After years of being one of the most unpopular notebook brands (with probably the longest name Fujitsu-Siemens Computers), Fujitsu, now with much shorter brand name, finally settled down to making budget and mid range notebooks for the masses. One of the first re-branded Amilo series notebooks is the Pi 3560 – a 15.6-incher with NVIDIA GeForce GT 240M graphics. Fujitsu also has 16-inch Pi 3560s, but since they use the same screen resolution, we decided to take a look of the regular 15.6″.
Amilo Pi 3560 looks very much like any other Amilo notebook from the Black & White series, although the new black top cover (engraved with Fujitsu’s logo) and the grayish, covered with stylized flower motives plastic of the palm rest differ it from the last FSC B&W design. Of course the most interesting part is under the cover and it includes Intel Core 2 Duo P7450 processor, 3 gigs of RAM and the aforementioned GT 240M graphics by NVIDIA. The rest fits today’s trends and it’s pretty much standard for mid-range notebook – 500 GB Seagate Momentus 5400.6 hard drive, Intel PM45 chipset and the regular Wireless-N and Bluetooth connections.
There is not much to say about the hardware, except the fact, that it comes at really low price, and it gives enough performance to play more recent games than with the more popular now notebooks based on ATI’s Mobility Radeon HD4570. The 40 nm GeForce GT 240M is a die shrink of the older GeForce 9700M GTS and features 48 shader cores working at 550 MHz, and it is supposed to have much lower power consumption than its predecessor, which allows manufacturers to use it in multimedia notebooks with less restrictive power requirements, such as Amilo Pi 3560, even when equipped with 1 GB of DDR3 video memory. Compared to ATI cards it’s close to Mobility Radeon HD4650, but slower than HD4670 (which you will hardly see in 3DMark06, but in games and with anti-aliasing and/or anisotropic filtering it will behave worse in almost any game. nevertheless, it has at least twice, if not more, the performance of Mobility Radeon HD4570, and we should point out the fact it comes at the same price with Pi 3560, which makes it much better solution compared to Acer Aspire 5730G, Toshiba L500 or Dell’s Studio 1555 based on HD4570. That is, for games.
The notebook itself looks stable and better built than most budget or low-end notebooks, which makes Fujitsu’s claims about its German design and high quality true. The cooling system is one of the best we’ve seen and it wondrously includes copper heat-sink instead of the regular aluminum one. Plus the hot air can exit from both rear and left sides of the notebook, which allows you to use it even where other notebooks cooling would fail – for example Acer’s newest Aspire 5738 and 5739 notebooks have an issue with hot air being trapped by the screen if you open the lid more than usual. The bootom part of Pi 3560 also includes something that might seems unimportant to most people, but it’s good decision anyway – those cooling grills above the memory, hard drive and wireless expansion card allow you to improve notebook’s temperatures with so called notebook cooling pads, if you consider to use one.
The worse part of Fujitsu Amilo Pi 3560 is the screen, which uses low cost TN panel with very narrow viewing angles (at least from sides and above, which are most important ones) and shows somehow pale colours with lower than average contrast. Compared to other notebooks at same price tag it only seems worse than those FullHD panels in Dell Studio 1555, as the rest of the budget multimedia notebooks use similar if not the same screens. Notebook manufacturers call the 1366×768 pixels resolution “HD Ready” as if it has really something to do woth HD content, but the reason is it covers 720p well. Problem is that 16:9 movies are not as popular as marketing teams like to say in their press releases and product previews, bur rather in odd cinema formats which leave you with black stripes above and below the movie, no matter if it’s a 16:9 or 16:10 screen.
As for benchmarks – Fujitsu Amilo Pi 3560 manages to run most recent games well, even if it’s not advisable to use max details in native resolution. Seagate’s Momentus 5400.6 drive is not one of the fastest around, but manages to achieve around 70 MB/s linear transfer rates with good performance even when working with small blocks of data, as ATTO shows. It has basic performance, but you can always change it with Seagate’s 7200.3 500 GB or wait for Western Digital’s 640GB Scorpio Blue.
3DMark06, 1280x768
As you can see from the 3DMark06 results, there is plenty to optimize in terms of overclocking. Those new 40nm cards from NVIDIA can OC very well without making real difference in consumption or lead to heat dissipation problems, and you can do it with NVIDIA System Performance Tool (now with longer name) right in your NVIDIA Control Panel. The newest beta driver from NVIDIA shows less performance than the modded drivers we used back when we first got our hands on Acer Aspire 7738G, based on Core 2 Duo and GT 240M, and the results are still much lower than those of ATI Mobility Radeon HD4670, especially in the more important HDR/SM3.0 benchmark.
S.T.A.L.K.E.R Clear Sky DX10.1 renderer, 1280x768
With only one exception in S.T.A.L.K.E.R Clear Sky “Rain” minimum framerate, HD4670 is much better even than the overclocked geForce GT 240M. Anyway, it’s just a benchmark score and you cannot get HD4670 at the same price, so no point talking about it.
ATTO benchmark - Seagate Momentus 5400.6
You cannot compare this to Seagate’s own Momentus 7200.3 performance, but again, it comes cheap.
So how twisted is Fujitus Amilo Pi 3560? Seriously, when you are after cheap notebook with good VGA and overall performance, there is no better solution than this one. Compared to other systems with the same price tag, you will see that most of them have Mobility Radeon HD4570, which is next to budget graphics as opposed to GeForce GT 240M’s good performance in most games. The new Amilo also has optical S/P DIF integrated in its 3.5 mm headphone connector and, compared to other similar notebooks, also has ExpressCard /54mm expansion slot and eSATA (and of course HDMI and VGA), which make its connectivity superior to any other notebook in its price category.
