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Mobile Gaming At Desktop Speeds
DigitalBiscuit writes: "Today's leading edge laptop PCs are packing serious power under their thin
little hoods, enough that even the hard core gamer may sit up and take note.
Here's a full showcase (dismantled to show you the innards) with benchmarks on a
Dell unit that employs NVIDIA's new GeForce4 440 Go GPU and a Pentium 4M (mobile) processor at 1.6GHz. Take one of these babies to the local LAN meet and be the envy of your Mountain Dew chugging cohorts." Of course, this will cost a lot more than similarly powerful desktop, but some people don't seem to mind that tradeoff.
Now if only data projectors would fall in price. With optical mice these days, you can quite comfortably sit in a nice armchair and look at a wall!
Even better will be those new Tablet PC's where you can disconnect the screen completely if you wish, so it doesn't get in the way of your 60" white sheet display...
This seems strangely like an infomercial. How much does a frontpage ./ article cost nowadays?
I used to be interested in this kind of uber-laptop, but once I tried one I realized it's just a big fat waste of moolah. If you want a nice LanParty box, just get a low-profile case and mobo, pop in a fast athlon and Geforce2/3/4. Many boards nowadays have AGP retaining clips that hold your video card in place during transport.
The only big part left is the monitor. If you were going to blow 4000$ on a gaming laptop, you probably have a bit of leeway in your budget for a nice 17" LCD screen. You could possibly even attach it to the case somehow and have a desktop-based humongous laptop-type-thing. Why not ?
-Billco, Fnarg.com
I remember when I joked that if I'd had a laptop I'd play DOOM in the woods alone in the summer at night, sitting on a treestump... now think Doom III and one of these babes or the ones that are to follow!!
:P
Expensive, yeah, but if you're rich check it it out
Seriously, the only platform that can reasonably get same-as-desktop speed out of their laptops is Apple's.
Chips by Intel and AMD (for the kind of speed needed for these types of activities, or just general high-intensity apps) simply cannot do the work needed for the price/feature/weight point needed.
Especially with Mac OS X now firmly in place, this really hits home why more and more people are dumping their Toshiba's and Sony's and hopping onto PowerBooks at their next upgrade cycle.
Unless you see nothing wrong with needing an industrial-strength blower to keep your lap cool.
Hire a Linux system administrator, systems engineer,
Sorry, couldn't help it
They who would give up an essential liberty for temporary security, deserve neither liberty nor security
I will never fully understand the desire, to beat someone else's 3D mark score. I've seen LAN battle, after LAN battle, of geeks screaming over frames, and individual points. These people spend so much money that they most often can't afford, on every little component in their box, so that i can show up, with my 128 RAM, 850 Thunderbird, and Matrox Millenium G450, and Own them all at every single game we play...
0110100100100000011000010110110100100000011000100
You guys realize that all this gaming shit gets pretty lame? All you fanboys can eat it.
Cool, tiny cases -- LAN parties. New high-powered laptops -- LAN parties. Overclocking techniques -- LAP parties. New 3D cards -- LAN parties. Consoles -- awright, I give you this one.
I've gone to great lengths to try and avoid game-related stories from the front page. Then this slides into Hardware. Who gives a flying freak.
Games suck. Hit a bar. Doing something physical. Read a book. Leave the computer off for an evening. Whatever. Can't you stoopid comic-book reading, game-playing fanboys stay in the dark dungeon of invisibility?
Every comic-book related "super-hero" (oh fuckin' grow up) movie that comes with a $40MM marketing budget just makes the rest of the world hate you that much more.
Here's a clue: Lucas blew Star Wars years ago. This new one isn't good enough to warrant a $100MM take. You're getting screwed.
Yeah, it's a rant. Whatever. Games = lame. They were in 5th grade, they are now.
One thing that mobile laptops will not be able to do is to match the power consumption required for good 3D cards.
Asynchronous might be the key with low power, super pipelining, high throughput or low delay.
Mouse powered Chips, Open source Processors and Lego
I hate to keep on these 25 year-old guys living in thier parents basements, but maybe this will get these guys outside. They can sit on the lawn and play quake 3. Or go to the bar and play quake 3. Or sit on the can and play quake 3...
OR TAKE A SHOWER DAMNIT!!!
Linux is dead.
LU
Somthing a year old, or a cool animated lucas arts game BY URSELF. I am not up for waiting for a year for a maybe port of a cool game to Apple. :)
I've a small form factor case witha happy hacker keyboard that is ALMOST laptop size, goes in my backpack along with my change of clothes and uber caff drink. All I need to worry about is a monitor, and thats the same problem on any laptop as well, the cost for mine, 900$
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
The sad revelation came to me when my brother visited for a weekend. I had been playing Black and White for a good while on my P3-700 with 256MB RAM and a GeForce 2 64MB. I thought that was powerful enough.
