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ABS Mayhem G4 Laptop

As a step in the direction of diversifying our OEM systems evaluation program, we take a look at a laptop from ABS. ABS has been in the systems integration business for 15 years and is the OEM behind Newegg.com. Carrying a 6600 Go and touted by ABS as a gaming laptop, the bar is set.

Part I - Overview: Inside the Chassis and Booting Up

Internal Affairs

Let's have a look at the system specifications before we take a peek inside:

As I've mentioned before, this chassis is easy on the eyes. It's stylish and fairly light (6.6lbs), and has a very nice keyboard and a large touchpad. Now we’ll move on to dissecting the system. Most of the screws were easy to remove, but a few of them were rather difficult. I'm not entirely sure why, but we had to use some elbow grease to get a couple of them out.

When we remove the first panel, we find our Toshiba hard drive. If you've never seen a notebook drive, it's strange to see a hard drive that small. It's locked into place with a few screws and an IDE cable that's not quite visible underneath the adjacent cover.

When we remove the main panel, we see the rest of the guts. In the upper left of the unit, we see the processor. As you can see, we have copper heat piping connecting the CPU to the intake fan. Right in the middle of the chassis, we find the mobile PCI-E 16X slot, home to the 6600 Go GPU. The fan is actually mounted directly to the card, so the vent on the chassis needs to match up with the fan. Just south of the 6600, we find the RAM. It's only 512MB of the 1GB we purchased with this machine, so the other stick is probably underneath the keyboard, as is the case with most other laptop designs.

Removing the keyboard was far more difficult than we imagined. Although we located the holding clips easily enough, releasing them did nothing to allow us to remove the keyboard. I pulled on it rather firmly, but I wasn’t able to remove it. I was able to release one side on the bottom, but there was a large tab that was holding the board in that didn't look like it was supposed to come out. There was no mention of how to remove the keyboard in the manual. Trusting that the BIOS knows how to count RAM capacity, we left it alone.

The highlight of the dissection process is that the placement of the hardware was well thought out. The judicious separation of the heat-producing components contributes to keeping the overall system chassis cool during normal activity. We'll take a closer look at this when we put it through the ringer with our Torture Test.

Getting the Boot

There's no prompt to get into the BIOS, so I had to explore the function keys. Turns out you press F2 to get in there. In general, there are very few luxuries afforded to the user.

Of the options and settings, here's what's available for the consumer. Under the Advanced tab, we see IDE Configuration. This will come up later, but for now, notice that most of the options for the IDE devices are set to 'Auto' to prevent conflicts.

Because we're dealing with a laptop, we see some options that we usually don't see in a desktop BIOS. The display settings tab allows us to select the video input at boot up. If you have a laptop display that leaves much to be desired, a common solution is to hook up a nice CRT or LCD to it so that you have a decent display when you're at home or work. The next tab is Security. It's basically the same type of thing you usually find here in a desktop BIOS, but with a few interesting features. One feature is that you can set up passwords for multiple users, which is something you don't see often. Because many people swap out hard drives in laptops as a means of adding extra storage, there's also an added feature for password protecting hard drives.

There's also a Power tab that is usually not much of a concern with desktops. I tried tinkering with the LCD Power Saving setting, but I didn't see a difference. The Battery Calibration option is a bit of a hassle as it drains the battery completely, and then you have to recharge it. After having this computer for several months and alternating frequently between AC and DC power, this may be a very useful feature. The last tab is for boot sequence.

In summary, this laptop’s BIOS isn't an extraordinarily strong tool. Not many people overclock laptops, but if that's what you want to do, you won't be able to do it within the BIOS.

Laptop Desktop

After inspecting the BIOS and restarting, we booted up in 34 seconds -- the fastest boot so far of any system we've tested. We're greeted with a very clean desktop, and the only alert was courtesy of SP2 security. There's a couple of System Tray icons I've never seen before, so let's see what they are. The first is a power management profiler. We'll go into some of these settings a bit later in the General Usage section. The second icon is an Intel Wireless manager.

The Start Menu is clean. However, there are a couple of items that don't ring a bell. One is Generic ChkMail, a utility that allows whatever email program you use to interface with an LED on the system. It never worked for me, but I didn't tinker with it much. The other item is Power4 Gear, which is the power profile manager. It's absent of bloatware, but ABS didn't shower us with gifts, either. For my tastes, I prefer a clean system so that I can choose what I want on my machine, which is what we have here. Others, however, may prefer to have the bundle that we sometimes find on large OEM machines, so that the user has all of their potential wants and needs accounted for.

Since this system is marketed as a gaming laptop, we thought we might take a look at what graphics drivers came loaded on the system. Because the system is tested before shipping, we assumed that all of the drivers would be updated to the most recent WHQL certified version. However, this was not the case. The notebook shipped with 71.13, even though the ABS Web site was already offering 73.00. As a reference, the current WHQL driver revision available for desktop systems is 78.01, with the 80 series available in the very near future. The 71.13 series that came loaded on the system is 5 months behind. Even the 73.00 version is 4 months old. Desktop drivers have moved up an entire generation in the meantime.

Next in our search for bloatware, we took a gander at the Internet Explorer window, to see if we could find extra toolbars, etc. We were pleasantly surprised to find that there are no extra toolbars, and even the homepage was set to the Windows installation default.

So far, we've got a pretty clean system. The one exception is the list of running processes in Windows Task Manager below. Even Google doesn't know what some of this stuff is. It's not in startup, and why some of them won't show up in a Start Menu Search is nothing short of mind boggling. Some of these items are for controlling the chassis LEDs, others for power management, and others for wireless internet.