2/10, and not even the pink palmrest we are expecting to see in Fujitsu’s next model can change our opinion.
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Great review guys – very informative. I have just purchased a slightly lower spec 16″ version – 320GB HD and a T4300 dual core Intel. I would be very grateful if someone (perhaps one of the Twisted Team!)could advice me how easy it would be in the future to upgrade the processor in this laptop? Intel PM45 chipset limitations aside; is it easily accessible and more importantly easily ‘changeable’ i.e. non soldered?
I’m guessing that the GT 240M could be replaced in the future too – or would there be issues with this.
All in all though – for less than 500 quid this a total steal.
Thanks for your help
D.
The CPU is not soldered, so you may replace it (ebay is great source or cheap mobile CPU from the T series), but the GPU is soldered to the motherboard, so you won’t be able to upgrade it, even if you find something better. Not that is possible to upgrade it now (except for the HD4670 for MSI service channels) because it’s obe of the last GPUs in the mid-range gaming GPUs to use MXM2 by default. Most GPUs are now MXM3 already, so you have one the best of those available for the entry level gaming laptops already, even if soldered onto the motherboard.
Cheers for quick reply on this guys – that’s good news on the CPU front. Based on the PM45 chipset, would this mean I could put any of the following CPUs in – or are there further limitations (RAM speed aside)? Thanks again.
Intel® Core™2 Extreme Processor QX9300 (12M Cache, 2.53 GHz, 1066 MHz FSB)
Intel® Core™2 Extreme Processor QX9300 (12M Cache, 2.53 GHz, 1066 MHz FSB)
Intel® Core™2 Extreme Processor X9100 (6M Cache, 3.06 GHz, 1066 MHz FSB)
Intel® Core™2 Quad Processor Q9100 (12M Cache, 2.26 GHz, 1066 MHz FSB)
Intel® Core™2 Extreme Processor X9100 (6M Cache, 3.06 GHz, 1066 MHz FSB)
Intel® Core™2 Quad Processor Q9100 (12M Cache, 2.26 GHz, 1066 MHz FSB)
Intel® Core™2 Duo Processor T9800 (6M Cache, 2.93 GHz, 1066 MHz FSB)
Intel® Core™2 Duo Processor T9900 (6M Cache, 3.06 GHz, 1066 MHz FSB)
Intel® Core™2 Duo Processor T9800 (6M Cache, 2.93 GHz, 1066 MHz FSB)
Intel® Core™2 Duo Processor T9900 (6M Cache, 3.06 GHz, 1066 MHz FSB)
Intel® Core™2 Duo Processor P9500 (6M Cache, 2.53 GHz, 1066 MHz FSB)
Intel® Core™2 Duo Processor P9600 (6M Cache, 2.66 GHz, 1066 MHz FSB)
Intel® Core™2 Duo Processor P9700 (6M Cache, 2.80 GHz, 1066 MHz FSB)
Intel® Core™2 Duo Processor P9500 (6M Cache, 2.53 GHz, 1066 MHz FSB)
Intel® Core™2 Duo Processor P9600 (6M Cache, 2.66 GHz, 1066 MHz FSB)
Intel® Core™2 Duo Processor P9700 (6M Cache, 2.80 GHz, 1066 MHz FSB)
Intel® Core™2 Duo Processor T9400 (6M Cache, 2.53 GHz, 1066 MHz FSB)
Intel® Core™2 Duo Processor T9550 (6M Cache, 2.66 GHz, 1066 MHz FSB)
Intel® Core™2 Duo Processor T9600 (6M Cache, 2.80 GHz, 1066 MHz FSB)
Intel® Core™2 Duo Processor T9400 (6M Cache, 2.53 GHz, 1066 MHz FSB)
Intel® Core™2 Duo Processor T9550 (6M Cache, 2.66 GHz, 1066 MHz FSB)
Intel® Core™2 Duo Processor T9600 (6M Cache, 2.80 GHz, 1066 MHz FSB)
Intel® Core™2 Duo Processor P8800 (3M Cache, 2.66 GHz, 1066 MHz FSB)
Intel® Core™2 Duo Processor P8800 (3M Cache, 2.66 GHz, 1066 MHz FSB)
Intel® Core™2 Duo Processor P8400 (3M Cache, 2.26 GHz, 1066 MHz FSB)
Intel® Core™2 Duo Processor P8600 (3M Cache, 2.40 GHz, 1066 MHz FSB)
Intel® Core™2 Duo Processor P8700 (3M Cache, 2.53 GHz, 1066 MHz FSB)
Intel® Core™2 Duo Processor P8400 (3M Cache, 2.26 GHz, 1066 MHz FSB)
Intel® Core™2 Duo Processor P8600 (3M Cache, 2.40 GHz, 1066 MHz FSB)
Intel® Core™2 Duo Processor P8700 (3M Cache, 2.53 GHz, 1066 MHz FSB)
Does anyone here know what cmos battery this laptop takes and how easy it is accessable?
Thanks
Did you find out where it is? I’ve just bought a new one for my daughter (student) and the CMOS battery is pretty near dead and I can’t wait while for the online retailer to fix it as it is needed now and works apart from that.
No, I never found out I am still waiting for a response.