Gaming and battery considerations
The above graph tells you all you need to know about the 3D prowess of the Intel GMA 950 accelerator. It's beaten to a pulp by a discrete Radeon X1300 Pro 256MiB graphics card and, as such, won't even be able to handle well-coded engines such as Quake 4 at the TFT's native 1280 x 800 resolution.
A 3FPS framerate was not uncommon at 1280x720 with details set to minimum. We're not able to provide benchmark numbers for Quake 4 due to Microsoft Vista identifying problems with the Intel graphics driver and aborting the timedemo - something that did not happen with the GMA 950 on the Shuttle that was run under Windows XP MCE 2005.
To further illustrate just how poor the GMA 950 is at gaming, the Shuttle X200's integrated graphics returned an average framerate of just 21FPS at 640x480 with minimum details, so don't be fooled into thinking that Intel's integrated graphics will provide a decent games-playing experience at reasonable quality settings, as the blurb would have you believe. GMA 950 also suffers from significant rendering issues, too.
Battery life
The battery test was simple enough. The Gateway MT6825B was charged to maximum and then a 1-hour 47-minute DVD was run - in full-screen mode and from the laptop's DVD drive - with screen brightness turned down to medium, battery mode set to maximum efficiency, and wireless connectivity switched off. We wanted to see just how much battery life was left at the end of the DVD. Not the most technical of evaluations but real-world nonetheless.We found that the battery still had 26 per cent charge once the DVD was complete, suggesting that the 52WHr battery is a good choice for a mid-sized laptop.
