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It seems the graphics for the notebook chips are pretty good: http://www.notebookcheck.net/Intel-HD-Graphics-4600.86106.0.html One step above nVidia 540m (the one I have on my laptop) http://www.notebookcheck.net/Mobile-Graphics-Cards-Benchmark-List.844.0.html For reference this could play recent games on medium settings very well. For gamers that can't afford (or don't want to bother with) two computers it seems this chip will provide enough horse power to play most games, a thrown back to the era (486 dos days) where you could simply play all available pc games if your rig was not older than 2 years. These days you have to actually buy a dedicated (and expensive) gaming pc to play games, I think this is what gave the console makers the edge on the market. Intel can change that.

It seems the graphics for the notebook chips are pretty good: http://www.notebookcheck.net/Intel-HD-Graphics-4600.86106.0.html One step above nVidia 540m (the one I have on my laptop) http://www.notebookcheck.net/Mobile-Graphics-Cards-Benchmark-List.844.0.html For reference this could play recent games on medium settings very well. For gamers that can't afford (or don't want to bother with) two computers it seems this chip will provide enough horse power to play most games, a thrown back to the era (486 dos days) where you could simply play all available pc games if your rig was not older than 2 years. These days you have to actually buy a dedicated (and expensive) gaming pc to play games, I think this is what gave the console makers the edge on the market. Intel can change that.

Dude you are missing the point, the point I was making was NOT whether shared memory for APUs is a good idea, I'd argue that is a non brainer, its whether a chip designed for netbooks is gonna make for a good gaming rig and I'm saying its not, the IPC is too low and putting all the memory on the die itself isn't gonna change that.

Let me put it THIS way...would you want to buy a "gaming rig" that was powered by an Intel Atom quad with hyperthreading? because that is EXACTLY what you have here, a chip designed to compete NOT with even the low end Pentiums and Celerons but with the ATOM both on price and power usage which I'm telling you all the memory tricks in the world isn't gonna change the fact that your CPU is primitive. Look at what chips they compare the last gen E1800 to or even read TFA where they say the new chip is pretty mediocre on everything but power use.

Hell by that argument the 733MHz Celeron in the first Xbox would beat an i3 if only you put the memory on die and we know that isn't the case, why? Because the Celeron is a MUCH more primitive design compared to the i3, and the same goes for comparing a Bobcat to even the lowest Athlon duals, there is just no comparison when it comes to IPC, none at all.

Both Sony and MSFT chose the APU because of PRICE because they plan on it being another pricing slugfest and you watch, it'll bite them both right in the ass. Don't get me wrong, for something like a netbook or a tablet where there literally is no room for a fan to move any air? Then an APU makes perfect sense, it also makes perfect sense on an office box where all they will be doing is non graphics intensive tasks like spreadsheets.

Mark my words it won't take game devs a year and a half to totally max out the Jaguar APU and then for the rest of the life of the console it'll be hamstringed by the APU, because the jaguar is based on bobcat which was AMD's answer to the ATOM, it was NOT designed to perform heavy lifting, nope it was built to be cheap and run at a low enough power it could be used in netbooks and tablets while still besting Intel Atom in just about every way.

Again don't get me wrong, I own an Asus EEE that has the E350 Bobcat APU and it does beat atom pretty badly, hell i can even play games like Torchlight and L4D on the thing, but compare it to anything other than an Atom, even as low as a Celeron, and its just gonna get creamed. Again this isn't a big deal in a portable, but in a game console where its gonna have to do 1080P with ragdolls and physics? yeah its not gonna take long at all for the game devs to be hamstringed by the jaguar APU and its lack of performance. Hell friend check out this comparison chart of the E450 (which the jaguar is based on) and other chips, even the 1.2GHz Celeron beats it by nearly 10%.

So I don't know WTF Sony and MSFT were thinking except "We gotta get the cheapest thing we can so we don't lose our shirts in the price war" because that quad core A series APUs you find in the $399 Worst Buy specials will be able to cream their brand new console on launch day. Only the fact that a console OS is so tiny compared to a full OS (although to be fair the console OSes have been bloating up with all the new features both sides has been bolting on) and the fact the game devs can optimize the living shit out of their code will buy them some time but if it takes even 2 years to max out those chips it'll be a miracle.

The fastest $25 graphics card on newegg is a radeon 5450, which even the current HD4000 beats.

If we allow up to $50, we get a GT620, which still gets narrowly beaten.

You need to get to $75 cards to find ones that beat the current HD4000, and will be about level with the GT3e. The current AMD A10 graphics are about 40% faster than the HD4000, and hence will be about 42% slower than the GT3e.

So no, we're not seeing any kind of kerb stomping here.

The fastest $25 graphics card on newegg is a radeon 5450, which even the current HD4000 beats.

