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Unfortunately, we're going to have to wait a little longer to get a conclusive idea of how the Penryn CPUs will affect battery life. Zepto machines we've looked at in the past have all sported below average battery performance and the Znote 3415W doesn't buck this trend. Of course there are many variables, including speed of hard drives, graphics cards and displays, that could have a significant impact and, as such, we really need a wider sample before we can make any real conclusions.

In any case, for posterity's sake, the results in the Productivity, Reader and DVD Playback tests were as follows:

As you can see the Zepto is noticeably down in all tests, though it ought to be repeated that these results are very unlikely to be representative and if anything, Penryn CPUs will probably offer a marginal improvement. This we'll only find out once we've seen a good selection of machines with different configurations.

Conclusions

Clearly Penryn was never going to be a revolution; it was never supposed to be. After all, it's still the same architecture using the same platform. However, the move to 45nm has brought some discernable improvements, with potentially higher clock speeds and the extra L2 Cache that'll come in useful in many scenarios. It's worth noting too that raw benchmarks don't tell the whole story, since our test unit did run noticeably cooler than some we've used in the past. This shouldn't come as too great a surprise and should prove advantageous to portable notebooks like the Dell XPS M1330, which still use the standard mobile processors but are intended for more mobile use where excess heat is an issue.

Moreover, with stockists clearing the decks in anticipation of Penryn, now is a really good time to pick up some great bargains. As we've seen in these tests the 65nm Merom CPUs still hold their own, so long as they're the full fat 4MB L2 Cache iterations. As such a really great notebook like the HP Pavilion dv2699 we reviewed recently can now be picked up for just over £700, which by our estimations is a real bargain.

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