Mobile Roundup: A Trio of Midrange Laptops
by Jarred Walton on September 17, 2008 3:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Laptops
Standard Gaming Performance
Unlike the gaming notebooks we recently reviewed, performance in games definitely isn't the most important criterion in determining which of these laptops is best. If you care about gaming, you basically have two options. First, you can get a decent desktop that will easily outperform pretty much any laptop at a fraction of the price; the second option is to spend more money and buy a gaming notebook. Of course with the Gateway P-7811 you won't have to spend more than about $1400, but in terms of gaming performance the GeForce 9800M GTS is going to be slower than the desktop 9600 GT (a sub-$100 part these days).
There are differences between the three midrange laptops in some of the titles, but most of these differences are pretty insignificant compared to the large elephant standing over in the corner. That large elephant is represented by the P-7811, which provides over twice the performance of the other GPUs in virtually every game. We have to question the need for these "midrange" mobile GPUs, as it seems most users that want better than integrated graphics are going to want a lot more (i.e. 9800M), or else they just need the video decoding capabilities provided by entry-level options like the GeForce 9300M. Give us a 9800M or HD 3870 with the option to disable it and run off an IGP, and we'd be a lot happier than these relatively slow GPUs. The ATI HD 3200 IGP is another great option for non-gaming laptops, although that would mean would need an AMD laptop instead of Core 2 Duo. However, as a complete package, an AMD CPU and IGP will often be a better choice than an Intel CPU and IGP.
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JarredWalton - Wednesday, September 17, 2008 - link
The same way as in http://www.anandtech.com/mobile/showdoc.aspx?i=339...">previous articles, which is to say we ran the built-in test. It may not represent actual gameplay 100%, but that's not really possible with any benchmark of any game, since specific scenes/levels are always slower for faster. The idea is to show the relative performance of the laptops. If memory serves, the built-in performance test usually provided higher numbers than regular gameplay by 10-20%.bob4432 - Wednesday, September 17, 2008 - link
did you have to unlock anything? the reason i ask is because when i run the benchmark test i get 63fps avg from an x1800xt to a 4850 to a 8800gtx to a 9800gtx @ 1280x1024 - 1680x105....rigs have 2-3GB of ram and are running from x2 4200s to e2160@3Ghz to a quad rigJarredWalton - Wednesday, September 17, 2008 - link
You need to add the -novsync option to the command line argument.bob4432 - Wednesday, September 17, 2008 - link
command line?JarredWalton - Wednesday, September 17, 2008 - link
You'll need to manually create a shortcut to the game executable (RelicCOH.exe). Then right-click on the shortcut and choose properties. In the Shortcut tab, under target, add -novsync at the end of the line (after any quotes or other stuff). The 1.70 patch enabled VSYNC by default to provide a higher quality rendering experience, and the Readme file details the above command-line parameter.bob4432 - Thursday, September 18, 2008 - link
thanks for the info - ended up w/ 106fps avg w/ a decent o/c'd 4850, e2160@3GHz and 3GB ddr2-667, so i am happy w/ that. pretty impressed w/ that 7811fx machine. thinking of myself moving up to a 24" 1920x1200 lcd here in a couple days and figure that my next rig will be crossfire since i will probably need it but not too shabby for the price i paid for this current gpu. only thing is the damn heat output :)again, thanks