If we allow up to $50, we get a GT620, which still gets narrowly beaten.

You need to get to $75 cards to find ones that beat the current HD4000, and will be about level with the GT3e. The current AMD A10 graphics are about 40% faster than the HD4000, and hence will be about 42% slower than the GT3e.

So no, we're not seeing any kind of kerb stomping here.

The fastest $25 graphics card on newegg is a radeon 5450, which even the current HD4000 beats.

If we allow up to $50, we get a GT620, which still gets narrowly beaten.

You need to get to $75 cards to find ones that beat the current HD4000, and will be about level with the GT3e. The current AMD A10 graphics are about 40% faster than the HD4000, and hence will be about 42% slower than the GT3e.

So no, we're not seeing any kind of kerb stomping here.

someone willing to pay for a nice screen expects things besides high resolutions, like color accuracy, low (or no) latency, and little to no blurring. the macbook pro screen sucks in these areas.

Hmm! At least in the Notebookcheck.net 13" rMBP review the display was found completely superior. Not in the typical silly way of saying "the display is sharp and the colors are vivid". Check it out, in the article they have laboratory measurements of the contrast ratio, brightness, sRGB coverage, etc. The glossy coating might be seen as a downside, though.

This was the first benchmark I found.
Keep in mind this new CPU is for mobile usage.
http://www.notebookcheck.net/AMD-A-Series-A10-5750M-Notebook-Processor.87797.0.html

First PCMark 7 benchmarks show a performance increase of around 10 percent on the A10-4600M (5750M: 2175 points, 4600M: 1965 points).
Thus, the A10-5750M would place roughly at the level of a Core i3-2330M (Sandy Bridge).

Notebook Check is pretty awesome.
If anyone knows of a better/equal website for laptop hardware, I'd like to know

Why would this average consumer need Direct3D for YouTube?

Most consumers need DXVA - i.e. DirectX Video Acceleration. On a netbook DXVA would mean that you could play Youtube videos with low CPU usage. That's particularly important on a netbook.

On my 1015PX - which is the second netbook I've bought so Intel have had two chances to get it right - it still doesn't work.

http://www.notebookcheck.net/Intel-Graphics-Media-Accelerator-3150.23264.0.html

According to Intel, the GMA 3150 can help the CPU decode MPEG2 videos. The DXVAChecker shows hooks for MPEG2 (VLD, MoComp, A, and C) up to 1920x1080. Therefore, the performance of the N450 and N470 with GMA 3150 is currently not sufficient to watch H.264 encoded HD videos with a higher resolution than 720p. HD flash videos (e.g. from youtube) are also not running fluently on the Atom CPUs.

It supports MPEG2. I don't think I've ever played an MPEG2 video on this machine and it could probably decode them fine in software anyway. It doesn't support H.264, which is absolutely ubiquitous and used by Youtube. An Atom N570 can decode H.264 in software but only with some effort (high CPU usage,fans at high speed, high power usage) at high resolutions.

On my i5 based notebook which is powerful enough to decode HD H.264 in software without breaking sweat H.264 is decoded by the GPU.

I think the problem is that Intel already has most of the netbook chipset market already. So getting HD youtube videos to work would just cannibalize the market for higher end i5/i7 machines. Still it seems odd that they revved the chipset and didn't fix the most obvious limitation.

Well from the spec sheet you are correct in that they didn't disable speedstep like they did on previous Celerons but 1.1Ghz is awfully slow for a modern CPU and according to the comparison charts (listed below on the same page i linked to) its bested by a Bobcat E series and even by the Atom N450 on a couple of tests.

Personally I think I'll stick with my E-350 netbook, as it lets me run any OS I wish while still getting 5 hours on a battery. Its nice to see plenty of choices in the low end though and I can't wait to see what Intel's answer to the jaguar is gonna be, having 4-8 cores in a netbook or laptop sounds nice and with any luck it'll make Intel drop their prices on their ULV quads. In any case the next year or so ought to be damned nice for tablets and laptops, plenty of choices and at prices that won't make your wallet cry.

> You can see where I am smugly going here. That is exactly what TFA was all about. In act, it also said:
>> Atom chips will move to an entirely new design later this year that is expected to get them closer to Intel's mainstream processors in performance.

I own quite a few Atom PCs and in terms of performance, I think Atom's are quite okay. They're not big on grunt, but still sufficiently powerful to do anything you throw at it EXCEPT 3D. That's their big weakness. Office, web services, software development, yeah fine. Even video transcoding: slower than a desktop, but it will get there. But 3D? No. 3D is ithe new black so that's a deal breaker for many. A wise man summed it up nicely: "I'd rather have a mediocre CPU and a fast GPU than the other way around."