Then he showed up with this weird-looking blue case, a Toshiba laptop. It had a combined DVD-ROM/CD-ROM/CD-RW 12x10x24. The screen was 16". It was an Athlon 1.2GHz, and had a GeForce 2 mobile 64MB (the bus was faster than my desktop cousin). The real kicker was when I sat it on my lap and began to play music. We're talking a male vibrator folks. The damn thing had a subwoofer built into the bottom. Unbelievable. Now a far cry from the specs of a 1.6GHz P4 w/GeForce 4, but hey...
Oh yeah.. and battery power? My guess was about 10 minutes on a single battery. It actually lasted 2 hours.
..brought to you by all of us using ad filtering software.
My Dell 1Ghz PIII w/ the ATI 64 MB DDR card NEVER uses the fans unless I'm running Kazaalite and Return to Castle Wolfenstein at 1600x1200 and the power is low. That's it. Amazing how some Apple guys are just as prejudiced as the anti-Apple guys. By the way, I got this notebook w/ 52 RAM and a 40 gig hard drive for $1651. What kind of Apple laptop could I get for that much?
I don't know - every time I see a laptop that has any type of gaming performance, it's 3 steps behind the best desktop and costs a chunk more.
For $2500, I can get a Athlon 2100+ system with a G4. Where are you going to find a laptop that can match that? The 3Dmark of a G4 TI 4400 can hit 10000, the G4 440 can only hit 5000.
Laptops simply can't dissapate the heat.
Plus, for real gamers, you are stuck with the base configuration. Maybe you can add more memory, but that's it. No new MB, limited OC, and no new video card.
This is a solution for a gamer with an open budget. While it can sure play the top games of today, it will be a slug on the next generation of games.
No, I don't trust in god. He'll have to pay up front, like everybody else.
I have a laptop that sports a GeForce chip and it does run games nicely. However, trying to play any serious LAN game on a 15" LCD can be very frustrating. In fact, after a couple of hours my eyes completely bug out.
So, I am still gonna gear grip pro my case and monitor to LAN parties, and take my laptop for someone who shows up empty-handed...
"Before the wreck, I never knew how to type with my face."
Use the P4 and Geforce 4 to crank up high frame rates and burn the ever living crap out of the guy next to you. Finally, a real reaosn to have a P4.
Also makes suitcase nukes a whole lot easier to build.
There is nothing wrong with being gay. It's getting caught where the trouble lies.
Being one of the estimated ten people to actually read an article posted on Slashdot, I see that the only thing actually said about battery life is this:
Battery life is also excellent due in part to the Pentium 4M Speedstep technology. We were actually able to watch 2 full DVD titles on this machine, before the battery alert came on.
I know this article was mainly to see the performance of a current laptop, but couldn't they have given us an exact time, at least, to show what you need to sacrifice for higher laptop performance? Plus how many batteries was that with? I know the unit can hold two batteries with the DVD-ROM. If both batteries were in the unit at the time that isn't very impressive, especially if they were short "DVD titles" (notice they didn't say movies). Sorry, but I am really annoyed by ambiguous statements.
At a LAN party you only get to brag until the next bunch of laptops with the GeForce 5XX comes out. However if your luggin' around your desktop, and a new video card comes out you don't have to change your whole system to replace the video card.
That is if you are that kind of gamer that needs to show off the most FPS on his computer. Or the kind of gamer who possibly owned the GeForce 2, 3, and 4 all in the same year. But of course there's no one here like that.
"It takes many nails to build a crib, but one screw to fill it."
You aint seen nothing till you've seen rtcw on a tiBook. I push around 60FPS in wide screen mode with everything turned on.
Later,
Phil
Of course, this will cost a lot more than similarly powerful desktop, but some people don't seem to mind that tradeoff.
I wonder why, perhaps it's because you have a device that will fit in your lap (or less) and be almost up to par with the speed of a large desktop tower? Presuming someone had a use for a mobile computer, why would they mind paying for a literal mobile desktop?
Is your browser retarded?
No gamer is complete without their own quad Xeon helping drive the pixels.
Talked to a guy at compaq once who had a little lan party with a few of those. Now THAT'S a high end game machine. I am told quake 2 ran fast on those babies.
-Pete
Soccer Goal Plans
I've got a laptop with a GeForce 2 Go and a Mobile PIII 933MHz CPU, and, sure, it's got the power to play games, but the issue is always the display. It's the same with any flat screen...the pixels have a hard time turning off, so whenever the sceen changes quickly, it blurs. So, you may have the hardware, but if the display stinks, what's the point? You'd have to hook it up to a monitor anyway, and if you're bringing along the monitor, you might as well bring along the rest of the box, too. Until laptop displays improve, there isn't much point in playing fast-moving games like FPSs on them.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
Alienware has a similar system with a 2.4 GHZ P4-M. You can see it on there homepage.
The exhaust stench of the portable generators mingles with the oily aroma of Sweat-Cooled(TM) "portables".
