Slashdot Mirror
What Laptop Has the Best Video?
magarity asks: "Compared to the primarily NVidia vs ATi desktop video market, there seem to be plenty of video chip choices for laptop makers with no clear market leader in installations. It seems no "mobile" variant or original video chip stands out. As a fan of NVidia graphics chips for desktops, I went looking to buy a laptop with the mobile variant of the Geforce2 chip, cleverly named the 'GeForce2go'. To my suprise, these are few and far between and only found two Dells and four Toshibas. HP, Compaq, and IBM laptops use a wide variety of other chips including manufacturers I'd never heard of until now. Does someone have a real-world report on whether the GeForce2go sucks batteries or just plain sucks? And since no one seems to be, who in your opinion should be the leader of the pack for mobile video?"
Screen is great, and the graphics are very responsive. ATI Rage Mobility AGP 2x w/ 8MB. It runs 3d games at 1024x768 with no hesitation, although I haven't benchmarked it. Your mileage may vary; I have 320MB of RAM.
The really irritating thing is in the video drivers from IBM. For some reason, when it boots it automatically detects whether there is an external monitor or not and sometimes CHANGES THE GODDAMN BIOS SETTINGS to reflect that state. When the BIOS settings are changed, you can't toggle the screen settings with the function keys anymore. This wouldn't be a problem if I never used my docking station, but I often have problems with restarting my system undocked (after it being docked) and being unable to see anything on the damn LCD screen. This can be remedied if I can plug it into a monitor somewhere, but that kind of defeats the purpose of having a laptop in the first place. A real pain when I take the thing to meetings or try to use it on the bus to/from work.
Only other problem: The screen rubs the keyboard. I've got halo's of about 20 keys and the trackpoint on the screen. It's not that visible YET, but I think it will probably start to restrict my viewing in the next 8 months or so.
- Freed
"Coffee should be black as hell, strong as death, and sweet as love." -Turkish Proverb
After many years in the PC Tech Business, I have found there are basically two key players in this field. ATI, and NeomMagic.
The ATI's are actually are not to bad, as the Rage Mobility is actually Nearly on par with the Regular Rage cards just Tuned more or less for the laptop screen. What this means from a user perspective is that the laptop screen looks great, and works great and there are like Zero issues and it gives you pretty much what you need for business on the LCD. 3D games even play well...I have not noticed any large battery power hit for playing them either. The other thing I like is that Driver Updates are frequent and easily available. The Rage Mobility's main issue however is that it IS tuned for the laptop screen so when you hook up an external Monitor, or dock the machine you can't get all you want out of the external Monitor. I am currently sitting at a 21 Inch Sony Flast screen Triniton that I can't run higher than 1024(The resolution of the Laptop LCD), the ATI doesn't offer 1152(The matrox in my desktop machine does), and 1280 gets a little fuzzy for my taste(Its not the Monitor I have tried 3 others and 2 other brands they all have this issue).
Neomagic's Chipsets are more of a functionality Balance, they work OK for the intended purpose of giving you Video on a laptop machine. They have struck a balance between the Internal LCD and the Connected Monitor displays. It will Push to a higher resolution and render it fairly well(My old laptop on the same Monitor I talked about earlier would do 1152, and even 1280 decently(although full refreshes are sometimes painful at 1280, but the display is crisp). I can get Half Life to run and look good on that machine. Newer stuff is no deal it simply doesn't have the graphical Horsepower. Neomagics Driver updates are infrequent and hard to obtain. Some chipsets they don't even provide dribers for directly you have to get them from your laptop hardware Vendor. Hope that Helps.
Power Corrupts,Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely, leaving one person(group)in charge is absolutely corrupt.
...has a 1.13GHz CPU, 512MB RAM, and a GF2Go with 32MB DDR. Tribes 2 simply rocks on the UXGA screen. I get no lag (becides network on occasion), and I run the laptop in "battery conservation" mode pretty much all the time. Even in complex scenes, I rarely notice a frame drop, and when I do, it could be related to the network connection.
I easily get two to three hours of use (gaming or other) with the battery save mode on, and because of the speed, I rarely (if ever) hear the two (!?) CPU fans come on to cool the CPU. I'm sure that saves quite a bit of power right there. I may be able to squeak 4 hours out of the battery if I try really hard and don't game. For gaming, when I first boot the machine up, I copy (actually decompress, but whatever) the Tribes 2 folder out to a RAM drive. Loading missions is REALLY fast, and the hard drive never spins back up, again saving more power.
The C810 costs a lot, but Dell goes through a round of "specials" every week, and you can pick up one of the following: $$$ off (200 usually), Free DVD or CDRW, Free Double Memory (buy 256, get 512), Free Accessories...
