Fujitsu LifeBook AH530
Rating: 8 out of 10
Price: $1149 street
Contact: Fujitsu Australia Phone: 1800 288 283
Web: www.fujitsu.com/hk/services/computing/pc/

If you’re looking for a decent performer without spending big dollars, this LifeBook AH530 has a surprising turn of speed for under $1200. It managed to go passed the 400 mark on our Techlogg.com Encode test – something the fancied MSI GX660R we also tested this month couldn’t do.

It’s reasonably well featured with a 500GB hard drive, HDMI output and dual-core Intel Core i5-450M processor. The AH530 may well have a 1GB-equiped graphics chip on-board but it’s only an entry-level Mobility Radeon HD 550v, which managed 130fps on Unreal Tournament 3 Demo at a low 640×480-pixels.We don’t expect serious gamers will take much note of it and it’s only a DirectX10.1 part. At least it’s there for occasional gaming.

It comes with the standard six-cell/4400mAh Lithium-ion battery and a weight just on the right just of 2.5kgs. The 15.6-inch widescreen LED-backlit LCD panel has the standard 1366×768-pixel resolution and there’s an LG DVD burner on-board.

That battery managed to hang on for 2hrs10mins on our benchmark test, which is a bit below our preferred 2hrs30mins level. However, in terms of its application performance, it’s pretty decent – you can spend half this amount and get a netbook that has only 20% of the AH530’s speed. On a bang-for-buck basis, the LifeBook AH530 comes up doing reasonably well. Compared to some of the similarly-spec’d offerings available such as HP’s Pavilion dv6-3030tx, the price is a little high but it’d be still worth considering.

With the market saturated with sub-$1000 notebooks, it’d be worth checking what you can get from the likes of Acer, Asus and HP with these same main specs. You might be able to find something a little cheaper than this AH530. That said, the Ah530 is a nicely built, solid model from Fujitsu. We’d just have preferred better battery life.

Techlogg.com says: A decent performer with a fair list of extras for the price.

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