Here's an Atom-powered Netbook. Does nicely in every category except 3D: http://www.notebookcheck.net/Review-Acer-Aspire-One-D270-26Dbb-Netbook.73534.0.html
Now compare that to a similar Netbook with the AMD chipset: http://www.notebookcheck.net/Review-Asus-Eee-PC-1015B-Netbook.56840.0.html
AMD delivers over twice the performance, and that's my experience: Open up a 3D app on an Atom device and you get three mouldy grey triangles before it crashes. Intel don't take 3D seriously. Never have.

> You can see where I am smugly going here. That is exactly what TFA was all about. In act, it also said:
>> Atom chips will move to an entirely new design later this year that is expected to get them closer to Intel's mainstream processors in performance.

I own quite a few Atom PCs and in terms of performance, I think Atom's are quite okay. They're not big on grunt, but still sufficiently powerful to do anything you throw at it EXCEPT 3D. That's their big weakness. Office, web services, software development, yeah fine. Even video transcoding: slower than a desktop, but it will get there. But 3D? No. 3D is ithe new black so that's a deal breaker for many. A wise man summed it up nicely: "I'd rather have a mediocre CPU and a fast GPU than the other way around."

Here's an Atom-powered Netbook. Does nicely in every category except 3D: http://www.notebookcheck.net/Review-Acer-Aspire-One-D270-26Dbb-Netbook.73534.0.html
Now compare that to a similar Netbook with the AMD chipset: http://www.notebookcheck.net/Review-Asus-Eee-PC-1015B-Netbook.56840.0.html
AMD delivers over twice the performance, and that's my experience: Open up a 3D app on an Atom device and you get three mouldy grey triangles before it crashes. Intel don't take 3D seriously. Never have.

Thanks, I've checked the links and they both seems to refer to 847E (even the second one, scrolling down, in the order description says "Celeron 847E,4G RAM w/4xLAN,4xCOM,2xMini-PCIe")

In the comparison on the Intel website, it looks one of the main differences is indeed the presence of the "Processor Graphics" on the 847E:

http://ark.intel.com/compare/55764,56056

From this link:

http://www.notebookcheck.net/typo3temp/pics/beaa4362c7.gif

The "Processor Graphics" looks like a big chunk of sylicon.

I've also found a link to a GPU benchmark that gives the 847 a 85 score, putting it in GMA territory:

http://www.videocardbenchmark.net/video_lookup.php?gpu=Intel+HD+Celeron+847&id=785

Yes, I'll wait for some field reports. Not an impulse buy for sure.

My 2-year old laptop has an nVidia GT 330M. At the time it was a mid-range dedicated mobile 3D video card.

Ivy Bridge's HD4000 comes very close to matching its performance while burning a helluva lot less power. So the delta between mid-grade dedicated video and integrated video performance is down to a little over 2 years now. Intel claims Haswell's 3D video is twice as fast as HD4000. If true, that would put it near the performance of the GT 640M, and lower the delta to a bit over 1 year.

This is all the more impressive if you remember that integrated video is hobbled by having to mooch off of system memory. If there were some way to give the HD4000 dedicated VRAM, then you'd have a fairer apples to apples comparison of just how good the chipset's engineering and design are compared to the dedicated offerings of nVidia and AMD.

I used to be a hardcore gamer in my youth, but life and work have caught up and I only game casually now. If Haswell pans out, its integrated 3D should be plenty enough for my needs. It may be "crap" to the hardcore gamer, but they haven't figured out yet that in the grand scheme of things, being able to play video games with all the graphics on max is a pretty low priority.

My 2-year old laptop has an nVidia GT 330M. At the time it was a mid-range dedicated mobile 3D video card.

Ivy Bridge's HD4000 comes very close to matching its performance while burning a helluva lot less power. So the delta between mid-grade dedicated video and integrated video performance is down to a little over 2 years now. Intel claims Haswell's 3D video is twice as fast as HD4000. If true, that would put it near the performance of the GT 640M, and lower the delta to a bit over 1 year.

This is all the more impressive if you remember that integrated video is hobbled by having to mooch off of system memory. If there were some way to give the HD4000 dedicated VRAM, then you'd have a fairer apples to apples comparison of just how good the chipset's engineering and design are compared to the dedicated offerings of nVidia and AMD.

I used to be a hardcore gamer in my youth, but life and work have caught up and I only game casually now. If Haswell pans out, its integrated 3D should be plenty enough for my needs. It may be "crap" to the hardcore gamer, but they haven't figured out yet that in the grand scheme of things, being able to play video games with all the graphics on max is a pretty low priority.

From the article:

It might not be the brightest LCD in the lab at 300 nits but it's bright enough [...]

