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AMD and Intel Notebooks Head to Head
An anonymous reader writes "The two chip giants go head-to-head in this review of notebook computers which features 10 different models." From the article: "To be blunt, sourcing high-performance AMD-based notebooks for this test was less difficult than extracting teeth from a fully grown chicken -- but only just. After much chasing, only two vendors submitted an AMD-powered product -- MSI and Asus. Interestingly, both vendors had their Intel-powered notebooks at the Lab with no chasing needed. We should point out that the rarity of AMD product is not the fault of AMD, rather vendors, in Australia at least, do not seem to stock adequate quantities of high-performance AMD-equipped notebooks. Acer, for example, has a humdinger of a notebook the Acer Ferrari 3400 that is equipped with a mobile Athlon 64 but the company was unable to ship a single unit to the lab during the entire month of May."
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I want to drag this out as long as possible. Bring me my protractor.
a bad reputation in Australia. I haven't really noticed a lot of talk about them to be honest - most of the stuff you hear about is Intel.
Then again, maybe the retailers in Australia just don't provide the same support for AMD as for Intel. Lawsuit, anyone? *removes tongue from cheek*
Australian dollars currently trade at $1.30AU for every $1US.
XFX Geforce 7800 at Newegg is:
$574 dollars2 E16814150100
Link: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N8
XFX Geforce 7800 at AusPCMarket is:
$924 dollarsh p?input%5Bproduct_code%5D=VI-11PVT70F-256&input%5B category_id%5D=1339
Link: http://www.auspcmarket.com.au/show_product_info.p
$574 x 1.3 = $746.20
There is a markup, of about 20 percent. Not 150-200% as you have stated, however.
10
20 Print "Balls To That"
Asus notebooks are also beginning to gain huge popularity here in Canada.
And they're easy to buy. Just go to HP's online shopping kiosk. I've been using a Presario R3240 for about6-7 months (athlon64 3200+) and am quite happy with the performance.
Cheers,
Well, not really built, just bought a bare AMD 64 Uniwill laptop from coboc.com, and inserted an AMD 64 3700+, 1.25 GB RAM, a wireless abg mini-PCI card, a 100GB 5400 Momentum Seagate drive and a DVD writer.
There was no shortage of bare AMD 64 laptops, the package arrived in one day.
I had lots of spare components, I only had to pay about $750 (CA Tax and shipping included). I did not have to buy a CPU,HD, DVD-writer or a wireless card, all these components existed already in our lab. I had no spare laptop memory; however, I managed to 'extract' 1GB+256MB RAM cards from other laptops in our lab.
I installed two 64 bit OS-es, Suse 9.3 64bit+ Solaris 10. Works great.
This company used to sell alot of AMD notebooks but I know 3 people with them and all 3 laptops suffer from overheating (thats what you get when you stick a 3700+ in a laptop I guess) they have stopped selling some of the top models :(
ASUS laptops are quite popular in Australia as well..
If your seasoined linux geek the advantages of Intel over AMD should be fairly obvious.
I am not talking about cpus per say... AMD64 cpus rock (and pentium-m is great for embedded stuff) but for the entire platform.
For instance the Intel Sonoma platform...
You have updated graphics with good compatability and full Free Software (tm) DRI support for the GMA 900 series and probably for GMA 950.
You may need to hit up the cvs servers for the latest in GMA 950 support at this time.. but both the DRI in X and the DRM in the kernel (as of 2.6.12) are aviable in the form of 915 drivers.
Intel released documentation to DRI to get this to happen...
Intel's Wireless support is also good for Linux. No fucking around with Linuxant for the official 'centrino' platforms (beware of vendors sticking in their own broadcom wifi units.. always pick intel).
ACPI support should be good.. if not it will be.
With AMD platforms you have to deal with a mixture of random wifi cards and random ATI or Nvidia graphics.
Nvidia support is OK, thru their excelent (+5 points) and closed source (-5 points) drivers for Linux. ATI sucks (-5 points) and closed source drivers (-5 points) should be avoided at all costs... and it's very difficult to find Nvidia on a laptop platform.
So if your looking for a new Linux laptop and you know what your doing and you want good support for your hardware thru free software then pick out Intel Centrino 'sonoma' laptops with GMA 900 or GMA 950 graphics (don't bother with ATI, and get Nvidia if you need the upgraded 3d speeds) and Intel wifi.
Fast, good performance, decent 3d performance (enough for quake3 and 90% of decent games for Linux) good battery life (better then the ibook (the latpop I currently use)) and it's generally more expensive and/or more lightweight then going after a AMD-based laptop.
Now if your building a desktop... AMD almost always. AMD64s are better then Pentium 4's...
Problem Solved
HJ
Australian prices include sales tax (10%) for starters.