When you look at the market for standard-size rugged notebook computers, it's primarily a race between offerings from Panasonic, Getac, and GD-Itronix. Dell has ruggedized versions of some of its commercial notebooks, and there are some Taiwan-based OEMs that have been making inroads. Getac, however, is definitely one of the major players, and it's probably fair to say that Panasonic and GD-Itronix are their major competition.

In terms of dimensions, weight and display size, rugged notebooks in this class have 13.3-inch displays with the old 4:3 aspect ratio, and they weigh around eight pounds. The B300 has a footprint of 11.9 x 10.3 inches (the substantial magnesium handle with a group of indicator lights in its base adds another inch and a quarter), and our review machine weighed in at 8.6 pounds, including handle and battery. The B300 is also about 2.4 inches thick, so this is no ultra-thin or lightweight. Size and weight, however, are about standard in this class. You don't slip a computer like the B300 into a briefcase, but this fully rugged warrior is really only a couple of pounds heavier than today's commercial full-size wide-screen notebooks.

When they originally designed this fanless machine, Getac engineers faced the challenge of dissipating the heat of a fairly powerful processor. They did this by using a total of almost three feet of copper heatpiping that removed the heat generated by the primary chips. Amazingly, despite switching to a faster chip with a 50% higher thermal design power (25 ves 17 watts), Getac managed to stay with a fanless design, and how they did it becomes obvious once you remove the inside of the bottom cover. It uses the same thermal engineering principles as used in the original B300: heat spreader plates press against the CPU and chipset via thermally conductive material, the heat spreader plates connect to copper heat pipes, and the copper heat pipes are secured to the Magnesium alloy backplate. While the overall thermal design method remains the same, heat is spread (and dissipated) much more efficiently by expanding copper heat piping by about 50%; the B300 uses about 48 inches of copper heat piping versus only about 32 inches in the older unit. Outside, a sheet of thin, hard plastic is glued onto the surface, either to provide additional protection against scratching, or to make for a cooler touch when held in your hands.

Below you can see the original B300's thermal design solution (left), and the significantly beefed-up solution of the new B300 (right) that allows operating a 2GHz Core i7 processor without fan.

The bottom of the unit consists of a contoured magnesium alloy plate with a continuous O-right style seal along the entire perimeter. It is held securely in place by 18 small Philips screws (they come in two different sizes and some have washers whereas others do not). The whole assembly has an industrial high-tech look that always differentiates Getac machines.

The sole door in the bottom plate has eight rounded corner -- no mere rectangles here -- and is also neatly and precisely sealed via foam pressing against an o-ring-style metal lip. The door is secured with six small Philips screws and provides access to the unit's two SO-DIMM slots (in our unit populated by two 2GB PC3/1066 modules).

The hard disk caddy (see image to the right) is a remarkably intricate affair consisting of a metal outer housing heavily padded with different types of foam and neoprene. What appears to be a heating element is wrapped around the disk (a Toshiba MK2565GSX in our unit). The optical drive in our unit was a Sony Optiarc AD-7580S DVD/CD rewritable drive (see specs).

The battery is a powerful 11.1 Volt/7,8000mAH 87 watt-hour unit with a built-in battery gauge that shows charge status via five green lights upon pressing the button next to it. You can't see the charge meter when the battery is installed in the unit, but it comes in handy when you carry spare batteries around. The battery can be removed if the unit is plugged in, but it is not hot-swappable.

As a full-size rugged notebook, the B300 comes with a full complement of ports, all of which are protected either by rubber plugs or hinged doors. The pictures below right show the left and the right side of the B300, both with the doors open and closed.

On the left side of the unit are the Media Bay and access to the main battery. The Media Bay is protected by a hinged door that snaps closed when two hooks engage. A spring-loaded lever releases the hooks. The door seals tightly when closed. The battery compartment has a double-locking mechanism. First you move a small lever to unlock the main lever. Then you move a larger lever to fully release the door. Both levers go hard and it is unlikely that they'll ever open by accident.

On the right side you find access to the hard disk, expansion ports, and a variety of other ports. The hard disk caddy sits behind a double-lock door like the one used for the battery on the other side. The door closes and seals securely, but it cannot be locked, and thus provides potentially unwanted access to the hard disk. On the other hand, military and other customers often require the ability to quickly and easily remove the hard disk. A hinged plastic door with a rubber pressure seal protects the stacked PC Card Type II and ExpressCard 34/54 slots and two USB 2.0 ports, one of which is of the combination USB/eSata variety. A compartment next to it has separate microphone and headphone jacks, a IEEE1394 "FireWire" port, an HDMI port (new), a springloaded SD card slot, and an (unmarked) RF switch that turns all installed radios on or off. Next to that is yet another door that protects and seals the RJ-45 gigabit LAN jack as well an the RJ11 landline jack for those who still use modems.