Actually, 300 nits is damn bright. They probably couldn't crank the brightness high enough or for some reason had a unit with a lower spec screen. Most current laptops at max brightness are in the 200 nits (cd/m^2) ballpark. Notebookcheck.net even has the lab and they indeed confirmed the manufacturer rating in their Lenovo X1 review:

Information
Gossen Mavo-Monitor
Maximum: 367 cd/m^2
Average: 330.9 cd/m^2
Brightness Distribution: 81 %
Center on Battery: 348 cd/m^2
Black: 2.8 cd/m^2
Contrast: 124:1

I am willing to pay a $500 price premium to any company that is willing to sell me a laptop that has a standard sized keyboard. I type 50 pages of text or code per week. IT IS WORTH IT TO ME

I bought this Acer Aspire for my wife about three years ago for the exact same reason, although hers has a Core i5 instead of AMD.

http://www.notebookcheck.net/Acer-Aspire-7540G-504G50Mi.47017.0.html

Notebookcheck.net has some good comparisons for this. http://www.notebookcheck.net/Mobile-Graphics-Cards-Benchmark-List.844.0.html

Nope, that's still crap. Take a look at this photo, which shows the keyboard clearly.

All the keys are jammed up against each other. The space between the number row and the function key row is missing, the arrow keys butt up against three other keys, etc... In other words, it has exactly the issues as every other laptop keyboard.

I've looked: to my knowledge, no laptop manufacturer on Earth has ever made a decent laptop keyboard, despite oodles of room on most 17" models. No such thing exists.

Intel HD Graphics 3000 is the definition of useless. Here's proof - 250 other graphics chips are faster. A few of those are several years old and can be found in a $300 refurbished laptop, like the x83vm-x1. If you need battery life, just buy more batteries ($40 each).

I have both a Asus K53 and K73, and I am very satisfied. They sure match the build quality of any of the thinkpad's i've had, and are way much better than the HPs and Fujitsus.

Both K53 and K73sv have a keypad, and the K73sv have a nice brushed aluminum finish and is dead silent most of the time when using a SSD.

(The nvidia card is a hybrid card, but bumblebee works fine)

http://www.notebookcheck.net/Review-Asus-K73SV-TY032V-Notebook.54381.0.html

I should add: The downside of the Livescribe pen for science conferences is that if you have audio recording on all day, the battery is likely to run flat by the end of the day, unless you recharge at lunchtime. The battery is fine if you only want to record written notes, so I tend to switch on audio recording only for the important talks.

Livescribe is fine, but if you want a $100+ device you'll be able to use more than once, I recommend a Fujitsu p1620 or Dell Latitude XT

Both dual core, both tablets, similar resolutions at 1280x768/800, but p1620 has a smaller screen, 8.9", and weighs less, ~2 lbs, and is almost the exact same size as a iPad, just thicker. p1620 battery is in the front and is easily swappable, and Fujitsu sells a multicharger for it so you can charge two batteries simultaneously while using a third. Resistive screen, uses a digitizer or your fingernail, and I can confirm clicking links and opening programs works rather well with a fingernail.

Latitude XT is larger and heavier, ~4 lbs, but the 12" screen is multitouch so you can use your fingers, great for Windows 8 when it's released. But the best part about this tablet is the available external extended "slice" battery which is basically a 2nd battery that docks to the entire bottom of tablet. You should get an additional 6-8+ hours of real world usage with the slice battery, and the slice battery can be charged separately, so you could leave one charging while using another one, and being an external battery the laptop does not need to be shutdown to swap allowing you to leave the laptop on continuously forever as long as you kept swapping the external battery.

I have both tablets and they both serve their purposes, XT for all day use with external battery, p1620 for maximum portability since it's much smaller and lighter. The Dell Latitude XT can be had for about $300 from Dell and the Fujitsu p1620 is around $200 on ebay.

I should add: The downside of the Livescribe pen for science conferences is that if you have audio recording on all day, the battery is likely to run flat by the end of the day, unless you recharge at lunchtime. The battery is fine if you only want to record written notes, so I tend to switch on audio recording only for the important talks.

Livescribe is fine, but if you want a $100+ device you'll be able to use more than once, I recommend a Fujitsu p1620 or Dell Latitude XT

Both dual core, both tablets, similar resolutions at 1280x768/800, but p1620 has a smaller screen, 8.9", and weighs less, ~2 lbs, and is almost the exact same size as a iPad, just thicker. p1620 battery is in the front and is easily swappable, and Fujitsu sells a multicharger for it so you can charge two batteries simultaneously while using a third. Resistive screen, uses a digitizer or your fingernail, and I can confirm clicking links and opening programs works rather well with a fingernail.

Latitude XT is larger and heavier, ~4 lbs, but the 12" screen is multitouch so you can use your fingers, great for Windows 8 when it's released. But the best part about this tablet is the available external extended "slice" battery which is basically a 2nd battery that docks to the entire bottom of tablet. You should get an additional 6-8+ hours of real world usage with the slice battery, and the slice battery can be charged separately, so you could leave one charging while using another one, and being an external battery the laptop does not need to be shutdown to swap allowing you to leave the laptop on continuously forever as long as you kept swapping the external battery.