The Mobile LAN party is underway!
You drank my drink, you drunk!
Okay, all you 1337 G33ks running over to Dell to see what that rig costs, cut it out! I can't configure mine! :P
"Draco dormiens nunquam titillandus."
As far back as Accolade Grand Prix on a CGA monitor, I have been subconciously angling with the screen to take corners with the car.
Now if you too suffer this affliction, then you'll know playing a game like this on a bus to work could be fucking disastrous:
The bus driver turns a corner, you angle to take an imaginary corner with the "car" and... BOOM... both you and your laptop are in the aisle.
:)
I've thought about this for awhile. If I could afford an uber-laptop I would play EQ in bed and take naps while I regenerate. I need serious help.
sig
For year I've been under the impression that LCD screens simply don't cut it for serious gaming and that most hardcore FPS players still rely on their trusty CRTs. I gather that the problem was primarily one of there being a slightly slower reaction time and lower refresh rates.
Possibly there have been advances in this area that I haven't heard about; anyone know what the current wisdom is on this?
And is it realistic for us to be talking about serious gamers switching over to laptops if this vital component is not yet up to par?
I had one once that was too long to flush, just kinda perched itself over the hole and balanced itself...
Stayed that way for 3 days in a heavily used community bathroom too!
I'm sorry, but my friends + chugging mountain dew + $3k laptop = disaster waiting to happen.
Would YOU trust your prescious to a bunch of caffeine crazed LANers? (please ignore the fact that you yourself are probably a caffeine crazed LANer)
Even prior to the GeForce 440 making it into Dell laptops, they had some pretty decent 3D-capable systems. I have an Inspiron 4100 (1GHz PIII, 32MB GeForce2 GO), and I play Jedi Knight II, Medal of Honor and RTCW all at 1024x768 without any slowdown at all. The sound isn't too bad either (provided you use headphones or good external speakers...the inbuilt ones are *terrible*).
I just saluted as I wiped...
Looking at the specs here, can anyone tell me why the chip with 64MB onboard has less bandwidth than the one with external memory? I thought the point of onboard memory was better performance...
Latitude C810, 1.13, 512MB, GF4, 60GB, 802.11 enabled, single battery, light to average usage, I get about 3 to 4 hours. Pushing the CPU gets me down to around 1.5 to 2 hours.
LOAD "SIG",8,1
LOADING...
READY.
RUN
Mobile Pentium® 4 Processor 1.6GHz-M 15.0 Dell® UltraSharp(TM) 256MB, DDR, 2DIMM (from 128MB, DDR, 1DIMM) 64MB DDR 4XAGP NVIDIA GeForce4 440 Go(TM) 3D 30GB Ultra ATA Hard Drive Upgrade! Floppy XP Home Integrated Network Card Internal 56K Modem 8X CD-RW/DVD Combo Drive Price Sub-total: $2,028.00 For a laptop, that's not bad, and anyways, we still know people playing CS w/ a TNT2 Ultra which can't begin to beat this monster. True, for a real LAN party player, a desktop is needed, for playing on a whim wherever you like, this does wonders.
--- nothing better then something important to say
I actually own the 1.6 P4m Geforce4mx laptop with 512 ram and 30 gig hard drive, and all i have to say is for 2704 after shipping this little box has huge nuts, and really i liked it so much i sold my desktop as i didn't need it anymore, just kept the monitor keybord and mouse, and now it runs better then my desktop did. I don't just had to put in my two cents from someone that owns an uber box. mmmm portable tribes2.........
What is the point of gaming on these high-end, high-speed laptops when the refresh rates of their screens are lower than what a typical CRT can offer? I distinctly remember a CNET review of a Dell Notebook Inspiron that featured a GeForce2 Go. It mentioned that the GeForce2Go could retain refresh rates higher than the notebook's TFT screen. This appears to defeat the purpose of hardcore notebook gaming, which of course requires fast refresh rates. (However, an exception would include most RTS games). In turn, this can degrade gameplay, especially with 1st person shooters. In addition, notebook screens are capable of displaying a limited amount of colors-around 1.5 million I believe, correct me if im wrong. Washed out images of flying objects, such as grenades in Counterstrike would make one's notebook gaming experience fragtastic...for the player and others.
Well, thats my 2 cents.
I might be the only person wondering about this, but so far there are no laptops that support true directx 8/8.1 features such as vertex and pixel shaders.
I know that very few games out there actually use them, but until laptops come out with a chipset like the Ati Radeon 8500 or Geforce3/4Ti, you're still stuck with basic Directx 7/OpenGL 1.3 (without modules) functionality.
This may not seem very important, but after seeing the Doom3 previews, I can say that pixel shaders and shadow buffers will be a must-have from now on.
Sigs are for losers
I'm glad that mobile computers are begining to catch up to destops in the video card area, that has always been my major complaint with them. Maybe I'll reconsider my laptop puchase now.
