Final Words & Conclusion

The Verdict

Right, we had very little time with this unit, hence this somewhat short review. It should be decent enough to get you a generic idea what AMD and FSC have been working on.

The Amilo SA3650 with Graphics Booster is an incredible lot of fun. The design and functionality seem to work out great. As a result you get to have fairly nice game performance (for a laptop) and heaps of monitor connectivity. Additional features can be found in high-definition decoding at 1080P. Granted, the more modern laptops can do just as well with their integrated graphics solutions, the better, but that's not really a reason to purchase a laptop like shown today, with an external graphics unit.

Gaming is what this is about, and that's not all glory. If you allow me to focus mainly on graphics and not so much the Laptop itself, then we feel it's already a little outdated. The problem with technological development in the notebook segment is that it evolves extremely fast ... much like the graphics industry. This segment means cutthroat business and as such I felt that the choice of the 3870 GPU used is a little short. I'd love to have seen this unit with a Radeon HD 4850 GPU embedded for example. That would double up rendering performance easily making it more alluring. You can however play last-gen games at fairly decent resolutions and image quality settings. Then the physical restrictions. The external graphics unit ... it won't run on the laptop battery, so you'll always need a power source for it as it's powered up with an external adaptor, something to take into consideration.

My biggest quandary however is this  .. if you use the external graphics booster .. you'll need an additional monitor as all that gaming performance can not be utilized for the notebook LCD, and that's just a deficit. Because if you are on the road, you are not carrying around an additional LCD are you? And at home .. well a 500 USD desktop PC can achieve much more than this laptop .. so there it would not make much sense either.

So as you can see, I'm a little mystified about what market the Amilo SA 3650 with Graphics Booster really is serving. Only very few of you guys will say "wow, that's what I've been looking for" and would meet their needs. The rest will go with either a higher-end specced laptop and faster embedded GPU, or simply a desktop / HTPC.

We do find the combination really good and the XGP as a platform really innovative plus worthwhile to develop and investigate. It is an absolutely an interesting development. But it will need a much more bite to get competitive and fascinating to attract a gaming audience.

Update: a little birdie told us that ATI Catalyst 9.1 drivers will allow the Graphics Booster to utilize the Laptop LCD monitor now for gaming. Which would be very much welcomed.

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