Standard Gaming Performance
Starting the benchmarks, we'll cut right to the chase and begin with gaming performance. That's what you buy one of these laptops for, after all. As mentioned in our last article, we have recently updated our laptop gaming benchmarks. We use built-in performance tests on Company of Heroes, Crysis, Devil May Cry 4, Enemy Territory: Quake Wars, and Unreal Tournament 3. For Assassin's Creed, GRID, Mass Effect, and Oblivion we benchmark a specific scene using FRAPS. In all tests, we run each benchmark at least four times, discard the top result, and report the highest remaining score. We will use resolution scaling graphs to compare the different laptop configurations, as that will allow us to examine how the GPU and CPU affect performance. At lower resolutions we should become more CPU limited, while the higher resolutions and detail settings should put more of a bottleneck on the GPU.
The Gateway notebooks obviously offer a lot of bang for the buck, even if they don't top the performance charts. The Alienware m15x is faster overall, but the margin of victory over the P-7811 is only about 7% (around 25% over the P-171XL). As we mentioned in our Gateway P-7811 review, there also appears to be a driver glitch with the P-171XL in Devil May Cry 4 - which incidentally is the only game where we don't see significant performance improvements from SLI at higher resolutions. The Sager NP9262 is clearly in a league of its own when it comes to performance. If you've ever wondered why people would consider purchasing a heavy SLI notebook, gaming performance that's almost twice as fast as the closest single GPU solution is the answer. Unfortunately, that means the CPU becomes more of a bottleneck, which is why we see several games where the Sager laptop has an almost flat line.
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yyrkoon - Friday, August 29, 2008 - link
Yeah, I would not expect my desktop to beat the laptop performance wise(in games), but with what I have for resolution/monitor wise it does perfectly fine for me.It is just that lately, since we are going 100% green energy(solar/wind), or as close to 100% as possible, I have been on this power consumption 'kick'. I would hope that the Intel motherboard with the desktop G45 chipset, and x4500HD would use half of what I am using power wise now with my current desktop, but I suspect that I would have to get the laptop based mini itx motherboard/CPU/memory for it to be truly where I would like to see things power wise. Even only 100W is roughly 8.33 amps off of the batteries on a 12v system : / Depending on how many batteries you have, that can be substantial.
I do realize that gaming on the Intel mini ITX boards would take the back seat because of performance, but it would be a perfect machine for running almost everything except for games. That is, until Photoshop, Illustrator, etc start leveraging the GPU/parallel processing.
Oarngemeat - Friday, August 29, 2008 - link
Good article - but the Alienware is not the first laptop with dual graphics cards like this. Maybe for a gaming laptop, but my Sony SZ is getting close to two years old and can do the same thing. Sounds like it even does things the same way, I have to reboot to switch graphics. I've seen it average at about 50% battery performance increase too.JarredWalton - Friday, August 29, 2008 - link
That's why I say the first laptop *we've* tested. Besides, a midrange (at best) GPU that can be disabled isn't quite as useful as a high-end GPU that can be switched on/off.denka - Friday, August 29, 2008 - link
I liked the article, but I've been looking on the Internet for a review that could tell me how good are ATI's 3650's, of which ASUS seemingly is a fan seeing how they have 5 models for sale on Newegg :)Still looking.
denka - Friday, August 29, 2008 - link
Sorry, must have been a stupid question. Found my answers on www.notebookcheck.netJarredWalton - Friday, August 29, 2008 - link
I've asked AMD to get me a notebook with 3000 series graphics, but no one has been able to do so yet. Outside of the 3870, though, graphics performance will be relatively mediocre. I've got a few midrange notebooks with 9500M/8600M GPUs that I'm reviewing, and one with a Radeon 2600. Performance is around 1/3 of the 9800M GTS in gaming. Many games (GRID, Mass Effect, Assassin's Creed, etc.) need to run at 1280x800 and low to medium detail on such laptops before they can get solid frame rates.fabarati - Saturday, August 30, 2008 - link
The performance of midrange laptop cards go: 9600m GT GDDR3> HD3650> 8600m GT GDDR3> 9600m GT=HD2600 GDDR3>8600m GT DDR2=9500m GS DDR2>HD2600 DDR2. Now there are a few more nVidia cards, just to muddle the waters more, but this should give rough performance estimates. 9500m GS is just a rebadged 8600m GT.On my HD2600 DDR2 I play Assassin's Creed with everything on max at 1280x800. On the other hand, my max is for some reason lvl 3 instead of 4. Solid framerates for one person is not the same as for someone else. Some can't stand below 40, som don't see the difference between 30 and 60. For me, over 25 is quite fluid. It helps that Ass Creed has motionblur. That smooths things up.
Oh, And i've OC'd the Graphics memory a bit. That helps too.
flahdgee - Friday, August 29, 2008 - link
I grabbed an Alienware laptop 3 or 4 years ago, and I expected to be able to game on it. I had the Geforce 6800 Ultra Go put in it and had overheating problems from the start. I had to send it into the company for repairs to the motherboard from various components burning up. Whether I got a defective component somewhere that was tearing it up, I don't know, but it has turned me completely off to laptops, gaming ones in particular.Wolfpup - Friday, August 29, 2008 - link
I'd just be scared off of Alienware-which I am anyway...I'm shocked that even the build quality is garbage. I don't get the point of that 15x thing. Dell's 1730 is SOOOO much better built, and it's higher end, for basically the same price. Those Gateway models seem to be a lot better built too, for at least $1000 less (or worse...)
cheetah2k - Monday, September 1, 2008 - link
Anandtech, you call this a "gaming laptop round-up"??Wheres the almighty Dell 1730 with dual 8800GTX's in all its glory? The little girls to scared to come out to play??
Who wants an Alienware, Gateway or Sagem-blahh??? Build quality and service is just shocking....
Get a grip fellas