i9300 questions and benchmarks

Keiran, even though you are not a gamer I would highly recommend you order your system with the nvidia 6800 go card. Ive used the 9300 and 6000 with the ati x300 and find it to be inadequate even for general use like web browsing and streaming video or playing dvds, this is especially true if you select a WUXGA screen though I dont recommend such a high resolution. The 6800 card will dramatically improve system performance as it has 256 megs of totally dedicated memory where the x300 only has 64 megs dedicated and 64 megs of shared memory from your system memory. It will provide you with a more future proof system as 128 megs is the bare minimum people need in their computers these days.

you can save 200 dollars by ordering a 1.86 ghz processor, check out some of my reviews on the 9300


http://www.notebookforums.com/showthread.php?t=96384

as for the benchmarks you are looking for, see tomshardware.com and anandtech.com for these benchmarks on the pentium M and on the hard drives.
fans are very quiet and system averages 42 C here.

Get 1.86ghz and 6800go GPU

In my opinion, if you're not a gamer, there is NO POINT in getting a Geforce 6800 Go that will cut your battery life by 40% (5 hours vs 3 hours with the 9-cell battery) and cost you $200 CDN more, to boot (although ours just comes with the 128MB ATI X300 or 256MB Geforce 6800 Go).

First of all, web browsing doesn't use any of the 3D acceleration of the video card. That's handled by the RAMDACs on the card, if I'm not mistaken. Anyways, the quality of the ATI 2D display should be as equally good as the Nvidia, since they've had many years to compete with each other (and 2D display quality should have matured by now). About the streaming video and playing DVD's, that's done a little bit with hardware support, but I don't think you'd notice much difference between the two. Again, the technology for that isn't exactly cutting edge, either, and should have matured quite a bit. ATI might be even bettter for the 2D and video playback, for all I know (they DID have that reputation for quite awhile). The Nvidia 6xxx series might have some extra features/gimmicks for video playback over the ATI X300 series, though; you'd have to check that out.

About the video memory: I've never heard that the 64MB ATI card uses an additional 64MB of shared system memory. If that's true, then it WOULD slow your system down a little bit. However, that would surprise me. Hopefully, you'd be able to disable that extra bit of memory if you're not using it for gaming. However, as far as I know, there's NO WAY that you can say that 128MB of video memory is not enough for general computing use. That amount of video memory is only used when you're playing games / 3D rendering, which is when it's used mostly (solely?) for caching your textures. Normal windows usage doesn't use much of your video memory (does it use any at all? Hmm, I'd imagine it would...) Hmm, ok, according to some preliminary Google research, the video memory is normally used in Windows according to your screen resolution and bit depth. So, for WUXGA@32bpp = 1920x1200x32, then you'd be seeing about 9000kB of video memory being used. That's under 9MB.

My 9300 has the 6800 go card and it runs very cool and quiet, Ive never seen my card go above 50c. As for web browsing, this is very subjective, if your watching streaming video for example, while web browsing, you will notice a significant difference between the two cards. It makes no sense to order the system with a card that is barely adequate for everyday use and light gaming, whether your a gamer or not. There are several posters who originally ordered their 9300 with the x300 ati card, I suggest you browse their views on this topic as you may find it helpful. Since it adds tremendous resale value to your laptop and offers you a "future proof" laptop, it doesnt make sense not to buy the 6800 go card. As I have said often in other posts, More than you need now is less than you'll regret later. Especially when considering the high cost of upgrading the video card and hard drive after initial purchase. You might also want to find a friend here in the states to order a system for you??? So you can get in on those awesome coupons that we enjoy here in the states. If I'm not mistaken the pound is still quite valuable as compared to the dollar.

As for the ATI card using only 64 megs of dedicated memory and the other 64 being shared, you can get this information straight off of the ATI website and other review sites on the web. The card yes, does have dedicated memory, but not all 128 megs are dedicated, only half of it, the other 64 megs is shared from system memory.

I get three to three and a half hours of battery life on my 9300 and that is with the 6800 go card and could get more if I wanted if I tweaked my power settings a bit im sure.
You may not watch DVD's on your laptop or think you wont as I did, yet I find myself doing this at times. Some light gaming too although I didnt purchase a laptop for this express purpose.

The choice is yours ofcourse but you will find that you have greater flexibility with the 6800 go card than you ever will with the atix300 card and flexibility afterall is the pivotal reason for purchasing a laptop is it not??

