Price: $2349.99

Web Store: Wintec Direct

Software: Windows 98/NT

Ship Date: Now

The mobile PC market is splitting into two vastly different sectors. On the one hand you've got the super slim, ergonomic, lightweight, sleek and low power consuming Notebooks whilst on the other there are Notebooks that fall into the '10 pound sack of potatoes' category, with DVD, 15-inch screens and enough battery life to last the whole way from LA to New York. We'll be taking a closer look at some sleek slim line mobile PCs in the near future but the focus of this review is on the '10 pound sack of potatoes' type that's giving a new meaning to the word mobile. Never mind the weight, what about the power and can one really play games on a notebook these days? We took a look at Wintec's OMEGA 5000ES Pentium II 333MHz mobile PC in order to find out.

Wintec offers a full range of the NEW (Dixon) Pentium II CPUs, from 300MHz to 400MHz. For the purpose of this review, Wintec configured a 'mid-range' (more high than low) Pentium II 333MHz with an extremely solid AGP 2X compliant 440BX motherboard. Intel introduced the mobile Pentium II back in April 1998 but the design has since changed. Older Pentium II's were based upon its desktop equivalent with 512K of secondary cache memory that only ran at half the speed and sat side-by-side with the CPU. This new mobile CPU (the one Wintec also uses) harbors 256k of cache, which resides within the Pentium II's core itself. Thus the cache now runs at the full speed instead of half the speed. The new design also reduces the all too precious space needed for a CPU unit when designing a laptop. Power issues still plague any serious power-hungry notebook user and the OMEGA 5000ES is no different.