MAXDATA Eco 4500 A review

Thanks to the popularity of Intel's Centrino platform for notebooks, we haven't reviewed a notebook featuring AMD's Mobile Athlon 64 processor for four months.

The Eco 4500 A is a budget notebook that uses the mid-range 3000+ version of the processor.

The Eco 4500 A's chassis looks smart with a black and silver finish. While the base feels solid, the screen is quite flimsy and the picture distorts easily under pressure. The notebook itself is quite large, leaving plenty of space to rest your wrists when typing, but the keys are stiffly sprung with little feedback and are made of flimsy plastic. The touch pad is also woolly and inaccurate, which makes it frustrating to use.

The screen has a resolution of 1,024x768 pixels but is bright and displays text clearly. Horizontal viewing angles are reasonable, but the screen goes dark quickly when viewing from above or below. Large blocks of colour also have a grainy quality, but greyscales are well defined with little banding.

Three USB2.0 ports on the chassis should enable you to connect most of the peripherals you want, while S-video and D-sub connectors allow you to connect it to a TV or monitor.

The notebook has built-in wireless networking and a useful enable/disable switch on the front to save battery life, but no Bluetooth. Its Ethernet and modem ports are awkwardly recessed. There's a DVD/CD-RW combo drive so you can watch DVD movies and burn CDs on the move. The built-in speakers have little bass, but the sound is clear and free from distortion, if a little lacking in volume.

The Eco 4500 A's overall Shopper and PCMark04 scores are about average for a budget notebook. The overall Shopper score is dragged down by a poor performance in the image manipulation test, which we attribute to its low 256MB of memory and a slow 4,200rpm 40GB hard disk.

The integrated graphics performed as badly as can be expected in our 3D benchmarks. Although the notebook is not too heavy, mediocre battery life limits its usefulness for mobile computing.

The Maxdata Eco 4500 A has a good screen but only average performance for the price. Its low memory hinders the notebook's performance. There are plenty of better notebooks available for the money. See our 'Notebook Price Test' in Shopper May 2005 for some examples.