Gaming
We've tested the gaming performance of a number of recent laptops using Quake Live, but unfortunately, that didn't work out on the X340. At the lowest quality video settings we could use, frame rates in Quake Live averaged around 8 FPS, too slow for play-testing. That's quite a bit slower than we'd expect, even out of Intel integrated graphics, and I believe the problem was somehow related to a sound driver issue. Sound stuttered severely in the game, and an audio-related process in Vista would consume 25-33% of CPU time even after we exited the game. We tried three different sound driver revisions, though, with no improvement.

Fortunately, some other games ran just fine. The excellent World of Goo ran fluidly at the X340's full screen resolution, and frame rates in Guild Wars at 1366x768 averaged in the high 30s and low 40s, which is quite playable. I decided to push even more and try Call of Duty 4, but that was too much for the GMA 4500MHD. The game did run without crashing, but even at its very lowest quality settings, frame rates remained firmly planted in the single digits. That's more or less as one might expect from this class of GPU hardware. Although it claims to be DirectX 10 capable and might meet the feature set qualifications, the GMA 4500MHD doesn't have the graphical horsepower required by recent console and PC titles with robust per-pixel lighting and shader effects.

Battery life
Each system's battery was discharged completely and recharged before each of our battery life tests. We used a ~30% screen brightness setting on the Eee PC, which is easily readable under normal indoor lighting. That brightness level is roughly equivalent to the 40% brightness settings we used on the NC20 and dv2. The X340 was tested using the "Turbo battery" profile, though with custom brightness. Oddly enough, the X340's 50% brightness level is closest to the Eee PC's 30% setting, so that's what we used, but then the X340's brightness increments don't appear to be evenly spaced percentages. From 50% to 100%, the brightness easily more than doubles.

For our web surfing test, we opened a Firefox window with two tabs: one for TR and another for Shacknews. These tabs were set to reload automatically every 30 seconds over Wi-Fi, and we left Bluetooth enabled as well. Our second battery life test involves movie playback. Here, we looped a standard-definition video of the sort one might download off BitTorrent, using Windows Media Player for playback. We disabled Wi-Fi and Bluetooth for this test.

The X340's matches MSI's three-hour battery estimate exactly in our web surfing test, putting it right in league with the Pavilion dv2 with its six-cell battery. The X340's run time was a little shorter in our movie playback test, but it surpassed the dv2 pretty handily. Not bad at all for a relatively fast system using a small four-cell battery.