Along the backside of the B300, which is unchanged compared to the original design, are the individually sealed power jack and an also individually sealed third USB 2.0 port. The better part of the backside is taken up by a large hinged door that covers two 9-pin DB9 serial ports and a 25-pin video port. The cover has an integrated sliding door that provides access to the expansion bus connector even while the main door is closed. On the right side is a Kensington lock slot, and there are two D-rings for a carry strap.

Most of the doors have metal hinges that are screwed onto the body and the actual door via two Philips screws each, making replacements very easy.

The front of the unit does not have any connectors or ports other than two small speakers to the left and right of the LCD case clasp. There wouldn't be room for anything else as most of the front is taken up the large, impressive looking magnesium handle that is screwed onto the system side of the computer. There are, however, five indicator lights built into the right side of the handle base. They show the status of power, battery, WiFi, Bluetooth and GPS.

The B300's 89-key keyboard is full-scale. It has black keys with white labels. Instead of using less legible blue for function key combos, Getac used white for those labels also, but placed them in little white square boxes.

Below the keyboard is a small and slightly recessed (so you can feel its boundaries in the dark) touchpad and two mouse buttons. The touchpad is on the smallish side, but it's much more responsive than the one on its arch nemesis, the Panasonic 31. To the right is a fingerprint reader that has its own sliding door.

The keyboard has a red backlight that can be set to come on automatically. It's pleasant and clearly illuminates the keys in semi and full darkness. One potential problem is that when viewed from an angle, the red illumination peeking out between keys can overwhelm the actual illumination of the key.

Above the keyboard are five hardware pushbuttons. From left to right, they are:

• Power
• P1 function button (turned display on and off on our unit)
• ECO button for engaging power conservation mode under battery power
• High-Bright button (turns display to full 1,400 nit power)
• Light sensor (engages light sensor adjustment of display brightness)

They moved up the performance ladder, but without going all out and incurring high performance related penalties. The step up from the original 1.6GHz Intel Core 2 Duo L7500 to the 2.0GHz Intel Core i7-620LM is substantial, especially since the new chip can operate at up to 2.8GHz in turbo mode (Intel's turbo mode allows the chip to incrementally overclock itself if certain conditions are met). The picture to the right shows the guts of the Intel Core i7 processor with its integrated graphics core and compansion chip. Rival Panasonic faced the same issue when evolving their Toughbook 30 to the latest Toughbook 31 model. They moved from a 1.6GHz Intel Core 2 Duo SL9300 all the way up to a 2.53GHz Intel Core i5-540M, a standard voltage chip with a substantial TDP of 35 watt. This necessitated a fan for the latest Panasonic while, with the low voltage 620LM processor, Getac still managed to run the machine without a fan.

In order to get a sense of where the B300's performance level stands compared to its predecessor and its major competitors, we installed Passmark Software's PerformanceTest 6.1 that runs about 30 tests covering CPU, 2D graphics, 3D graphics, memory, and disk and then computes scores for each category and an overall PassMark score. We also ran our second benchmark suite, CrystalMark. The results are below, and for comparison we added the original B300, the latest Panasonic 31, as well as three GD-Itronix units that also compete in or near this class.

What does all of this newly enhanced performance mean for the new B300's battery life? The competition has set the bar pretty high in this class, with the Panasonic 31 and the GD-Itronix GD8000 both reaching over eight hours of theoretical battery life in our tests. The first generation B300, too, was a power-mizer and managed to reach a theoretical maximum battery life of almost 12 hours.

Running our standard BatteryMon benchmark with the B300 in ECO mode (radios off, LCD lowest, etc.) we recorded a power draw of as little as 8.9 watts, and generally in the 9 to 10 watt range. We then set the B300 to high-performance mode and the display to normal brightness. This increased power draw to 17 watts. We then turned on the super-bright backlight, and power draw rose to 28 watts. Setting the machine to power saver mode, but leaving the LCD in full-bright mode, reduced draw to 25 watts.

Getac's own G-Manager utility also includes a Battery status screen and it pretty much confirmed the results we'd seen on BatteryMon. G-Manager showed a minimum draw that was a bit higher at around 10.5 watts, and maximum draw about the same as we had see in BatteryMon at 29 watts. Given the B300's powerful 87 watt-hour battery, this would translate in a theoretical maximum battery life of 8 to 10 hours, and around three hours or so in full-power mode with the display set to maximum brightness (which on the B300 is VERY bright).

Below is a screen capture of the very useful Getac G-Manager utility.

As always, real world mileage will vary. Minimum draw in a test lab is not an accurate predictor of actual battery life (we've seen standard voltage i5/i7 processors draw less than ultra-low-voltage versions). However, between the very good power management of the mobile Intel Core i5/i7 processors, Windows 7's much improved power management, and the Getac B300's extensive power management settings, if the situation requires it, the B300 can run a good long time on a charge, and twice that via an optional second battery that goes into the media bay en lieu of the optical drive. Do keep in mind, though, that power settings do affect clock speed.

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