the Mac Air and the Ultrabook. It was the original thin, small and light laptop.
Click to expand...
Back in 2004 when they were introduced you might have had a point, but it is 2012 and what is thin and light then is no longer thin and light today.

pelo said:
I understand the notion of an ultrabook but it all goes to shit if you can get the same in non-ultrabook specs
Click to expand...
There's more to specs than CPU, and that's precisely why I don't think you "understand the notion" of an Ultrabook.

Vaio S starts out at $800. Zenbook Prime is $1050. For some people, the $250 price difference is worth it for one-pound less weight, a superior display, a SSD, and 30% thinner. When put into these terms, the perceived "savings" of the Vaio S starts diminishing.
 
There's more to specs than CPU, and that's precisely why I don't think you "understand the notion" of an Ultrabook.
Click to expand...

- ultrabooks aren't classified by weight but rather thickness, processor (17W ULV) and presence of an mSATA drive or SSD.

Just because I disagree with you doesn't mean I don't understand. And nice work signing up to completely miss the point. So here we go again.

A pound and a half more gets you a Sony 1080p IPS display with an nVidia discrete GPU, full access to all ports, better build quality (the Sony shell is actually carbon fiber and the screen bends so it doesn't crack when under torsion), non ULV IB processor (so more processing power) and for $930. If you've tried a high res IPS display on Windows in smaller diagonal-sized displays you'll note 1 thing that's skipped over by people like you: it sucks. You'll find yourself zooming in a lot and some programs will have incredibly small text that doesn't scale with any OS-derived options (think Adobe Photoshop). Apple doesn't have these same problems due to their "walled garden" approach. Though, even still they have to deal with one or two quirks related to text size and high pixel count displays. (Anand's recent review of the new MBP showed some of these problems). I've used high-res IPS/non-IPS displays on smaller form factors (14" and under) and they're difficult to use with Windows and slightly easier with OSX.

The Zenbooks are awesome ultrabooks, but I wouldn't pay over a grand for an amazing display that I can't run at native resolutions due to a crappy on-die GPU and ULV processor. Good luck gaming at 1080p and good luck maintaining image quality at lower non-native resolutions. In fact, good luck running any modern game at decent settings. A pound and a half is something I'm more than willing to lug around if it means I'm getting a pound and a half more processing/gaming power and the ability to tinker with the parts myself. Furthermore, you won't strain your eyes, the quality of the display is indistinguishable for most -- in fact a 1600x900 at 14" in a laptop is considered "retina" by definition [technically it's over retina], meaning past that pixel-count-to-display-quality is limited by the person's eyesight. There are other factors to consider outside of pixel count such as brightness, contrast and black levels but because both are IPS displays and the non-pixel-count factors are relative factors that are overlooked by most reviewers and depend heavily on personal preference let's assume they're "equal."

But, please, go on about how clueless I am.

links

Sony S model. 15.5 has a 1080p IPS display. Imo, if you're going to be using 1080p on Windows/Linux then a 15"-17" is perfect. 14" generally looks great at 1600x900. Any higher than that and you'll see yourself struggling (I have 20/20 vision). You can also buy a 7mm SSD and place it in the optical drive (if you don't use the optical drive at all) or replace the platter HDD with the SSD. For $160 you can have 2 hard drives.
http://store.sony.com/webapp/wcs/st...98552921644768015#/s15specificationTabContent

The aforementioned Asus Zenbook, while an incredible package, is also $200 more expensive and less practical despite being ~1.5lbs lighter. If you want lighter weight and don't mind sacrificing on the things I mentioned above then this is the #1 ultrabook to get.
http://www.amazon.com/Zenbook-Prime...1341274903&sr=8-1&keywords=asus+zenbook+prime

*actual ultrabook requirements*

Under the current Ultrabook definition, a machine needs to be less than 18mm in height and have a display less than 14 inches. (Most of the machines I've seen with the moniker have 13.3-inch or smaller displays.) Systems with 14-inch or larger displays can be up to 21mm (0.83 inches) thick, in part because larger systems often have optical drives, Regis noted. In addition, an extra 2mm of thickness is allotted for touch-screen laptops, hybrid, or convertible designs, as touch-enabled screens are thicker.

One big requirement is that the machine must have a "fast resume," moving from a near-zero power hibernation state to the point where users can type on the keyboard in less than seven seconds. To do this, Regis said, most manufacturers will implement Intel's RapidStart, which uses a non-volatile NAND flash memory cache in addition to the main disk drive. Effectively, this stores the contents of the system's memory on a fast solid-state drive (SSD) cache that can be quite small—just the size of the system DRAM. Most Ultrabooks will use this cache in addition to a traditional hard disk drive, though some will use a full solid-state drive.

In addition, Ultrabooks must have more than five hours of battery life on MobileMark 2007, although more than eight hours is recommended. Most models are doing better than that, though smaller systems with 11-inch screens often are at the low-end of the scale simply because they are so light and have such small batteries.

Ultrabooks are supposed to have their BIOS/firmware enabled to expose Intel Anti-Theft and Intel Identity Protection Technology. The actual technologies are not required yet, however, as they have not been fully rolled out in software and all geographies. There are no cost requirements, and Ultrabooks will be available at a wide range of prices.
Click to expand...

http://forwardthinking.pcmag.com/laptops/293910-what-s-in-an-ultrabook

You'll note there is no weight requirement. Ultrabook requirements are essentially "Oooo! That looks thin and pretty" + cache drive.
 
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Not sure why you're ranting about gaming and whatnot, from the OP:

* Good quality 13.3" screen
* No discrete GPU - don't need it

And yet you're recommending a 15" model with a discrete GPU... :rolleyes:

As to the OP, I doubt you'll find any ultrabook with a HDD+SSD combination... In fact, I doubt you'll find many lightweight 13" laptops with that, period. A MBP or something else with a removable optical is probably your best bet, as you've found out (Samsung Series 7 maybe?).

Any reason you can't just use an external USB 3.0 drive tho? Its as fast as eSATA...
 
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