Gigabyte M912 Reviewed: Performance Impressive, 2 Screens Confirmed

After teasing with an unboxing video yesterday, Chippy made good on his promise and ran benchmarks and gave in-depth opinions on the Gigabyte M912 touchscreen ultraportable last night.  Turns out that Gigabyte themselves were watching, and have confirmed that there will only be two versions of the M912: both will run Vista or XP (no Linux option), but where the M912 will have a 1280x768 CCFL-backlit LCD, the M912M will have a 1024x600 LED-backlit LCD.

Watch Chippy's overview review video after the cut

As for how the M912 actually performs, Chippy comes away impressed.  The 160GB drive shows fast 60MB/s read speeds, the RAM is easily upgraded (Gigabyte fit 1GB, but he's already tried it with 2GB) and the whole thing runs quietly and generally cool.  Best of all, the 1.6GHz Atom processor does a surprisingly smooth job running Vista.

It's not all ideal, though; although the CCFL-backlit screen has a higher resolution than the LED version, Chippy found it wasn't as bright as that on other netbooks and that it sucks up more power.  Under light use its averaging 3hrs use from a full charge: expect that to drop to 1.5hrs playing video at full brightness and with WiFi switched on.

This overview video comes in at a whopping 62 minutes; the full live demonstration (all six hours of it!) from last night is also available.  I'm hoping Chippy produces an even shorter, snapshot video: as I said before, the M912 (or perhaps more likely the M912M) could be a real game-changer in the netbook market, but people will need to be educated as to exactly why they should want a touchscreen on their laptop.