Specifications

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As shown, the transfer rate of the D430′s
4200RPM drive is rather low, but this is to be
expected for a smaller and slower drive. SSD
drives are available for the D430 and would
eliminate this bottleneck. Another thing to
mention is that the HDD is a PATA/IDE drive,
which means you’ll need to pay attention to
make sure you get a compatible drive if you
ever upgrade anything.
Lastly, the D430 comes equipped with the Intel
GMA 950 IGP. Oddly enough, Intel choose to
keep the GMA 950 as the IGP of choice for the
ULV platform. The performance of the GMA
950 has been well documented since it came
out some time ago, but we’ll summarize a little bit here with a benchmark score.
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With a score of 348, it is obvious that the D430 will not be playing the latest games. Sure, it will play Grand
Theft Auto: Vice City, Final Fantasy VII & VIII, the original Neverwinter Nights, and maybe even the original
Halo game. But anything that is not at least a few years old is going to choke this card. Halo is pushing it, as
at the lowest settings it is barely playable, so I think I’ll stick to Solitaire thank you very much.
This particular IGP, or any IGP, is chosen not to play games but to do its basic office jobs while drawing a
minimum amount of power. The D430 is no exception, and while you can have a little fun with this laptop it is
primarily an office machine.
Well, all these benchmark programs cannot really say how the average user is going to feel about a
computer, so on with my personal opinions regarding performance.
Even though the processor is only a single core 1.2GHz processor (which furthermore runs around 800MHz
when self-downclocking with its SpeedStep technology), during general usage I do not feel that the laptop is
slow. All of the Microsoft Office applications perform well enough, though Outlook does occasionally freeze
up at the start. Playing music and typing this review did not pose any problems, and Firefox runs just as fast
as it would on my desktop system. In fact, FF only starts having problems with 10+ tabs open and drains
around 256-512MB of memory…but that may be in part due to caching (where the HDD speed shows) or
some other unknown performance-related issue. Oh, and did I mention that I’m running Norton 2008 on this
Pa
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