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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.
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
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.
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.