I have both tablets and they both serve their purposes, XT for all day use with external battery, p1620 for maximum portability since it's much smaller and lighter. The Dell Latitude XT can be had for about $300 from Dell and the Fujitsu p1620 is around $200 on ebay.

The system you found has a quattro 3000M graphics card. Do you know how insanely expensive those are? That is not a consumer graphics card, like the one in the macbook pro.

Which graphics card in the MacBook Pro, it has two? The Dell only has one. According to Notebookcheck the AMD Radeon HD 6770M the MBP has is a "middle class graphics card for laptops in 2011." So while the Quadro 3000M is a pro graphics card, and has more memory the Radeon HD6770M isn't exactly a consumer graphics card like you said.

You really never pay full price for those Dell laptops.

Yeap I saw that. Dell jacks up the price then gives purchasers an"Instant Saving" of several hundred dollars.

I should probably point out that this laptop you pointed out isn't even a consumer laptop. Apple is all about the consumer, and doesn't care about the enterprise.

You say one thing in one sentence then promptly contradict yourself in the next. Is the MacBook Pro not for consumers or is Apple not only a consumer enterprise.

This is why you never see workstation grade graphics in a mac - just the regular ATI/nVidia consumer parts.

So you know more than all the professional graphic artists and photographers do about their profession? Are you one yourself? Fact is is many of them use Macs, and only Macs. Sure others use Windows PC and others are trying out Linux PCs but you're stupid if you believe no one uses Macs.

> The same applies to all other all-in-ones whether Apple, Dell, HP, or any other. The same with the Mac Mini.

So? I'm not really limiting myself to all-in-ones.

Do you always criticize those who agree with you?

Let's look at the Mac Pro.

But you didn't. You said The iMac is a desktop with zero upgrade ability. Even then though you don't look at the Mac Pro. It is just about as expandable as any system NewEgg will assemble. I do agree though you can get better components with custom built systems, no matter who the OEM is. Dell, HP, Leveno, and so on. Are you going to criticize this too?

Again, no. If you spend more on a PC than a Mac, that PC will *severely* outspec the mac. You can probably find a few outliers (such as Thinkstations) that are more comparable, but even those come with more workstation grade components than any mac. Macs are vastly more expensive than any equivalent-spec consumer PC.

I provide real data and all you do is talk, where is your data? Without data it's not real. But don't bother, I'm sure you or anyone else can provide data supporting your position. Then again not everything is uniform. There is no "what's best" for everything. As I've said in threads above this one volunteering for Free Geek I disassemble used and old PCs then rebuild new systems with old but good parts. Once built we then install Ubuntu 10.04, Lucid Lynx, and sell them. And we support the PCs we sell for 1 year.

Falcon

A few days ago, I was in Best Buy looking for a new external hard drive. While I was trying to get over the insane price markups, a very svelte-looking laptop caught the corner of my eye. It was one of Samsung's newest models, and it was beautiful. Maybe a little too beautiful, as it reminded me up, down and center of the MacBook Pro it was obviously trying to compete with.

Anyone that has good working vision can see that Samsung, more or less, copies Apple's designs wholesale. They might not be complete replicas of their products, but the "nods" they include in their designs are pretty obvious. Not a bad thing when you consider the technological advancements they provide with their clone-killers, but not surprising when Apple throws down the legal gauntlet as a response.

A few days ago, I was in Best Buy looking for a new external hard drive. While I was trying to get over the insane price markups, a very svelte-looking laptop caught the corner of my eye. It was one of Samsung's newest models, and it was beautiful. Maybe a little too beautiful, as it reminded me up, down and center of the MacBook Pro it was obviously trying to compete with.

Anyone that has good working vision can see that Samsung, more or less, copies Apple's designs wholesale. They might not be complete replicas of their products, but the "nods" they include in their designs are pretty obvious. Not a bad thing when you consider the technological advancements they provide with their clone-killers, but not surprising when Apple throws down the legal gauntlet as a response.

watching h.264 720p w/o hardware acceleration

I'll never understand why Intel didn't put H.264 in the GPU in the N570. I'm writing this on a 1015PX. It does Youtube 720p video pretty well but it needs around 50% CPU usage. Windows 7 has the hooks for H.264 hardware acceleration but the GPU only implements Mpeg 2. Most cellphones SOCs have hardware accelerated H.264 decoding despite having a lower transistor budget than an Atom. HD video performance is pretty much the only thing that people complain about on netbooks. Adding support for H.264 in the chipset would have ended those complaints. Plus of course the power consumption would have been lower compared to decoding on the CPU.

Well I can tell you that while it of course isn't gonna compete with my 6 core with an HD4850 it is a pretty damned nice mobile unit IMHO and frankly I'd say it beats Atom+ION as far as battery life + performance goes.

