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GCN Home > April 17, 2000 issue

Sceptre Soundx 6600 notebook is a perfect fit for the road

By John Breeden II
GCN Staff

The Sceptre Soundx 6600 comes close to my ideal of a notebook computer. It’s more powerful than most desktop systems.

The 6600 has good graphics and memory support, and it weighs just 7 pounds. Everything I need on the road is in the triple-spindle design: a DVD-ROM drive, a 1.44M floppy drive and a 10G hard drive. All components come integrated into the case, so there’s no need to swap drives on the road.

One school of thought says a double-spindle design saves weight when traveling, because you can leave the floppy or CD-ROM drive behind. But I’d rather have all my drives along just in case. When reviewing double-spindle notebooks, I often end up stuffing the extra drive into the carrying case.

Sceptre has improved the CD-ROM drive’s performance over earlier models, which stuck the floppy and the CD-ROM drive—now a DVD-ROM drive—into the same bay. The forced double-spindle design with three drives gave patchy CD-ROM performance.

Driving along

Box Score              
Soundx 6600
500-MHz Pentium III portable

Sceptre Technologies; City of Industry, Calif.;
tel. 888-523-3815
www.sceptre.com
Price: $2,810 GSA

+ Fast processor and excellent overall performance
+ Triple-spindle design
+ Fairly lightweight







UsabilityA+
Features and ConfigurationA+
Benchmark PerformanceA+
ZD's Business Windstone 9922.5
More than twice as fast as a 233-MHz Pentium MMX


The overall grade comprises scores for three factors: usability (60 percent), features and configuration (20 percent), and performance (20 percent). The lab used ZD’s Winstone 99 Version 1.1. The baseline for 10.0 Winstone units is a 233-MHz Pentium MMX. For benchmark information, go to www.gcn.com/gcnlab/benchmark.


The 6600 has the DVD drive in front and the floppy drive on the side. I saw no DVD performance problems, either playing a movie or running an application that constantly accessed data on a CD.

The 9.34G hard drive was spacious. I would run out of space on my desktop systems before I ever started to feel the crunch on this notebook.

If speed is what you need, this baby cooks. It has a 500-MHz Pentium III processor supported by a 256K Level 2 cache. The 100-MHz system bus is a big reason the notebook runs incredibly fast no matter what the application. I installed three office suites, and all ran as well as on a 450-MHz Pentium II desktop system or better. The 128M of RAM comes standard, so you needn’t worry about memory-intensive applications. And the unit aced the GCN Lab’s ZD Benchmark Operation test suite.

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