Intel Corp (INTC)

[ChipGeek]

In terms of temperature, it seems to get dangerously hot at the exaust vent during load, but otherwise is in the range of most devices.

Battery life is impressive, with 9.5 hours of idle time, and 5.5 hours of web browsing. Unfortunatly, the 1.5 hours of 3DMark06 looping implies maybe it wouldn't be such a good portable gaming system.

This behavior during load is my biggest worry about ultrabooks, convertible or otherwise.

As I posted here a few months ago, I bought the top-end Samsung Series 9 with the i7, 8GB of RAM, 256GB SSD, etc, and everything about it is great, including its ability to play moderately resource-intensive games. I can play Diablo 3 with various graphical settings set to low-medium, and the performance is just fine.

However, when I do so, the thing gets quite hot, to the point that we bought a lap desk for it. Furthermore, the remaining battery time takes a nosedive, and the 1.5 hours of battery under full load sounds about right to me.

If anybody is hoping that Ivy Bridge ultrabooks are going to provide a mobile gaming platform, I think they will be disappointed. And that's too bad, because I think that's something that could really propel mass market acceptance.

What I don't know is if things will improve with less resource-intensive games. If somebody fires up Angry Birds, will the simple act of turning on the high-performance graphics core crater the system power? Basically, I'm wondering if ultrabooks could come up short relative to tablets when playing casual games, because tablets have low-power graphics cores while Ivy Bridge is still chasing high-performance. I don't think that the EUs within the Ivy Bridge graphics core are dynamically configurable. Are they?