Test: Ultrabooks with Ivy Bridge

With the Ultrabooks you get finally flat, light and nevertheless fast notebooks for an affordable price. Because extremely compact subnotebooks existed earlier, they were with prices around the 2000 euro only almost inexpensible. The price of the five ultrabooks in this test, however, ranges between 800 euros for the Fujitsu Lifebook UH572 and 1200 euros for the Toshiba Satellite Z930-119.


Ivy Bridge Technology


And for that, you get devices that boast fast Ivy-Bridge core processors, SSDs, or at least cache SSDs and high-quality aluminum or magnesium housings. USB 3.0 is now integrated into the Intel chipset and is therefore part of the basic equipment. An HDMI jack is available for all five test devices, as well as a memory card reader and a webcam.


Faster graphics at Ivy Bridge


Test: Design Ultrabooks


Conclusion


With a screen diagonal of 13.3 inches and a maximum weight of 1.4 kg, the Ultrabooks are primarily intended as travel companions. This is because the devices with SSD are not suitable for the desktop replacement, they offer up to the Toshiba with its 256-GBytes-only memory capacity of 128 GB.


Also an optical drive could not accommodate one of the five manufacturers in the flat chassis, which is a basic requirement for a 13.3 inch Ultrabook. The performance of the HD-4000 graphics is now fully adequate for graphically less complex 3D games, but demanding DX11 titles only run with far lower quality settings and do not make any sense.


Intel likes to designate its development model as a tick-tick tactics for processors: a new processor architecture (Tock) always follows a die-shrink, which means the switch to a new production technology with smaller transistors (tick). This is the case with Ivy Bridge, the third-generation core processors. They are manufactured in a 22-nanometer process and are also made up of tri-gate transistors.


Buying advice: Notebooks from 13 inches


In these tri-gate transistors, the gates are placed over three-dimensional fins made of silicon substrate, the electrons flowing over all three sides of these fins instead of as before through the gate (planar transistor). This simplifies the construction of smaller transistors, but also benefits with performance and power consumption. In addition, multiple transistors can be arranged side by side on a transistor to improve performance.


As Intel is able to accommodate 1.4 instead of 1.16 billion transistors on the die, the developers have also made some improvements to the architecture, especially with the integrated graphics unit. It now supports DirectX 11 and OpenGL 3.1.


Test: Notebooks up to 550 Euro


In the mobile processors, the HD-4000 GPU is now integrated into Sandy Bridge, instead of the twelve execution units of the HD 3000 graphics. Since in these execution units the calculation of the 3D graphics takes place, it has become much faster. The Intel developers have also invested a further fine-tuning with Quick-Sync-Video, a function in which the GPU encodes and encodes video. It should be twice as fast in Ivy Bridge as at Sandy Bridge.


The test goes to the Zenbook Prime UX31A from Asus. The sleek and stylish 1100 Euro Ultrabook is the only device in the test to display a full HD resolution. It also provides the highest performance, a very good battery life and an aluminum housing with a torsion-resistant display lid. A minus is the USB-LAN adapter, which only works with 100 MBit.


Guide: Ivy Bridge faster and more economical


This saves time when copying large files, such as HD videos. When the lowest possible weight is the focus, then the 1100 gram Toshiba Satellite Z930 is the model of choice. However, it leaves a much less solid impression than the Asus.


If you want to spend less money, with our purchase tip, the 800 Euro cheap Sony VAIO SVT1311W1E, well served. The smart device is equipped with a SSD despite the comparatively low price and has all important interfaces. It can be shining through the best battery life in the test. Only the highly reflective display has to get used to, for the outdoor use it is not optimal.


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