I think "stomps all over it" is the correct performance comparison. For gaming the E-350 even bests core i5 solutions in GPU-bound games (which is almost always the case with IGP's) like Modern Warfare 2.

In CPU-performance, there isnt an Atom that performs better (most are much worse) and the E-350 uses less power.

People say how AMD isnt competitive in the high end, and they are right.. AMD doesnt even have high end parts! But on the same token, Intel has absolutely nothing that can compete with AMD's E-350 anywhere near its price point, nor do they have anything on the horizon that might touch it.

Add to this that AMD now has the E-450, with only a very small increment in clock speed but adds "Turbo Core" onto the GPU getting as much as 22% more FPS in games, a huge improvement.

I am strongly considering building an E-450 desktop system for my guest room, because it can be done for under $150.

We are having some problems with our silicon...
http://www.notebookcheck.net/Analysts-claim-worldwide-supply-shortage-of-silicon-wafers-this-year.50214.0.html

Good idea not to keep all the eggs in one basket, not a good idea to keep 7/10 of them in 1 basket either when it comes to a fundamental that keeps our technology spiraling forward.

We should definitely not keep all of our computing eggs in one basket, lest the fate of Ringworld become ours.

We are having some problems with our silicon...
http://www.notebookcheck.net/Analysts-claim-worldwide-supply-shortage-of-silicon-wafers-this-year.50214.0.html

Good idea not to keep all the eggs in one basket, not a good idea to keep 7/10 of them in 1 basket either when it comes to a fundamental that keeps our technology spiraling forward.

So this is more of a reaction than a proactive move by the UK government ftw.

Actually, they say GT555M, which is on the low end of the high end and seems like an odd choice for gamers. The emphasis seems to be on CPU, packing an 2.8GHz Intel® CoreTM i7 2640M, which is the fastest clocked dual core mobile CPU (but not necessarily fastest performing). I would agree that is a design mistake - I'd stick in an i5 and a Geforce GTX 580M or 590M because GPU is more important to gamers than CPU, but perhaps the 555 conserves battery much better than those other ones (nVidia claims it is a good tradeoff of performance vs battery life), so they may be aiming for longer battery life.

I have a suspicion that the 7200 rpm drive is an error, but I could be wrong. I would guess it is a 7200 rpm hybrid drive like the Seagate Momentus XT, which combines a 320GB HDD with a 4GB SSD drive and costs around $100, and they claim it is around 80% as fast as a SSD, wheras an SSD at that size would be about $500 for 20% more speed.

That GPU also supports 3D Vision, so there is the possibility that it may also include 3D glasses.

As for the $2800 price tag, Razor anythings are always expensive - looks like standard price doubling over cost, so they are going Apple-like or Alienware-like margins. I have friends with Razor mice and I have a logitech performance laser mouse and I've tried both and I don't really see any improvement in gaming (in fact, I like mine better). On the other hand, their keyboards roll mine for gaming - one has a $200 (at the time - I think they're $160-170 now) G19 Logitech keyboard and the other has a ~$130 Razor keyboard (the WoW model). My non-gaming keyboard has 5 programmable macro keys, their keyboards have... many, many more. I also only paid only $30 for mine (I don't really play a lot of games that need macros, anyway).

Can't find my password right now, so I'm posting this Anon

But I have to say: WHAT THE HELL ARE THESE RAZOR GUYS THINKING?

Look at the specs:

• - $2,800.00 shipping in 2011Q4.

  (Target dates never slip right? Where did I put that Duke Nuke'em receipt?)

• .
• - 2.8GHz Intel® CoreTM i7 2640M Processor
• - 8GB 1333MHz DDR3 Memory
• - 17.3" LED Backlit Display (1920x1080)
• - NVIDIA GeForce® GT 555M with NVIDIA® OptimusTM Technology
• - 2GB Dedicated GDDR5 Video Memory
• - Built-in HD Webcam
• - Integrated 60Wh Battery
• - 320GB 7200rpm SATA HDD
• - Wireless Network 802.11 b/g/n Compatible
• - 16.81" (Width) x 10.9" (Depth) x 0.88" (Height); 6.97lbs (Weight)

Whereas I bought this HP laptop back in May (2011):

http://slickdeals.net/forums/showthread.php?t=2925383

• - $925.00 delivered in 2011Q2 (May/June).

  (Was $875 before I added 6770M graphics, Bluetooth, & 9-cell battery upgrade.)

