For a while now I loved the idea of having a small, lighter laptop computer to ease travels.

Wouldn’t it be great to have a small computer that flips and has a touchscreen? And so, on March 3 of 2020, I decided to go on Dell’s website and get myself a Dell Latitude 3190 2-in-1 (11.6″).

Why Dell? Well, even both websites had a deal going on, Lenovo’s website was entirely broken and outright unusable. Laptop was 749.99$CAD and the ActivePen was 44.99$CAD (before taxes, saved around 465$!).

Anyway, on March 23 of 2020, I received the laptop!

Let’s start with the basics.

Specifications

This laptop is aimed for light amounts of work and something that’s pretty portable.

Not exactly a lightweight machine but not too heavy either. Sizes are 30.4cm (width) x 20cm (length) x 2.5cm (height, closed).

Installing ZorinOS / Test

You thought I’d use Windows? Nope! Installing ZorinOS Core 15.2 (linux 5.3.0-42-generic) was painless, just had to note that the install media must be adjusted for UEFI (using GPT), since the laptop is a 2020-post-era laptop, has UEFI Class 3+, so no CSM support (apart from booting from external devices, when set).

Everything works out of the box: Touchscreen, the ActivePen, automatic screen rotation (!), touchpad, Wi-Fi (well, I did install non-free modules), you name it, and it feels snappy enough. The screen feels nice to look at, and surprisingly, the pen supports sensitivity! (Tested in Krita)

Messing a bit in the terminal and browsing the Web holds an estimate time of 13 hours, which is a lot more than my T430’s 3-4 hours.

Processor

Obviously, the Pentium N5000 is not meant for any serious work, but nonetheless, I’m curious what’s inside.

Below is the output of my ddcpuid tool.

[Vendor] GenuineIntel
[String] Intel(R) Pentium(R) Silver N5000 CPU @ 1.10GHz
[Identifier] Family 6 (6h) [6h:0h] Model 122 (7Ah) [Ah:7h] Stepping 1
[Extensions] x87/FPU MMX SSE SSE2 SSE3 SSSE3 SSE4.1 SSE4.2 Intel64/x86-64 +LAHF64 VT-x/VMX AES-NI SHA FMA3
[Extra] MONITOR+MWAIT +MIN:64 +MAX:64 PCLMULQDQ CMPXCHG8B CMPXCHG16B MOVBE RDRAND RDSEED RDMSR+WRMSR SYSENTER+SYSEXIT SYSCALL+SYSRET RDTSC +TSC-Deadline +TSC-Invariant RDTSCP RDPID CMOV FCOMI+FCMOV POPCNT XSETBV+XGETBV FXSAVE+FXRSTOR
[Technologies] EIST TurboBoost Intel-SGX HTT
[Cache] CLFLUSH:64B SS PREFETCHW
- L1-D: 24 KiB, 6 ways, 1 partitions, 64 B, 64 sets
	- Self Initializing
	- No Write-Back Validation
- L1-I: 32 KiB, 8 ways, 1 partitions, 64 B, 64 sets
	- Self Initializing
	- No Write-Back Validation
- L2-U: 4 MiB, 16 ways, 1 partitions, 64 B, 4096 sets
	- Self Initializing
	- No Write-Back Validation
[ACPI] ACPI APIC x2APIC ARAT TM TM2 APIC-ID:2 MAX-ID:64
[Virtualization] VME
[Memory] P-Bits:39 L-Bits:48 PAE PSE PSE-36 Page1GB Intel-XD/NX PAT MTRR PGE SMEP SMAP
[Debugging] MCA MCE DE DS DS-CPL DTES64 PDCM SDBG PBE
[Security] IBPB IBRS STIBP SSBD MD_CLEAR
[Misc.] HLeaf:18h HELeaf:80000008h Type:Original Index:0 xTPR IA32_ARCH_CAPABILITIES FSGSBASE

Oh cool, SGX! Good news is that can be disabled within the BIOS (well EFI/microfirmware).

As a random piece of stats, using my ddcput tool, I can compare RDRAND EDX performance, and while it is around 100.2 cycles on my i7-3770, it’s around ~1001.9 cycles for the N5000.

For fun, there’s a small table of different CPUs to really understand that the N5000 is not meant for anything serious (taken from cpubenchmarks.net at 2020-03-11), ranking by CPU Score (highest to lowest).

Do note, the N4100 and the N5000 in this list have a TDP of 6 Watts, which is impressive, seeing the G1610T has a TDP of 35W.

Conclusion

I really like this machine. This is my portable Ultimate Whiteboard, and I already love it. If I could give it an IGN score, that’d be 9/10 (because some bugs might happen with a linux distro).

Would write manuals with LibreOffice Writer.