Cheers

Just an afterthought on battery life concerns, three solid hours with wifi isnt enough battery life??? How often does one use their laptop outdoors??? How often does one use a laptop with no power outlet nearby?? Airports are full of them, universities, coffee shops etc.

Also if you are going to get a system with an atix300 card, perhaps you could get a price break by purchasing one from Dell outlet. There are quite a few in the outlet here in the states with that card as many users returned them to get a 6800 go.

What are you talking about??? the x300 is perfectaly capable of playing games. Did you not understand him?? I dont think he stuttered?? He said just for web brosing and the x300 is more than perfect for that. I had a system with integrated grpahics and it would even be able to play games, also it web broswed just fine.

The X300 128MB/64MB is definately adequate. Hell, it even plays BF2 (albeit w/ lowest graphics settings)!!!!
With the screen brightness set on high, processor at full speed (1.86GHz), graphics card o'clocked to 390/800, wifi on, I get 2:53 of web surfing/word processing and 1:00 of intense gaming.
With the screen brightness set on low, processor at lowest speed (800MHz), graphics card u'clocked to 125/318, wifi on, I get 3:15 of web surfing/word processing and 1:25 of intense gaming.

Throughout gaming, the fan noise is minimal. The Processor fan is on the left side of the computer but the speed is never on "High" setting (around 120000rpm) when controlled by the automatic fan control. The "High" setting on the CPU is clearly audible, but never intrusive. The GPU fan on the other hand is very quite even when put on "High" setting. I used I8kfanGUI and put both fans on "High" setting. I ran the most graphically intensive applications one after the other (BF2, Doom3, 3DMark2k5, RealTimeHDR w/ 6800go@390/800, P-m1.86@1.86GHz) and the maximum temperature I could get the CPU and GPU to be at was 46 celsius and 54 celsius respectively. I must say this is very impressive. For normal non graphics-intensive tasks, the temperatures dip to as low as 30 celsius (CPU) and 47 celsius (GPU) w/ fans automatically adjusted by system.

My question is, what's the point of getting a 9300 instead of the 6000d if you're not going to get the Geforce Go6800 256mb? I mean considering the 6000d would be cheaper and have the same specs, except for the 17inch screen, is there a point?

Sorry, the x300 cannot hold a candle to the 6800 go, to each his own but you cant go wrong with the 6800, more than you need now is less that you'll regret later, see others who got the x300

Ok, I think I have sort of the lowdown comparison (hopefully) between the Nvidia Geforce 6800 Go and the ATI Radeon X300 mobility line:

1) Price
the 6800 of course is substantially more expensive than the 64MB and 128MB ATI cards

2) Battery life
From what I remember, you can apparently get... 3.33? hours with the 6-cell and up to 5 hours with the 9-cell using the ATI X300. FIVE HOURS! That opens up a lot of flexibility in your day right there (you could run it for more than half of your working day non-stop on battery). With the 6800 Go, you get approx. 2 hours with the 6-cell and 3 hours to 3h15min with the 9-cell.

3) Image quality & Performance
- A. General system performance
Ok, your system performance shouldn't really be affected no matter which card you choose. I remember when review sites used to benchmark the test systems to see which system was faster in normal applications with a particular video card, but I haven't seen that sort of comparison any more. Maybe it's because CPU's have gotten so fast that whatever CPU load a video card would take up doing the 2D rendering is now inconsequential. With that being said, you WILL notice lower performance if you're using a video card/chipset that is based on shared RAM memory. This is because it's eating up part of the memory bandwidth to access its memory. HOWEVER, two things to note:
From what I gather from the 6000's hardware page, only the 64MB version uses shared memory: 32MB of dedicated RAM and 32MB of shared memory. Anyways, under normal Windows usage, not all of the 32MB of shared memory would actually be allocated, I believe. You'd either be losing out on, say, a minimum size of 8MB of RAM, or perhaps none at all, since it's got its own 32MB of dedicated memory. I would believe that the ATI engineers / firmware developers would make it so that the drivers just used the onboard dedicated RAM and never touched the system memory unless you needed the extra space.

