AJP 8317 review

Like the Gateway 8550GB we reviewed last month and the Acer Aspire 9504WSMi on page 42, AJP's 8317 is a large notebook with a high-resolution widescreen display.

It looks similar, too, with a silver plastic finish and black keyboard. Unfortunately, it doesn't feel as well-built as either. The lid flexes a little under pressure and the keyboard is surrounded by a worryingly flexible and cheap looking sheet of shiny black plastic. Even the large power button feels squishy.

FEATURES

The 8317 has almost every port you could wish for. We were particularly impressed to see six USB 2 connectors on the left-hand side of the case, so you should have no problem adding extra peripherals. There's also a FireWire port, plenty of audio connectors and three video outputs. The DVI and VGA outputs are good for connecting to a monitor, or you could use the S-Video output to play a DVD through your TV.

Inside the notebook is an 80GB hard disk. This is a reasonable size, but it's not as good as the 100GB disks included by Gateway and Acer. A dual-layer DVD writer is fitted to the right side of the chassis. Wireless networking is built in, so connecting to the Internet wirelessly is easy, and Bluetooth is also fitted as standard. This makes it easy to synchronise data with a phone or PDA.

DESIGN AND FEEL

Most notebooks use a touchpad that's usually recessed from the main chassis or surrounded by a raised border so you know where to put your fingers. The 8317 is unusual in that it has no such markers - the touchpad is simply a part of the case below the keyboard, and it's marked with a transfer, stuck onto the case. This doesn't affect its performance, but it looks like a last-minute addition. The two buttons beneath the pad are a different matter. They look normal enough, but they're annoying to use and have an imprecise, squishy feel.

Fortunately, the keyboard is better. Like many widescreen notebooks, it has a full number pad to the right of the main keys. Each key has lots of travel, but a soft-sounding click - it's not perfect, but it's acceptable for everyday use.

The 17in widescreen display has a high native resolution of 1440x900 pixels, which is great when you're working, as you can fit several documents on-screen easily. Unfortunately, it isn't particularly bright and we noticed some slight darkening in the bottom corners during our white screen test. Some banding was visible in solid areas of grey, but this was less of a problem with full-colour images. This isn't a problem in day-to-day use, but the screen isn't as good as the Acer's.

PERFORMANCE

Inside the 8317 is a powerful AMD Athlon 64 3400+ processor. Unfortunately, this is paired with just 512MB of memory - 128MB of which is taken up by the integrated graphics. This hampers its performance in memory-intensive tasks like our image-editing test. It initially scored just 66.18 in our benchmarks, but by reducing the amount of memory used by the graphics, we were able to increase this score to a more respectable 77.98. Fitting 1GB of RAM would have been a better choice.

This kind of memory-hogging might be acceptable were the graphics processor powerful to give a good score in 3D games. It's not though - the 8317 ran our Doom 3 test at a juddering 2fps. You'll be able to play older games or the odd hand of solitaire, but modern 3D games are out of the question. This is disappointing when you consider that Gateway's 8550GB can run Doom 3 at 23.3fps, and costs just £12 more.

Its battery life isn't particularly impressive either. In our intensive test the 8317 lasted for just one hour and 42 minutes, so you'd have difficulty watching a long DVD without access to a power socket.