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Gaming laptops are often on par with mainstream desktops in gaming performance, but have the drawbacks of being large and heavy. AMD wants to change this with the XGP, which is literally an external graphics card in a box. Unfortunately, this solution also has its drawbacks.

Fujitsu Siemens was the first manufacturer to release an XGP box that can be used in conjunction with its 13-inch Sa3650 laptop. On its own, the 3650 is a fairly standard AMD-based laptop with a Turion X2 Ultra processor running at 2.1GHz and integrated Radeon 3200 graphics, which makes it sufficient for most tasks except gaming. When you add the GraphicsBooster, however, graphics performance get a a 470% boost according to Fujitsu. This isn’t particularly surprising, considering that the box contains a Radeon HD 3870 GPU.

One of the obvious drawbacks is that you need an external screen to use the GraphicsBooster, so basically it’s not really a mobile solution. We tried it with Far Cry 2 on an external 22” monitor, and regretfully it wasn’t running very well either, at least not in high resolutions.

Having your 13-inch laptop double as a gaming rig definitely sounds like an interesting idea, but clearly the 3870 isn’t fast enough to satisfy hardcore gamers. It will be interesting to see how future versions of the XPG perform, but for now it’s neither a mobile or cost-effective solution.

We already knew the U115, with its hybrid SSD/HDD magic, would manage to have excellent battery life. But what happens when you match up this battery-stretching beast with a mammoth 9-cell laptop battery? You break records, that's what.
Not all that long ago, the U115 was reported as capable of achieving 12 hours of battery life on a 6-cell battery. This is due to the fact that the netbook has an HDD for mass storage but runs most basic tasks on a power-sipping SSD. But recent reports from Johannes of the German site Eee-PC.de have put the U115 at a mind boggling 25 hours and 4 minutes on a single charge.

Johannes used a batteryeater test on the lowest possible settings to get his results. Conversely, LaptopMag put the U115 under a more rigorous test of constant websurfing - and it still squeezed out 10 hours and 32 minutes. Your real life usage will probably be somewhere in between.

Frankly, if a laptop gets 5-6 hours of charge I'm fairly happy with it, especially if it doesn't require an oversized battery that juts out awkwardly. But I'm not going to complain about a little jutting when it's getting me 20 odd hours of juice. Finally, a single device on which I can continuously watch 10 hours of movies, listen to 10 hours of music, and all the while work on my various business reports while flying nonstop to Australia. Or perhaps even more importantly, I can finally forget to bring my power cord to work for 3 consecutive days without it mattering anymore.