PLATINUM LABS Ultrabooks PLATINUM LABSUltrabooks

www.pcpro.co.ukPC PRO•APRIL 2012132

LABS Ultrabooks LABSUltrabooks

www.pcpro.co.uk 133PC PRO•APRIL 2012

7

6

53

4

8

8

1

2

6 SSD An HDD means less space for everything else, so manufacturers have adopted SSD modules (such as the one pictured) or tiny mSATA SSDs (such as in Dell’s XPS 13). These pack hundreds of gigabytes of high-speed storage into a tiny footprint, perfect for an Ultrabook.

7 COOLING FAN While Intel’s low-voltage CPUs tend to run cool, the inside of an Ultrabook doesn’t give them much room to breathe. Some heat dissipates through the chassis, but heat pipes are required to ferry heat away from the CPU and PCH, aided by a low-profile cooling fan.

8 SPEAKERS Laptops aren’t renowned for their sound quality – after all, this usually requires large speakers and powerful amplifiers – but Ultrabooks work wonders, combining tiny drivers with digital sound-processing algorithms to make a richer noise than you expect.

3 PCH (PLATFORM CONTROLLER HUB) Intel has done away with the bottleneck of the old north bridge and south bridge. Designed to give the CPU faster communication with the motherboard, the PCH provides a high-speed link for both graphics and general data transfer.

2 WIRELESS CHIPSET With many Ultrabooks doing away with the Ethernet socket, the wireless chipset is crucial. Several models have cut costs with single-band chipsets, but it’s a false economy – dual-band 802.11n is essential for high-speed wireless networking.

1 BATTERY Squeezing battery life into a shell millimetres thick is no easy task. Unless, that is, you use lithium ion polymer batteries. Both lighter and more flexible than the rigid lithium ion cells, these malleable pouches form slender batteries that fit the tightest of spaces.

4 RAM If you were hoping to upgrade the RAM, think again. With little space left for a normal-sized motherboard, or even a full-sized hard disk, manufacturers have compromised by embedding RAM directly onto the motherboard. Don’t settle for anything less than 4GB.

5 CPU With Ultrabooks adopting Intel’s low-voltage Core i5 or i7 CPUs, there’s no lack of performance. The integrated graphics give modest gaming capability, and battery life stretches almost to the nine-hour mark. The forthcoming Ivy Bridge should set the bar even higher.

Anatomy of an Ultrabook It’s easy to take technology for granted but, as these photos of Asus’ UX31 show, plenty of work goes into cramming all the required components into a slim, graceful chassis