Gateway P-7811 FX: We've Got Upgrades
by Jarred Walton on August 15, 2008 5:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Laptops
Going for the Gold
For our first look at benchmarks of the P-7811, we thought it would be best to focus on comparisons to Gateway's other FX series laptops. We have earlier results from the P-6831, but since it has such a slow processor we also added results from the upgraded P-171XL. The P-171XL is no longer in production, but it provides a better indication of graphics performance when the CPU is not a bottleneck, as it has a Core 2 Duo X7900 (2.8GHz, 4MB cache) processor. It also ships with two 200GB hard drives in RAID 0, 4GB of RAM (but a 32-bit OS, so only 3GB is visible), and a WUXGA display. It had an initial launch price of $3000, which quickly dropped to $2500, and now it has been replaced by the $2000 MSRP ($1630 at TigerDirect) P-173XL - the primary difference being the inclusion of a T8300 processor instead of the X7900. Here are the three test configurations for this first look at the P-7811.
| Gateway P-6831 FX Test System | |
| Processor | Core 2 Duo T5450 (1.67GHz 2MB 667FSB) |
| Memory | 1x1024MB + 1x2048MB Samsung DDR2-667 5-5-5-15 |
| Graphics | NVIDIA GeForce 8800M GTS 512MB GPU/Shader/RAM Clocks: 500/1250/799 NVIDIA drivers: 167.46 |
| Display | 17" WXGA+ (1440x900) UltraBright (Samsung LTN170X2-L02) |
| Hard Drive | 250GB 5400RPM Western Digital (Scorpio WD2500BEVS-22UST0) |
| Optical Drive | Optiarc AD-7563A SuperMulti DVD+/-RW |
| Battery | 9-Cell 86WHr |
| Operating System | Windows Vista Home Premium 32-bit |
| Gateway P-171XL FX Test System | |
| Processor | Core 2 Extreme X7900 (2.80GHz 4MB 667FSB) |
| Memory | 2x2048MB Samsung DDR2-667 5-5-5-15 |
| Graphics | NVIDIA GeForce 8800M GTS 512MB GPU/Shader/RAM Clocks: 500/1250/799 NVIDIA drivers: 175.95 (Hacked from LaptopVideo2Go.com) |
| Display | 17" WUXGA (1920x1200) Matte (Samsung LTN170WU-L02) |
| Hard Drive | 2x200GB Seagate Momentus 7200.2 in RAID 0 |
| Optical Drive | Toshiba DVDR/HD-DVD TS-L802A |
| Battery | 9-Cell 86WHr |
| Operating System | Windows Vista Home Premium 32-bit |
| Gateway P-7811 FX Test System | |
| Processor | Core 2 Duo P8400 (2.26GHz 3MB 1066FSB) |
| Memory | 2x2048MB Samsung DDR3-1066 7-7-7-20 |
| Graphics | NVIDIA GeForce 9800M GTS 512MB GPU/Shader/RAM Clocks: 600/1250/799 NVIDIA drivers: 176.02 (beta from Gateway) |
| Display | 17" WUXGA (1920x1200) Glossy (AU Optronics AUO 1088) |
| Hard Drive | 200GB Seagate Momentus 7200.2 |
| Optical Drive | 8X SuperMulti DVD+/-RW |
| Battery | 9-Cell 86WHr |
| Operating System | Windows Vista Home Premium 64-bit |
Note that we won't have all benchmarks on all three laptops; in particular, we no longer have the P-6831 for testing and so we were unable to run some of our latest benchmarks. We were able to run all of our tests on both the P-171XL and the P-7811. We do expect the P-7811 to perform faster in all of the gaming benchmarks, since the 9800M GTS offers more graphics horsepower because of the increased GPU core clocks. Similarly, we expect the P-171XL to outperform the other two configurations in application benchmarks that depend more on CPU and hard drive performance.
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JarredWalton - Friday, August 15, 2008 - link
9800M GT has 64 SPs; GTS has 96 SPs (like the GTX), and the 9800M GTX has 112 SPs. There's some debate about whether there's rebranding or if there are actual differences; judging by the performance, I'd bet on there being some changes. I believe, for example, that 9800M has the VP3 video processing engine and it is also fabbed on 55nm instead of 65nm... but I might be wrong.JarredWalton - Friday, August 15, 2008 - link
Suck... I screwed that up. I don't know why NVIDIA switches GT/GTS meanings all the time. 8800 GTS 320/640 < 8800 GT < 8800 GTS 512. Now we have 8800M GTS < 8800M GT. Stupid. Also worth noting is that NVIDIA has released no specific details on the core/RAM clock speeds for the 9800M series.fabarati - Friday, August 15, 2008 - link
I was basing my information upon what Clevo resellers were saying in the Notebook Review forums. There was this huge fight about this, due to nVidia posting the wrong specs on their webpage. When the NDA was lifted, they could come out and say that they were the same card.But yea, nVIDIA is being really annoying with the suffixes. ATI has a pretty clear lineup, for now.
JarredWalton - Friday, August 15, 2008 - link
Okay, updated with the clock speed info from nTune (as well as NVIDIA's specs pages). It looks like all of the shaders are 1250MHz, while the RAM speed on all the units I've seen so far is 800MHz (1600MHz DDR3). I don't know for sure what the clocks are on the 9800M GT/GTX, as I haven't seen a laptop with that GPU yet. So in order of performance, and assuming 600MHz GPU clocks on all the 9800 cores, we have:8800M GTS
9800M GTS (up to ~20% faster than 8800M GTS)
8800M GTX (up to ~50% faster than 8800M GTS)
9800M GT (up to ~80% faster than 8800M GTS)
9800M GTX (up to ~110% faster than 8800M GTS)
Now, the maximum performance increase relative to the 8800M GTS is based on the game being purely shader processing limited. Many games depend on GPU memory bandwidth and fill rate as well, in which case the difference will be much smaller.
fabarati - Friday, August 15, 2008 - link
Oh, and a 1440x900 resolution is a WXGA+ resolution, not SXGA+.