The idea of a laptop that offers the flexibility of a desktop PC is nothing new. Neither is the fact that, somewhere along the line, you’ll be forced to make a compromise. Take the 17in Clevo chassis that almost every system integrator and his dog use for their performance notebooks. Units housed in the Clevo’s monolithic frame may offer power comparable to a high-end desktop system, but it pushes the weight up to six kilograms – heavy enough to give any travelling man shoulder ache. Also, any decision to integrate a high-end Prescott CPU into the design is a poor one; half the weight of the chassis comes from the vast copper-finned, internal heatsinks – and still the laptop gets hot enough to par-broil your thighs.

Powerful, but bulky
So is there such a thing as a desktop replacement in a truly portable chassis? The low-heat, less power-hungry Pentium M certainly makes it viable. Dell’s performance-line XPS Gen2 proved this beyond question four months back. And in both form and function, the Fujitsu-Siemens Amilo M28 has a very respectable crack at achieving the seemingly impossible.

When we write about desktop performance, we mean performance in all areas – particularly graphics. And the Amilo’s graphics performance is just a shade below cutting edge. Built around the powerful Nvidia GeForce 6800 Go mobile graphics platform, borrowed from its bigger brother the PCI Express 6800GT, this machine’s 3D capabilities are beyond question. Moreover, the GPU has access to 256MB of dedicated graphics RAM, so overall system performance isn’t impacted by the standard shared-memory architecture you see with most notebooks. A portable machine that supports cutting-edge games and other graphics-intensive applications is not to be sniffed at, and while the Amilo may be a little bulkier than you may like for a portable machine, it’s a world away from the Clevo chassis and its ilk. This is a power machine posing as a svelte notebook.

Widescreen display
Most of the laptop’s 4.1Kg weight comes from the 17.1in WXGA widescreen display. The glossy panel offers bright, crisp visuals and decent viewing angles, and when the charger is attached, the Amilo makes an excellent portable media centre. To this end, Fujitsu-Siemens has also included a pop-out media centre remote control unit, which nestles in the PC Card slot when not in use. And with 80GB of hard disk capacity onboard, there’s a reasonable amount of space for storage-hungry media such as MP3s and movies.

In fact, the only area of the specification in which the Amilo is lacking a little is the RAM allocation. Its 512MB DDR400 is ample for most applications, but given the 1.73GHz Pentium M chip and the 6800 Go GPU, it’s definitely positioned as a capable games machine. If you want to play new, resource-ravenous titles such as Battlefield 2, a gigabyte of RAM is much preferred; not only will you notice a performance hike from the vanilla, you’ll hear a lot less hard-drive paging. If the Amilo M 3438G is starting to catch your eye, we would have to suggest quickly plugging another 512MB SODIMM of DDR400.

As the specification suggests, the machine performs. It scores well in 3DMark03 and 3DMark05, achieving 8,410 and 3,525 respectively, which proves it’s up to the task of gaming. Bear in mind that, a year ago, a single-card desktop gaming PC costing over £2,000 would have struggled to achieve such scores. Benchmarks aside, it’s happy running Far Cry at decent settings.

Less impressive, however, is the battery life of the Amilo. That power-hungry 6800 Go chip, coupled with the 17.1in widescreen display that it powers, means that the laptop can only put out a paltry 144 minutes of productivity before it winds down. Bear in mind, though, that even the Dell XPS Gen2 fails to achieve more than about an hour of solid play before running dry.

Despite the unimpressive battery life, it’s hard to fault the Amilo. And at this price point, you’re getting an uncommon amount of grunt for your spend. For £958 all-in, the Amilo M 3438G is something of a steal. If it’s games and portable media you’re interested in, and you’re on a budget, the Amilo offers blinding performance for the outlay.