I just bought one of these puppies last week. I'm chomping at the bit for it to arrive now :)
:)
Been completely mobile for years (no desktop), and the only thing I ever really had complaints about were the video cards. I won't be worrying about that anymore, evidently
Take one of these babies to the local LAN meet and be the envy of your Mountain Dew chugging cohorts.
Sounds to me as if this is a way to eliminate the competition. If you can't beat em kill em with cancer. Right. Some advice: Eat right and gain the advantage. Skip the soda and at least drink vegetable juice instead of sugar in that soda pop and live long enough to beating your opponent. No wonder geeks hardly live past 50 years..this up and coming generation is doomed. Peace
Given how everyone always trumpets how fast their extreme gaming systems are, it's sad we don't here more about extreme slow gaming.
Sure, playing through Quake at 180 fps is cool, but winning Quake at 5 fps, ah, now that's a challenge.
My greatest act of low-powered gaming was winning Unreal on a PowerBook G3 300. This was MacOS 8.6 or so, with manual memory management and everything. I had to create a custom Extensions set boot mode to even get enough free memory to launch Unreal.
The two most challenging aspect were graphics and controls. The Rage Pro was very aenemic, and I was lucky to get 15 fps out of it. And I had to use hardware scaling, since the LCD was 1024x768, and the card could barely do 3D at 640x480. Also, it had to run in 16-bit mode, which those old ATI card had huge dithering problems in. So it was kind of like watching a blocky yet blurred filmstrip in a snowstorm.
Controls? Well, of course, the keyboard and, wait for it, the trackpad! No mouse for me! If you haven't played through a first person shooter using a trackpad for aim, you haven't lived, at least not lived badly.
The nice thing about this is that you can play in bed when your girlfriend is asleep. The startling thing was she actually married me even after that.
My video compression blog
Do those who make it care?
Do those who will empty-minded buy it care?
Do I, running Linux and happy as a clam, care about it, since I'd probably buy a PS2 + Linux Kit?
Well, I care. It's a curiosity. The other day I saw this female elephant giving birth, kinda beautiful...
Another beer, please... Ah, Links pre 6, wow, just downloaded pre3!
Don't these guys know about girls?
Great, so they benchmarked the effect of 3 different power settings on framerates. The results look nice, but they don't say anything more than "if you want more performance, you get shorter battery life.". I wish the morons had compared it to one or more desktop systems, a standard P-IV 1.4 GHz with an equivalent GeForce card for one. I assume the laptop has less horsepower than a desktop, but they could have at least done testing so that I could confirm or deny that assumption, but no they didn't.
What time is it/will be over there? Check with my iPhone app!
I'd rather have a Sager Notebook. Although you can't get it in Dell's nice Enhanced UXGA it can come with a Pentium 4 2.4 GHz and a Radeon Mobility 7500 which outclasses the GF4Go in speed. At 2.4 GHz it can last almost 4 hours with the optional secondary battery. Also, even though it is bundled with Windows almost all the hardware is Linux friendly. See for yourself.
Many LAN parties are at predictable or regular locations. For the price of a laptop you could buy a better desktop and several monitors and leave extra monitors with the friends that host the LAN parties.
At least were not anonymously trolling forum subjects that hold no interest to us. Please explain how that is a noble pursuit in any way better than video games?
The only big part left is the monitor. If you were going to blow 4000$ on a gaming laptop, you probably have a bit of leeway in your budget for a nice 17" LCD screen. You could possibly even attach it to the case somehow and have a desktop-based humongous laptop-type-thing. Why not ?
---
Its called the imac....
;)
OK, OK, I'm an unusual case. I'm a professional graphics programmer who writes computer games for a living. I would just love to have a laptop to work on; but I'm doing all my work on consoles and GF3 and up hardware (basically it needs pixel shader 1.0 and higher).
:-(.
:-)) - so that uber-geeks and gamers can upgrade their video.
I'm almost resigned to never having a laptop - because no doubt by the time an integrated laptop solution with ps1.0 or higher comes out I'll have to be supporting DX9 based hardware
BUT, this also indicates that unless something changes, playing the latest greatest games on your laptop is just a fantasy.
What we need from laptop manufacturers is the ability to slot in a card just like a pluggable harddrive. Then they could supply some ridiculously bulky addon (complete with its own fan and maybe power supply
Or is there some way to do this already? I build my own desktop systems and its trivial. Do any of the hardware guys reading slashdot have links to how I customise various laptops? Thanks.
StrutterX
I should tell you that I've taken to doing all my gaming on my laptop because my desktop has some hardware problems and I haven't gotten around to fixing them. So while it's no GeForce 3, it works great. My gaming consists mostly of Counter-Strike. It runs at 1024x768, almost always at 60 FPS. The smoke gernades slow it down, but what do you expect. I should note that the 60 is my refresh rate, and I run Win 2k so it probably maxes out higher. The LCD screen is GREAT and you can see things very well. I doesn't blur during action and such. The only problem is it's impossible to play FPSs with a pointstick or touchpad, so I keep a USB mouse handy. But what do you expect?