• .
• - 2nd Gen (Sandy Bridge) Intel Quad Core i7-2630QM (2.0 GHz)
• - 6GB DDR3 RAM
• - 17.3" diagonal HD+ HP BrightView LED Display (1600 x 900)
• - 1GB Radeon HD 6770M GDDR5 Graphics, HDMI, VGA
• - 750GB 5400RPM HD (or change to 640GB 7200rpm)
• - 9-Cell Lithium-Ion Battery (96Wh Battery)
• - Blu-ray player & SuperMulti DVD burner
• - HP TrueVision HD Webcam with Integrated Digital Microphone and HP SimplePass Fingerprint Reader
• - Premium Beats audio and HP Triple Bass Reflex Subwoofer for superb music with virtual surround sound
• - Intel 802.11b/g/n WLAN
• - Bluetooth.
• - Genuine Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit

Now granted, I got the older lower-rez screen. (By choice, I might add. HP was & is offering the higher resolution 1920x1080 screens if you want them. I preferred a higher framerate and lower price.)

And granted, less RAM (6vs8), less video RAM (1vs2), and a slower processor (2.0vs2.8). Of course you'd expect to see that with a 6-9 month time discrepancy. And HP does offer upgrades on all of these, even the video RAM, for a little extra.

In contrast, the graphics cards are quite close in capability. Source: http://www.notebookcheck.net/Mobile-Graphics-Cards-Benchmark-List.844.0.html

(I run LOTRO with all settings maxed at >50fps in the busy zones...)

Pricewise, you can buy **THREE** of the HPs months ago for the price of one of the new Razers next Christmas.

What's more, fedora installed on my HP relatively smoothly. (Ok, granted, I do need to unload & reload the hda_intel_foo kernel sound driver to get the speakers to turn off when headphones are plugged in. And I am still working on getting the 3D hardware accelerated graphics to engage properly under linux. But overall, it's surprisingly tolerant of Linux out of the box! And with a 750 gig harddrive, I have room to play around!)

One thing I would like to mention: Imaging (dd if=/dev/sda of=./sda_image) the harddrive under Linux showed my HP laptop's harddrive was failing out of the box. (10k errors in the SMART log are kind of a giveaway.) Yet every test under Win7 showed the drive was fine. Even SMART tests. My kudos and thanks to HP, who believed me when I said my drive was failing, didn't even blink when I mentioned using Linux on it, verified the failure via BIOS testing, overnight mailed me the new drive, and let me replace it myself. That was sweet of them!

I agree with you, directx11 content would probably suffer, I'd still buy it in heartbeat if I had the cash. http://www.notebookcheck.net/NVIDIA-GeForce-GT-555M.41933.0.html

Of course, the Pentium-M is much less performant clock-for-clock than a modern Sandy Bridge i7

By how much? After many blind alleys on Google, sandy bridge "pentium M" benchmark eventually brought me to this comparison. I chose Intel Core i7 2657M, Intel Core Duo T2250 (representative of Pentium M microarchitecture), and Intel Atom D525, all dual core and all at roughly the same 1.6-1.8 GHz clock. Performance for the i7 appears twice that of the Core Duo, which in turn is twice that of the Atom.

OK, I see there are different models: "Beware: The GT 320M should not be confused with the newer GeForce 320M in the Apple MacBook 13" 04/2010 laptops, which is a chipset graphics card." And from the context, you clearly were referring to the Apple version.

Thanks. With your tip I found a review and it looks like an able candidate, if just from the posted WEI scores.

Glad to see you pay attention to comments and are willing to assist long after others stop moderating a thread.

This review suggests that the 480M is good for perhaps 16.1 fps.

Ummmm.... Depends. You will probably end up buying it anyhow, like it or not, if you buy a laptop with a discrete graphics solution. As I said, MXM was invented for that and is nearly universally used. Should you look for it? Well that depends on how much you care about trying to upgrade the laptop, rather than replace it, and how much you are willing to spend. The components are quite expensive. For example a 5870m is 350 Euro, which translates to $450 or so. Well that is more expensive than a desktop 5870, but its performance is more around that of a 5750 or 5770 which are about $150.

To do the upgrade you have to make sure three things are all ok:

1) The version of the MXM slot. There aren't too many, but still.
2) The physical size of the MXM card. This varies a bit and the new one has to be the same.
3) The thermal and electrical solution. If you system currently deals with a 25watt card, dropping a 100watt card in there is going to burn something out.

So it can be done, if you are technically inclined, it just can be expensive and difficult. Plus if you break it, nobody is likely to honour any kind of warranty.

http://www.notebookcheck.net/Upgrade-Replace-a-Notebook-Video-Card.3236.0.html has more info.

the only person who's excited to see Team Fortress 2 on a mac mini hooked up to a 50" screen that has all the bells and whistles?

While it might be a new chipset, I wouldn't be surprised if the nVidia 320M graphics chipset has issues with running TF2 with everything on high. It's hard to say though, as Left 4 Dead appears to run it OK according to that post.

However, what resolution do you plan on running it at on a 50" display?