LOAD "SIG",8,1
LOADING...
READY.
RUN
I don't know what you will be using your portable for and why you're asking about video chipsets but in my, and many others, opinion Apple makes the best laptops for video. The new PowerBook G4s have a Rage Mobility w/16MB RAM, and an awesome 1152x768 screen. If you're looking for a good portable for taking to a LAN party and frag your buddies in UT or Q3A the PBG4 is a nice slim computer with plenty of power to push those pixels to the screen, not to mention AirPort and gigabit ethernet builtin for the networking. If your looking to do video editing there's the included iMovie and numerous pro level packages for doing that, along with the builtin FireWire and dual display feature (internal LCD and extrnal VGA or S-video) you have a nice video editing portable. Since this is Slashdot I feel the need to mention that you can run a number of different Linux distributions and *BSD variants. Mandrake, SUSE, YellowDog, LinuxPPC are a sample of the Linux distros to choose from. If BSD is more your style you've got Darwin, MacOSX, and NetBSD. Since you didn't specify that you're looking for an x86 I thought I'd chime in with my two cents.
My laptop, a Dell Inspiron 3800, uses the ATI Mobility M1 chipset. Despite the fact that they were still selling this computer until about 6 months ago, driver updates have already stopped. (As far as I know, you can still buy NEW laptops using these chips)
OpenGL stuff, like "Half-Life" doesn't work, period, and no fixes are forthcoming.
Additionally, ATI is the only vendor that hasn't figured out how to do dual display under Windows 2000 (very important for business presentations). They do not plan to fix this issue, even though it works fine on Nvidia.
Your laptop choices are really Trident, ATI, or Nvidia. Trident sucks. ATI does NOT deserve your money. Nvidia is unproven, but seems to be doing well so far, so that's what I would recommend.
Cheap laptops: You're stuck with S3 Savage and Trident CyberBlade graphics. They'll do fine in Everquest, but they don't work with *nix's that well, and aren't the greatest for 3D. These are what you find in the $699-$1499 market.
Mid-Range Laptops
Both Dells and the Sony I've had came with the ATI Rage Mobility. Works great for Quake III and most other games. Roughly equivalant to my desktop's Voodoo 3. Not stellar, but very nice. These are what Apple uses, along with most some other manufacturer's $1299-$1999 range
High End Laptops
GeForce2 2Go and GeForce3 2Go. ATI Radeon. Haven't used the portable Radeon's yet, but the GeForce, obviously, is the like the ATI except faster, of course. Only problem is the laptop we bought with this chipset cost nearly $3,000 (loaded) and is a tank.
Yep - that's me. Trollin' the trolls since...ummm...yesterday
I've got a 1GHz Dell Inspiron 8100 with a 32MB GeForce2 GO. The graphics performance is quite good. I've been using it for 3D modeling with Maya, and it runs without a hitch. If you're wanting to use professional CAD and modeling software, a very cool thing I've found is the ability to unlock features in GeForce series cards that are intended for the high-end Quadro cards, such as Hardware Accelerated Lines and User Clipping Planes. With the desktop GeForce2 cards, a slight hardware mod (moving a resistor) does the trick. But the only way I know of doing this for the GeForce2 GO, however, is by modifying the drivers under Windows with a utility called SoftQuadro (http://www.nvworld.ru/docs/sqe.html). This won't improve game performance, though - it'll most likely hurt it if anything. It's only useful if you use apps like 3D Studio, PRO/E, Lightwave, etc.
Besides the Quadro2 GO (which is only found in the exotic Fujitsu-Siemens Celsius Mobile H), the GeForce2 GO is the best mobile graphics chipset on the market right now. Soon, though, ATI will be releasing their Mobility Radeon 7500, which is reported to blow the GeForce2 out of the water. Here's a comparison: http://www.inqst.com/articles/radeon/0826main.htm . I've read, however, that the previous Mobility Radeon chipset had problems with professional applications like Maya, and I'm not sure if those same problems will be inherited by the newer chip.
As for power consumption, I get 2 1/2 to 3 hours, which ain't bad considering the 15" display.
Oh wow... := karma - 13 after that post. What the hell?
karma
Either some moderators got really pissed off at me (even after I'd been modded down to -1?) and went and modded down my other posts, or there's some funky uber-moderation going on...
Or, of course, maybe my original posts were all overrated.
I have to agree with the Apple and Dell votes already made. I've had a Dell Inspiron with an ATI card (SXGA and one step below a GeForce2Go) and have loved it. 1400x1000 rocks. The only thing I might trade it for is a high end Apple were they more flexible in their use of operating systems.