[Added later:] Oh my goodness... I wrote this whole following section about Intel integrated graphics because, for some reason, I thought I was talking about the i6000 series.... I SO need to go to sleep, lol. I guess that's why I linked to the 6000 spec page in the last paragraph. Hmm, ok, I blame it on the fact that the only Dell Canada Inspiron that I know of that has the ATI X300 64MB option is the i6000d. i9300's come standard here with the 128MB X300.
The same might be said for the integrated Intel graphics, too. It can take up to 128MB of shared memory, depending on the situation and total amount of RAM (http://www1.us.dell.com/content/prod...pecstab#tabtop - see footnote #3), but it'd probably only take up about 8MB for non-gaming/3D rendering, if I had to guess. Ooh, here's a good page from a Tom's Hardware analysis on integrated video: Weaknesses Of Integrated Graphics. It mentions the increased memory bandwidth demands that accessing the shared memory would require when you're doing something intensive like 3D gaming, but it doesn't mention anything about 2D image quality for web browsing (because that's not so much of an issue NOW of days), nor DVD playback. This is a 2 year old article, though. Anyways, here's something else very interesting from the article: Sysmark 2002 benchmarks with the integrated video chipsets, and the results showed that using the integrated video vs. adding a video card only meant that you were just barely (they viewed it as negligible) slower in the office-like benchmark. But I should note that the benchmark was conducted at a low XGA (1024x768) resolution @ 60Hz refresh rate, and those office tasks aren't usualy memory bandwidth intensive. If you're running at WUXGA @ 60Hz (@ 32-bits), that's 527MB/s of memory bandwidth to just do the display (I think that's how it works). With the i6000's PC3200 RAM, though, you have ~3052MB/s of memory bandwidth, and that doubles to ~6104MB/s if you're running in dual-channel mode. Anyways, in summary, it looks like integrated graphics don't affect performance that much, unless you're doing any 3D gaming or rendering (in which case they "suck" for more than one reason, lol). BUT WAIT! I just read that most integrated video chipsets have a small amount of cache (let's hope greater than the 9MB that WUXGA @ 60Hz @ 32bpp takes up) onboard so that the video chipset can access it directly instead of using main memory (for basic 2D display). Hmm... so maybe integrated video is pretty fine now of days for non-3D stuff.

- B. 2D image quality (not video)
Generally, for Windows applications and 2D stuff, the difference will come down more to ATI vs Nvidia, because as far as I know, the 2D RAMDAC chips and other hardware for 2D stuff is the same for each company if you're buying a recent card from them. I think you'd get the same 2D image quality in normal applications whether you're using an ATI X800 PT card or a mobility X300, since I'd expect that ATI isn't exactly revolutionizing their 2D hardware technology, which has matured quite a bit, already. Nvidia of course uses their own technology, so you MIGHT be able to see a difference between Nvidia 2D and ATI 2D, but I haven't heard 2D quality comparisons being an issue with video cards in the last like 3+ years.

C. 2D video performance & image quality
Generally, you shouldn't see much difference, either, for normal video playback. ATI's video might be even higher quality than Nvidia's, due to the different hardware acceleration technology that ATI would use. The video card is only involved in video playback only when hardware acceleration is used, which I think might only be used for MPEG 2 (DVD) decoding/playback and HDTV playback. HOWEVER, here is a big difference: as far as I know, the 6800 Go has a feature called Purevideo (you will probably need to download a patch to enable it with Windows Media Player), which enables hardware acceleration (via DirectX, I believe) of HDTV decoding and also DVD playback, too. This is on top of the usual video/DVD decoding acceleration hardware that Nvidia cards have. The desktop X300 has the VideoShader function which includes "All-format DTV/HDTV decoding", but the mobility X300's spec page doesn't seem to show that... Ok, the mobility X300's overview page DOES list VideoShader as a feature, which helps with DVD playback. And it should have the usual ATI video acceleration features, too. UPDATE: Apparently you can also download the hotfix from Windows that uses DirectX video acceleration for HDTV clips, too. Or the newest Catalyst drivers took advantage of this. Something like that. I'm not sure if it works for the X300, too, but I wouldn't be surprised.

I suggest that you read other threads where owners of both video cards on the 9300 have posted their thoughts, I dont see anyone regretting their 6800 purchase, the same cannot be said of the x300. If "adequate" is "adequate" for you then get the x300, and you will see if "adequate" will still be "adequate" six months from now.......

As far as comparing the two cards.....THERE IS NO COMPARISON
Thats like comparing a ford escort car to a corvette.

Nice analogy