The laptop does get warm after alot of CSing, but I'm not suprised. It's not hot at all, and doesn't seem to effect anything. When it does get hot the fan(s) come on, but they are quite quiet and you can't hear them over the game unless you keep it quiet.
Basically what I'm saying is that for what I do (gameing wise), the GeForce 2 GO works great. Considering that this is basically a GeForce 2 MX or so, I'd like to see the GeForce 4 GO, which is basically a neutered GeForce 3. Things are great on the 2D side too. And, yes, I've played Quake 3 and such a few times and it works great as well. No, you're not going to get 200 FPS with 4x AA at 1400x1050 (the native resolution), but then again, it IS a laptop. I should also point out that I game with my AC adapter, not having it might trigger the power miser stuff and slow the GPU down, I don't know.
While I'm on the subject, I'll also point out that the LCD looks great in ANY resolution. I doesn't look like it's been cheesily stretched (like my old Winbook did), it looks like it's the native resolution. But if you don't like it, there is a hot key that displays the image 1:1 on the screen, centered, with a black border around it for non-native resolutions if you want. I prefer full screen (which is nice on a 15" laptop).
In summary, these things work great. I've never tried the ATI, but I bet it would be just as good if not better (but I don't like ATI, and that's another discussion). Before this, my laptop gaming was limited to SimCity 3000, The Incredible Machine, Solitare, and other 2D games. Now I can do all that and headshot people in Counter-Strike from a hotel room without one of those lanboxes-in-a-suitcase.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
This is really the main last big thing holding them back after they got the nVidia chips.
I have a Dell 8100, it rocks, but you know what would rock even more on these beasts? It's almost a workstation replacement, I can do most 3D setup that I need prior to rendering, I can even do some test rendering on it too with heavy features like radiosity and caustics, I never though I'd see the day when a company would have such decent 3d performance on a mobile platform, for both previewing (opengl) and rendering.
;).
One thing that I would kill for, and that's about the only "workstation" thing missing, (and don't laugh) would be a IDE raid-0. Battery consumption is not an issue, IDE drives doesn't consume near as much as the CPUs, neither would a raid-0 chipset (or who cares about the chipset, I could live with a software stripeset as long as it's on 2 distinct channels), and besides, if it would require more cells on the battery, so be it. They make batteries last for 3 hours on inspiron 2500 laptop (8 cell battery option), of course for number crunching and all it wouldn't last as much, but the point is, I'd take the floppy space and cramp in another 40GB ide drive in there, 2 channels, double the space, double the speed and tripple the fun
Right now you can get a gig of ram in your laptop, you can get firewire, you can get wireless connectivity, CD-Writers, dvd players, you name it, the IDE raid feature is the only thing missing. Since the 2.5" drives aren't as big as their 3.5" cousins, it could be a good tradeoff, and I'd gladly take the performance too.
--- Metamoderating abusive downgraders since my 300th post.
I'm typing on that machines older brother in a way. Dell Inspiron 8100. I have the Mobile PIII chip. 1.13Ghz. 512 MB ram. 32 MB GeForce2 Go. 15" 1400x1050 screen.
Now granted there is no way my machine can compete with a decked out desktop system. However, in terms of the-best-of-both-worlds this maching can't be beat. I've got a killer mobile system, and a pretty hot gaming machine. Machine-wise, I'm pretty near the top when I go LAN partying. It's nice being able to show up with your equipment in one hand and jsut opening the screen and be ready to go.
Some down sides I've noticed with my machine so far as follows. One, when you hook up an external mouse something keeps you from making rapid movements get through the system. You can only move the mouse at a relatively slow pace or it will skip on the screen. Two, battery life stinks. Don't plan on playing games without being hardwired to the electrical grid. Even with dual batteries in my system. 3.5 hours is all it will do. On the plus side. If you step down the processor speed and do normal work. Like work on a spreadsheet I can get roughly 6 hours of work time. Not to shabby. Three, the plastic case is kind cheap and the chassis has a lot of flex. ie. don't pick it up by the corner.
Any bad stuff is pretty much nullified by the fact that this machine is pretty much a one of a kind. Mobile desktop to a new level.
We've got one of the dell laptops mentioned here.
Had to get the binary video driver from Nvidia for
X to work, and the unit weighs about 3.2Kg.
It runs quite nicely, except that the performance is lower when the mains power is removed (Mobile CPU's lower their Hz to save power).
here are the bogostats:
2385.51 bogomips - 1196.502 MHz (batteries)
3185.04 bogomips - 1595.321 MHz
We're not running quake on it tho'
Can I ask you how you measured your bogostats. I'm curious to see how my Mobil P3 1.13Ghz compares to the new P4 line. Thanks
like
Lucents Volume Holographic optical storage
that made intro at NAB2002.
