These tests are all run several times and we take the best score, and the results are as "apples-to-apples" as we can make them. We will start by comparing the Gateway NV5214u (AMD) with the Gateway NV5807u (Intel). As you will see, the difference in performance and battery life is far greater than a few percent, so it will take a lot more than a mere change in component manufacturer for either side to make up the deficit.įor our tests, we are going to have two sets of results to report. We reran the battery tests and confirmed that the overall change was less than 1%, which is again within the margin of error for our tests. One other item that bears mention is that we also swapped batteries between the two laptops to ensure that the batteries did not have an impact on battery life. Outside of low-level benchmarks, the differences are transparent to the end-users. It is common for large OEMs to source similar parts from several vendors in order to meet their capacity requirements. Our guess is that users will find a variety of similar components from different manufacturers, based on whoever happened to provide Gateway the best price/availability. Changing the hard drive and display did not affect performance or battery life by more than 1% - well within the margin of error. You might be tempted to cry "foul" right now in terms of having "identical" laptops, but we did do some (limited) testing to make sure that the differences in component choice did not affect the results. The optical drives are also different, and in fact even the LCDs come from different manufacturers (AU Optronics for the NV5214u and LG Philips for the NV5807u). While both have the same size and rotational speed hard drive, the Intel model includes a Hitachi hard drive and the AMD model uses a Seagate hard drive. If you've been paying attention to the various parts, there are a few differences between the two laptops.
NV5814u available online starting at $580
#Integrated ati radeon hd 3200 graphics review full#
In the interest of full disclosure, here are the specific configurations of the two test laptops we received.