Fujitsu Lifebook UH572 Review: Good Looks, Significant Drawbacks
Although reasonably priced at $999 (as of July 5, 2012), the consumer sibling of the business-oriented Lifebook UH772 delivers decidedly subpar performance. Even with one of the new Ivy Bridge CPUsan Intel Core i5-3317U running at 1.7GHzthe UH572 did poorly in our WorldBench 7 test suite, turning in an overall score of 97. That's on the low end for notebooks in its ultraportable class, and likely reflects the unremarkable nature of the rest of its configuration: 4GB of memory, standard Intel HD4000 graphics, a 500GB 5400-rpm hard drive, and the 64-bit version of Windows 7 Home Premium.
Performance
While the UH572 did okay on certain parts of the benchmarkstartup and content creation scores were on a par with other Ivy Bridge Ultrabooks we've seenit stumbled badly in the PCMark 7 Productivity Suite and storage components. I blame the pokey hard drive, which together with the HD4000 graphics--unassisted by a discrete GPU--probably also contributed to lackluster gaming scores as well.
Battery life was also unimpressive, clocking in at 4.5 hoursnot the worst we've seen but a couple of hours shy of the best performances. Factored in with the rest of the UH572's test scores, it produced an overall performance rating of 67; by way of comparison, the models on our current Ultrabook chart all scored in the high 70s or low to mid-80s.
Sleek Design