Yeah but they keep ignoring the audio. Not mentioned at all, except to say that it's integrated, audio in these things is around the level of the Sound Blaster Pro. I wanna see laptop sound at the level of Sound Blaster Live.
...when the 130nm Athlon XP chips come out. Hopefully that includes notebook chips, and maybe someone will finally have the cajones to build a decent Athlon notebook. I want brute force computation along with my GeForce 4, dammit!
Since when was cost catagorized as a 'trade off'...
A trade off is when you accept a negative so you can gain a positive. These are considered as secondary factors _after_ the primary factors are met...primary factors are the basic things, like:
- will it to the basic job (truck instead of a car)
- can I afford it (I have ten bucks and it costs one thousand)
- is it available now (this thing isn't even on the market yet)
...cost as a trade-off is like saying I'll buy it, but if my mom won't let me keep it, you have to let me return it tomorrow.
"Ok, I'll trade the fact that I can't afford it in order to meet my need to have it."
...that makes sense....not.
Our PCB design team uses an older Dell model with the origional Geforce2Go for doing CAD work while at home . They love the fact that they can get almost desktop performance out of something they can carry home. They simply copy the directory tree to their laptops, and with a simple batch script using subst they can use all their tools just like they were on the network. With a half gig of ram, a 1.6Ghz P4 mobile and a geforce2Go GPU with 32MB or DDR texture ram it runs even their largest projects at full speed =)
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
The Dell laptops in question can take new video cards. For instance, I could upgrade my 8100 (GF2GO) to a GF4GO or an ATI card. The cards just aren't your average shape and size. Dell will sell them to you on thier supplies page.
it looks promising http://www.alienware.com/main/system_pages/area51- m.asp
New HSF technologies will be needed to keep the playing field equal. Since laptops are compact it will be a large uphill battle.
A buddy of mine has one of those Dell Inspiron 8100s with the GeForce2Go. The light weight and 60 second setup really caught my eye. I gave it a whirl, but the blurring motion and artifacting problems (yeah, driver was updated) made the experience disappointing; especially a big fat block right on the crosshairs that made sniping all but impossible. Before long, the novelty wore off and I was back on my own box.
I haven't given the GeForce4Go-based notebooks a whirl yet and they're pricey.
My solution is to opt for a nice 17" LCD and get one of Shuttle's new SS40 series boxes when the AGP version comes out. Stick in a GeForce4 Ti4600 and you've got a small gaming system that won't blow your back out.
This'll have to do until we can get some whoop-ass wearables for a bit of augmented unreality. :)
...and I can promise you, the screen (the ultrasharp 15" model) has no problems that you would notice with blurring in any FPS, DVD playback, etc. The _only_ visual artifact I've noticed so far is when there is a full intesity, primary colour object moving _very_ fast on a dark background, and then there's a very slight lag in clearing that colour on the edge (hard to describe, but it's not a problem in-game). It's one of the most impressive things about the laptop. I guess it uses the technology discussed on Slashdot a while back where the individual pixels are set to the maximum/minimum voltage while they are approaching the desired colour.
Linux support is pretty good too, just waiting for better support of suspending, speedstep and docking/undocking (the docking station has it's own PCI bus - can linux cope with PCI bus hotplugging yet?).
I've got a 233MHz 64M toshiba (480 CDT to be exact, with extra ram) , and it's getting a bit slow to run stuff like openoffice, mozilla, etc. Which is kinda important at meetings for the local LUG.
I've been looking at dells (I've heard the plastic casing cracks in the bottom of them), people want me to buy an apple laptop, (no second mouse button), and I dunno about toshibas, com^wHP laptops, IBM ones...
Which laptop should I get? I don't want an ATI card (driver problems, I'm pissed off with ATI), a touchpad would be nice, need to have a floppy (bootable) and a cdrom/dvd drive (bootable).
linux compatability is the most important thing, of course.
If you already have a Dell 8000, or 8100 with a Geforce card or Radeon 7500 (not the M4) you can order the GF4GO from Dell's parts line and drop it right in.
This is well documented in the Dell user forums on the Dell website.
The nVidia GeForce4Go 440 is basically a low power version of the GeForce4 MX 440 which lacks the vertex and pixel shading engines that the GeForce3 and the GF4 Ti series have. Since DOOM3 will make extensive use of these, we can probably expect a new GPU that's more in-line with high performance cards soon.
I just got a new laptop recently and trust me, it's quite a feeling to tell a friend that your laptop games better than his workstation.
As a big fan of both Apple and PC hardware, I find myself making a tough decision over the next two weeks.
Yes, I'm getting the Dell Inspiron 8200, but I'd absolutely love a PowerBook G4. It's just unfortunate that it doesn't do what I want it to do.