The people affected by this are those who prefer a feature limited open source driver over a proprietary one. I highly doubt a closed source game is high on their list of priorities. That said, it gets 17 fps.

Personally, I had a pain of a time finding a laptop with h264 hardware acceleration, a screen that would actually benefit from 1080p, and open-source friendly hardware. But I did that so stuff like this wouldn't affect me, and accepted that I'd have a time lag with games.

for laptop graphics card comparisons i like...

http://www.notebookcheck.net/Mobile-Graphics-Cards-Benchmark-List.844.0.html

it's pretty win. and is up to date.

I mean an Intel GMA 4500 MHD (X4500 HD for desktops). Both the tech specs and Linux drivers are freely available. I got it because I needed h264 decoding and prefer open spec. 3D performance is good enough for circa 2005 games.

Never used Intel GMA, huh? 9400M is a rocket compared to the best GMA (see notebookcheck). Should work fine for WoW and HD video, but keep Crysis away.

incorrect, the T9400 does support Vt.

Intel Chips are massively hit-and-miss when it comes to Vt - I suggest checking wiki before buying. I tried to find a laptop in the $1000 range with Vt support, hardware GPU (the graphics work I do requires about a class 3 GPU here), and at least 720p. You almost can't find it - either they have Vt or they have hardware GPU. I get discounts from Dell, Toshiba, and IBM, but by the time I specced them out to my minimum they were $300-500 over budget. I finally found a 30% off coupon code for laptops over $1100 from HP and bought one of those (and 30% off brought it back to my $1000 budget - Dell with my discount and their sale was $400 over budget). Sony and Apple were out of my budget range from the start.

So I was looking around after seeing this earlier to try and make sense of what older generation codenames match to the newer generation codenames, and found this: http://www.nvidia.com/object/geforce_m_series.html (scroll down).

Basically it goes GTX > GTS > GT > GS > G

The old 9400/8400 line has become the 210/110
The old 9600/8600 line has become the 230/130
The old 9800/8800 GT/GS has become the 250/150
And The old 9800/8800 GTX/GTS has become the 280

There are a few other cards that fall in the middle of categories, but that seems to be the basic gist of it as far as I can tell.

Heres another useful resource for comparing mobile gpu's: http://www.notebookcheck.net/Comparison-of-Graphic-Cards.130.0.html

http://www.notebookcheck.net/ATI-Radeon-HD-3200.9591.0.html

Basically on part with Nvida 8400 series mobility cards.

I assume they underclock the CPU to reduce heat? I don't see why otherwise.

The Quadro NVS 160M is based on the 9300M GS and is nowhere near as powerful as a 9600M GT.

Quadro NVS 160M:
580MHz core
700MHz memory
1450MHz shader
64-bit memory interface
8 shader pipes
256MB maximum memory

3DMark 06 average of 1988
Doom3 average (Ultra 1024x768) 50fps

Geforce 9600M GT:
500MHz core
800MHz memory
1250MHz shader
128-bit memory interface
32 shader pipes
1024MB maximum memory

3DMark 06 average of 5154
Doom3 average (Ultra 1024x768) 133fps

Source for Quadro NVS 160M and Geforce 9600M GT. I can confirm the validity of the 9600M GT information since that is what one of my laptops (non-Mac) has.

Other than that, I agree. I bought a nice Acer Aspire 8930 not long ago and it is better than the best Macbook Pro in every way that matters. It also cost $1650 less.

The Quadro NVS 160M is based on the 9300M GS and is nowhere near as powerful as a 9600M GT.

Quadro NVS 160M:
580MHz core
700MHz memory
1450MHz shader
64-bit memory interface
8 shader pipes
256MB maximum memory

3DMark 06 average of 1988
Doom3 average (Ultra 1024x768) 50fps

Geforce 9600M GT:
500MHz core
800MHz memory
1250MHz shader
128-bit memory interface
32 shader pipes
1024MB maximum memory

3DMark 06 average of 5154
Doom3 average (Ultra 1024x768) 133fps

Source for Quadro NVS 160M and Geforce 9600M GT. I can confirm the validity of the 9600M GT information since that is what one of my laptops (non-Mac) has.

Other than that, I agree. I bought a nice Acer Aspire 8930 not long ago and it is better than the best Macbook Pro in every way that matters. It also cost $1650 less.

According to this site the 9400M G has higher core and shader clocks than the 9300M G, but the 9300 has dedicated memory.

The benchmark results listed there show:

9300M G
3DMark 05: 3252
3DMark 06: 1958
Doom3: 38 FPS (Ultra detail 1024x768)

8400M GT
3DMark 05: 3587
3DMark 06: 1033
Doom3: 49 FPS (Ultra detail 1024x768)

9400M G
3DMark 05: 3930
3DMark 06: 2067
Doom3: 83 FPS (Ultra detail 1024x768)