Gateway P-6831 FX: Best Midrange Gaming Notebook Ever
by Jarred Walton on March 28, 2008 6:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Laptops
Other Application Performance
Finally, we ran several other performance benchmarks, including the popular Futuremark 3DMark and PCMark test suites. Since this is primarily a gaming notebook, we aren't as concerned with performance in general applications. Besides, just about any modern computer is more than sufficient for your typical office and Internet work. Because of the slower CPU, the Gateway P-6831 scores much lower in many of these benchmarks — excepting 3DMark, of course.
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The Gateway P-6831 places right where we would expect it to in these tests. In the 3DMark benchmarks, it falls below all of the 8800M GTX notebooks as well as the SLI notebooks we've tested, but it bests everything else. In PCMark05, it places at the bottom of the pack, helped by the 5400RPM hard drive and the T5450 CPU. Note that for 3DMark06, you need to use an extrenal LCD capable of 1280x1024 resolution to generate comparable results. (At the default 1280x800 use the 1440x900 laptop LCD, our score improved to 7005.)
We're also including full PCMark Vantage results starting with this review. Most of the scores should be similar to PCMark05, but for now we only have results from the AVADirect M570RU, Dell M1730, and Gateway P-6831 laptops, and variation between benchmark runs seems to be a bit higher than other tests (around 5%). Our results are summarized in the following table:
| PCMark Vantage Performance Breakdown | |||
| AVADirect (Clevo) M570RU |
Dell XPS M1730 | Gateway P-6831 FX |
|
| PCMark Suite | 3995 | 4496 | 2946 |
| Memories Suite | 3127 | 3559 | 2293 |
| TV and Movies Suite | 2585 | 2853 | 2140 |
| Gaming Suite | 4429 | 4015 | 2687 |
| Music Suite | 3808 | 4390 | 2988 |
| Commincations Suite | 3558 | 3907 | 2852 |
| Productivity Suite | 3954 | 4189 | 2041 |
| HDD Test Suite | 3137 | 4139 | 2585 |
In video encoding and 3D rendering, the CPU is almost the sole determinant of performance. We only have results from Penryn X9000 systems for these tests, and outside of QuickTime (where the RAID 0 hard drive array helps the XPS system), we see better than linear clock speed scaling from the X9000. The 2.8GHz chip is clocked 68% faster than the T5450, and it performs up to 85% faster. Having three times as much L2 cache certainly helps.
Again, keep in mind as we see CUDA enabled applications in the future, raw CPU performance may turn out to be less important for these highly parallelizable tasks.
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ToeJuice - Friday, March 28, 2008 - link
Nevermind... overreacted to the first page... lolbill3 - Friday, March 28, 2008 - link
Would you make a gaming laptop your only machine? A 9600GT caliber GPU sounds nice now, but in just a few months as always it will be slipping way behind.It's hard enough keeping up to gaming specs on a desktop, seems to me a fixed spec laptop is always a losers choice for gaming.
gerf - Friday, March 28, 2008 - link
I use my laptop for all computer uses outside of work. I consider it gaming able as well: Dell Vostro 1500 1.6GHz C2D, 8600m 512MB only DDR2, 2GB RAM, 85WHr battery. With the discounts of the day, 3 year warranty and a bag thrown in, it was about $1050.What mattered the most was that I get about 5 hours battery life when I'm just running moz, irc, IM, Thunderbird around the house.
I'm not a Dell employee, but I have to say that this type of lapper could be grouped up there as a reasonable alternative for moderate gamers on the go.
JarredWalton - Friday, March 28, 2008 - link
That sort of system is a standard laptop first and a gaming laptop second. There's nothing wrong with that, of course, but if you really like games and want to be able to run at maximum detail, that type of system won't cut it. That's what I'm getting at in the conclusion: the need for balance as well as targeting what type of system you want. If you want long battery life, the 8800M notebooks are currently a poor choice. I'm still waiting to see the first notebooks with HybridPower, so that you can get both 3D performance *and* long battery life.pmonti80 - Friday, March 28, 2008 - link
For the kind of people who read anandtech, that laptop is not going to be their only computer. It's a second or third computer, like a desktop pc you can move or if you go to a LAN party, used for such things.And for the kind of people not reading anandtech this mobile equivalent of a 9600 GT is more that OK for a couple of years. At the native resolution of 1440x900 they would be able to play any game for 2 or more, just reducing the settings used as games demand more power (1440x900 is just a few less pixels than 1280x1024).
Just my 2 cents.
iclicku - Friday, March 28, 2008 - link
I actually bought this laptop to leave at my GF's place so that when I'm over there, I can play games and such. Plus my GF loves to use it as well. I already have a desktop at home and the specs are very similar to the laptop.FXi - Friday, March 28, 2008 - link
Nice review. It's very nice to see a notebook that enters the market at a kinder price point (even fully loaded it's far better than Dell or Alienware 17" gaming models).Drivers! Seriously anyone who isn't "working with" Nvidia hand in hand right now to get regular driver updates for mobile gaming machines is going to be out of this business when those updates start showing up. SLI absolutely requires serious regular driver updates, and the minute those updates stop (you stop getting supported) your SLI rig is not a single gpu rig in any future games. Kinda sad, eh?
The TN panel is a bit of a compromise, but folks should seriously consider that the price for what you get is pretty good. One can always move up several thousand and not get dramatically more performance. A cpu upgrade would probably be the only thing most folks might consider paying more for.
Well done :)
pmonti80 - Friday, March 28, 2008 - link
It's a pitty that I live in spain and can't buy this notebook. Because I would buy it without a second thought if Gateway sold these here.Great for Lan's and as a Desktop Replacement. For a decent price.