This thing's a desktop replacement for me. I use PCs everywhere. I'm one of the organisers of a large LANning event down here in Melbourne so I need to construct/test game server configs for a variety of games. I'm a Uni student and see less and less of my desktop PC. I play MP3s and watch files encoded in DIVX, while encoding these files is quite speedy on a G4, playback of MP3s, for example, can use over 20% with iTunes on my G3 400 PowerBook. Compare that to my PII 266 notebook which does it in about 3%. The G4s are more efficient, but over 10% on a G4 500 is hardly what I'd call efficient. I can't play DIVX on the G3 400 without it struggling - the PII 266 does a better job.
I don't use Photoshop, so that argument bites the dust. My game of choice - Tribes 2 - won't run on any Mac hardware. I can't get a 1600x1200 LCD panel on a PowerBook, which can be a godsend when using X and ssh'ing into a bunch of servers - something I'm already used to.
Still, the PB G4s are fantastic machines, they look REALLY cool and run one of the nicest OS's I've ever used. It's just unfortunate that it doesn't do what I want it to do - it doesn't suit *me* and the stuff that *I* do.
However, for all those considering a new notebook, I do urge you to take a look at the G4 - if it does what you want it to do, I envy you.
Forgive me for assuming that you would know that a 'G4" is an Nvidia GeForce 4 Graphics card.
In general, Slashdot users call the PowerPC 7400 processor a "G4" and the NVIDIA GeForce 4 graphics chipset "GF4".
Offtopic is RedundantWill I retire or break 10K?
That's why I got the GF2Go...screw the gameboy advance :)
The PC doesn't have many side-scrolling or falling-block titles. The GBA has pretty much every 'tris game ever designed.
Pocket PC + NVIDIA's mobile 3D video chipset = XBOY
Will I retire or break 10K?
The GeForce 4 440 that most of these high-end P4 notebooks sport has full MPEG-2 decoding built-in. So, outside of drawing to the screen, every function is done by a processor purpose built for DVD playback. While it's a good example of a feature laptop users are looking for, it's a terrible way to "demonstrate" the power of speedstep, as the P4 itself has very little to do with the battery life increase. They go on and on about the GF4's PowerMizer technology and the P4's Speedstep, and fail to realize that this battery life increase is likely due to having a dedicated decoding processor.
While they're at it, I might suggest the following purpose-built vs. software-simulated tests:
Pentium 4 running Quake 2 in software mode vs. Pentium 4 running Quake 2 with hardware acceleration: Which is faster?
$20 TI-30 solar calculator vs. $1,500 PC running calculator.exe under WindowsXP: Which is cheaper for basic mathematical functions?
MPEG-2 Encoder card vs. 1 Ghz Athlon: Which encodes quicker?
Incidentally, I noticed that they ran most of their framerate tests at 1024x768 (considered by most gamers, obviously, to be the optimal trade-off between quality and performance). Of course, this notebook (and most like it) has a native resolution of 1600x1200, and every 1600x1200 notebook I've ever seen has a terrible blurriness to it at anything other than the native resolution (obviously). I wonder how Quake 3 fares at a non-blurry resolution?
So does a PC. Not to mention some o t h e r s
"I have fallen off the wagon, for I am a slave to tea."
Fuck Fuckety fuck man. I have a girl and she fucks me, and neither of us poison our bodies.
I wouldnt want a girl that wants to share a pint of beer with me, cause the drink tastes like SHIT.
Beer smells pretty good though.
So do a lot of household cleaners, and I don't ingest them.
[GBA has platform games, and] So does a PC [link to Boycott Advance, a GBA emulator].
Yes, but you still have to buy the cartridge reader for $45 from a Visoly dealer such as Lik Sang. A GBA doesn't cost much more than that. And even then, VisualBoyAdvance is a bit more accurate than Boycott Advance (for GBA) and Marat's VGB (for GB/GBC).
[links to Super NES, Genesis, N64, and Game Boy emulators]
For one thing: Do NOT use iNES or NESticle. They have a bug in their VBlank handling that causes some games to skip their delay loops or perform other weird actions.
For another thing, cart readers for Super NES, Sega Genesis, and N64 were extremely hard to come by last time I checked.
[PlayStation emulator]
It's easy to read most PSX games (they're ISO 9660 file systems for Christ's sake), but many PSX games do not work well with a keyboard. If you're going to carry a USB PSX pad (Gravis GamePad Pro) with your laptop, why not just carry a GBA?
Will I retire or break 10K?
I recently bought the laptop the article is about, if anyone is interested, here are my current thoughts:
1.) XP sucks. yea well I know thats obvious but it was pretty damn strange to see my laptop struggeling with a 100mbit/s network connection to keep writing the data to the disk. my 1.6ghz 256mb RAM was at 50% usage as an ftp client while the server barely made the 10% mark.
2.) to get debian on it is pretty damned hard but it looks like everything is working apart from hte modem. Infrared, USB, PCMCIA (hot swapable), network, Graphics, twinview, DVD/CD-RW, etc.
graphics are sweet, unreal isnt stressing the thing to much even at full resolution etc.
