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Portable: ECS i-buddie 4 Review :: Features
The I-Buddie is based around a mobile styled SiS650 North Bridge and SiS961 South Bridge board and fitted into a plastic shell sizing in (with the monitor in the traveling position) at 13.07" x 10.81" x 1.76". You get support for the Socket 478 P4 series of processors from 1.4-20GHz with the Willamette core and the 2.0-2.8GHz with the Northwood core. The system has a 400MHz quad piped 100MHz FSB but does not support the recently released 533MHz FSB that will soon become the standard. Having a 15inch LCD monitor for your viewing area is like having a 17 inch CRT display only without the radiation making the I-Buddie a very good tool for the professional who is on the go but still needs a large area to constantly work with. When you consider all the features it has to offer including the Intel inside, pardon the pun it is extremely lightweight weighing only 7.0 pounds. It will fit in any laptop bag as well for easy traveling. If you want to take it on the go you will have to buy the optional external 12 Cell 2000mAh, 88Wh Lithium-Ion battery pack that allows you to pack up and use the i-Buddie anywhere you want to take it. This can come in quite handy when you need power and there are no outlets. The keyboard works very well as does the glide pad for using your mouse. I found playing games like Quake III to be a little difficult to control but for general writing and control every thing worked great. For games I would connect your own KB and mouse.
For input/output options this is a loaded gun as you get 4 USB 2.0 connectors, one parallel port one external monitor out a PS2 connector you also get an IEEE 1394 Firewire connector and a lastly for communication a 10/100 LAN RJ45 port and a 56Kmodem.
Another nice thing is the hard drive support. With the A928 you get ATA33/66/100 and Enhanced IDE (PIO mode 4) support. You can use 2.5" 9.5mm height drives up to 40GB so lack of storage space should not pose a problem. The onboard audio works rather well and the system supports 6 channels of AC'97 2.2 compliance audio for 5.1 channel Dolby Digital. There are two stereo speakers within a sound chamber and a microphone input is also present. For video support the system has a built in SiS 315 graphic core, AGP 4X supported. It features a 256bit 3D graphics engine that can run the 3D engine clock speed at up to 143MHz. The i-Buddie has incorporated a Share Memory Architecture that supports up to 64MB in a DDR frame buffer better known as shared system memory .
What this means is that now your 128MB DDR chip is now only giving the system about 60MB to run itself which is just not enough for a robust OS like XP. Do yourself a favor and get a 256MB stick or better for optimal system performance, you won't regret it. This system seems to have a bi-polar electrical disorder because sometimes it thinks it is a laptop and others times a desktop PC. For the user this is a very beneficial thing as the i-Buddie offers very solid features for such a small package. Lets move on to the performance section and see how well the system performed. I/O Options
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