3.)its a desktop replacement, make no mistake about it. you can knock a bull unconscious with it. its big but its good.
4.) dell service...nahhh, first wrong keybord then an unordered french one, then the right one, finally and you have to call up dell to build it in.
speedstep isnt supported under debian AFAIK but I am pretty sure the speedstep equivalent of the NV card is.
its a good laptop if you dont need to carry it around a lot. dell isnt exactly customer caring but at least the quality of the thing is good.
Dont worry, if you are american I don't blame you, their beer is shite. Go to canada or europe and enjoy the taste of REAL beer
::Drools::
::Wipes chin::
::drools more::
I was just looking at this the other day...pity with the config I wanted it would cost more than 2 desktops for me...almost $3000.
Still...::drools even more::
http://thechubbyferret.net - Ferret pictures and informative links.
It's 15.
You can hardly call it a subwoofer. It sounds good for a laptop.. but I'd rather they just made the damn thing smaller and left it out.
ANd it's not a far cry at all from a 1.6Ghz P4 w/Gf4.
The Geforce4 440go is only marginally better than the gf2mx. It has some new features.. but overall, playin gquake and such, it's similar.
ANd 1.6Ghz -vs- 1.2Ghz is a marginal improvement.
Has anyone noticed that the japanese WILL NOT sell you a 15" or a 16" high-resolution TFT desktop display, either 1600x1200, or 1450x1024 ?? These displays must cost about $1000 fully fleshed out in a desktop enclosure.
Instead, we are forced to pay $1700 for an 18" display - at a minimum cost. Why?? It's the age-old vicious upgrade cycle - originated by the car industry and perfected by the greedy PC hardware industry. And that same Greedy PC Hardware Industry is pumping out useless crap thats starting to look like a 1965 GM automobile.
For you young turks, in the 1960's GM and Ford predicated their business model on a 2-year upgrade cycle. Cars were stamped in wild shapes from tin foil, and all the cloth and plastic and fasteners were all designed to fall apart after 2 years - forcing the car buyer to trade in a model every two years. This lasted until 1973 and then the US Car Makers got HAMMERED by eco-friendly durable automobiles from Toyota, Honda, and Nissan.
I predict that the PC Industry's ECO-ARMEGEDDON is less than 3 years away. Intel is facing serious problems - big corporate customers are going to a 4-year IT upgrade cycle instead of a 3-year upgrade cycle. This means 33% fewer sales for Intel and AMD.
I just bought a Dell 8100 with a Radeon 7500 and according to an article at Tom's hardware (TechTv has one also. Search for Radeon 7500) the Radeon is killing the GForce2GO chipset in framerate. Plus it has 64meg of video ram. It works great with Debian just make sure you get the latest X server 4.2 or the Radeon won't work.(Sure would be nice to be able to apt-get the 4.2 X server.) The UXGA screen is nice and 1600x1200 with X is even better. I duel boot WinXP and Debain (XP for games) and both work excellent with this setup. Check out the Radeon before buying that GForce2Go it seems to be the better card. ...Mr.Pantz
probably as much as a /. article
unzip; strip; touch; finger; mount; fsck; more; yes; unmount; sleep
The inspiron 8200 (which is the "desktop replacement" equipped with the GF 440) has an SXGA screen (1440x1200, I believe, certainly higher than the XGA 1024x768 you imply). Believe it or not, a lot of high-end notebooks are now sporting UXGA (1600x1200) LCDs, which is why they are becoming lousy for gaming, although an 800x600 interpolation for that resolution is fine.
Belive it or not, as long as you fiddle with desktop fonts and such, 1600x1200 is not terrible on a 15" display. That, and the 15" display is not going to be the default high-end display for long, as Gateway offers a 15.7" and Sony offers a 16.1" display (both in ~8.5 lbs. notebooks, but that's why they call them desktop replacements).
Currently, 1024x768 is the native resolution on low-range celeron and duron notebooks and the 12.1" micro notebooks like the Toshiba 2200 series and Sony's R-series notebooks, but anything sporting a P4 and plenty of higher-end PIII units have at least SXGA resolution.
I have recently moved from an old Pentium (1) clone (500 mHz) with an ATI Rage Pro to a nice and crisp Athlon 1700+ with 512 DDR memory, and a Geforce 2 MX. My hard drive is also fast, 7200 rpms. I am a little interested in why there is any need to upgrade to the new nVidia chips. My computer can crank out ~450 fps if I am just gaming (and I can easily keep my minimum fps above 200 in UnrealTournament if I am also playing mp3s in the background). This is great, and will probably be enough for a while. The only problem is that my monitor's refresh rate's at 85 hertz. Shouldn't people like me upgrade our monitors quite a bit before we even touch our graphics cards again, or am I not understanding something?