Is the X700 Mobility no good any more

It depends on what games you want to play. I played all three Prince Of Persia games and Fable: TLC on full settings and I had no issues with it.

Granted if you want to play oblivion then you wouldn't be able to but as I said it depends on what games you want to play.

x700 Today

I'm glad I logged on today. I'd like to be in on this discussion.

I've been using the x700 for a year now (previous to that I was using the integrated ATI 9000 graphics card), and I often ask myself if it's still enough. It never lets me down. Unless you're a heavy gamer, there shouldn't even be a question as to whether it's enough. This thing can handle any non-gaming graphics need for anyone, from my experience.

As for gaming, it has played so many games at great resolutions, that I can't seem to find the need to seek better. It plays UT2004 at max everything (and without a stutter) and gets great frame rates. I often run Fraps during gaming, just to check that my frame rates are staying within an acceptable range, and usually they stick around 60fps.

Other 3D games I play include: Quake IV, BF2, BF1942 (including the awesome "Desert Combat" mod), Doom III, and Call of Duty. I've never been disappointed in this card. Not once.

I have a friend who I helped find a great deal last year on a Dell I9300, with the 6800 in it, for $1300(ish). He has more problems with his graphics card, than I ever have. And his runs at standard 1280x800 res (max), while mine runs at 1680x1050! For example, when playing at a LAN party, he will often have lag that I don't experience at all, even when we're both plugged into the same switch.

I was told by some people that if I bought this notebook, that I would want something better within 6 months. So far I can't complain. It's got its little quirks, but those are easily handled by one who knows what to look for. It's thinner than most notebooks I see people using.

My friends with their new dual core Dell e1705s or whatever they are (still 15.4" screens), and their x1400 graphics cards, complain that mine "looks" so much thinner than theirs do. Well, it IS thinner, and it's designed with that in mind. And the x700 still outperforms the x1400 in almost all respects.

So yes, I think it's still a great card.
Ransom

As long as you're not trying to run FEAR or Obivilon, you should be ok with most of todays game.

Some of the games that I have played or am currently playing on my 8104 with X700 128MB are:

EVE, City of Heroes/Villians, HL2, Act of War DA and HT, Dawn of War WA, Empire at war, Rise of Legends, Heroes of Might and Magic V, Galactic Civilization II, Spellforce 2, Battle for Middle-earh 1 and 2, Age of Empire III, and Civilization IV Warlords.

Agree with what has been said above, and I am also glad to be part of this thread. ‘Far Cry’ blew me away when I first saw the graphics. Then I installed the ‘K9 Vision’ mod, and it blew me even further away. Every time I fire this up I feel that the X700 has given me stunning value for money. Installed a load of demo’s that have all performed flawlessly and still have the full games to play. The fact that a relatively thin notebook can turn out this kind of quality without stutter really is an incredible achievement.

Admittedly, every graphics accelerator has its day, but given some sensible settings I feel the X700 may just outlive its expected playability. Acer deserve a pat on the back for getting things right. Thoroughly impressed…

Psychotic_UK what drivers are you using that allowed you to get prince of persia the sands of time to work. I have the default ones from acer and when I try to run the game I get a warning box saying the x700 card is not supported. I can ofcourse just click on the run game anyway option and the game "seems" to run fine but I would rather have full support from the game so again I ask what driver do you have and where might I be able to get it.

Cheers,
Nosix

nosix, I use the 6.6 mobility catalyst from ati. I get the same message as well. It's not something that can be avoided since at the time that the game was released, the x700 wasn't in production and thus not in the games coding.

Even if you play the game you still get full support but what you don't get is assurances that it will not crash at some point. My game though, has not crashed once whenever I played.

How much ram do you have because i can run both FEAR and Obivilon.
fear at 1024 with very good graphics as far as obivilon i run it at 1200 x 800 using the x700 with 6.6 drivers

Thanks for the reply atleast I know im not alone with this error message and it's not much to worry about but I would still like to test out the 6.6 drivers so guess I will do a search to see how I can get around the anti acer thing that ATI has for there drivers.

Cheers,
Nosix

well major #1 is omegadrivers.net, hands down, a x700 "not being able to play new games is" BULL granted its no 7900gs which i have, but as long as every setting isnt max it works damn well, i have a friend with an old t43p that has a x600 that still plays games very well at mid settings hi res or med res high settings, you ahve to know the card top to bottom to know what it will stutter at, and even when i had my x600 it never let me down and im a heavy gamer its all in the way you know/run your comp

and plus all travelmate's x700 are underclocked making it not even run at 100%

I got x600 w/ 64mb of ram, i can player HL2:Episode 1 with everthing maxed out with frame rates around 42. Battlefield 2 i can get most settings to high, exept 2 i need to keep low becuase it just dosnt work with those any higher.(shadows and ... forgot) Oblivion has been the game thats showing my cards age, 2 yeards old it can handle a new high intesne graphic game at med settings i think thats good! Then the X700 is way better that its younger simbling x600.
http://www.gpureview.com/show_cards....=318&card2=100

Which drivers are better overall, the latest catalyst, or the latest omega?

Does anybody know what happened with the Omegadrivers? There haven't been a release since the 6.5 catalyst!

From DriverHeaven forums sounds like he's not going to work on them, at least for now.

NGO and ZeroPoint builds are available though. And NGO include classic control panel.

CCC simply sucks - an extremely slow loading monster of bloatware (compare it to also .NET based NHC to see the difference).

Eh? Radeon Mobility x700 128MB is a kick-ass card. I have the Travelmate 8104 and it runs Battlefield 2 on "high" and cs:source maxed except for anisotropic filtering and anti-aliasing (2x). Oblivion runs good with medium textures and everything else maxed except for tree shadows (off), shadows on grass (off), and anti-aliasing (set to none oh well). I get a bit of lag in places like guard barracks and places where there are 15+ npcs in the same room, but that's okay. For some odd reason, Oblivion says that HDR isn't supported. Strange because it works fine on bf2 and css. Anyways, I guess I'll just have to survive with bloom effect only for that game.

Also, I found a cool program to get the catalyst drivers installed- http://www.driverheaven.net/patje/

EDIT: oh, I forgot to mention- I have cs:s running at 1280*768, bf2 at 1024*768 (couldn't find widescreen settings), and oblivion at 800*480 or whatever the heck that really low wide res is. So I guess I'm saying bf2 and css run great (50+ fps at those settings) and oblivion runs pretty good (30+ fps).

EDIT2: I dunno what difference it makes, but I have 2.0Ghz pentium M compared to your 1.8...

DarthAcer: Too bad omega is gone... Which driver would you recommend instead? The reason I don't go with the official mobility drivers is that I need a custom resolution (1024x640) to run the more demanding games like Oblivion.

spengo: the reason why HDR is disabled in Oblivion is that it is based on shader 3.0. instead of shader 2.0. (e.g. like CSS or BF2). And you probably know that the X700 only supports shader 2.0.!

I'm on Omega (6.5 based) but then I do not run Oblivion. I briefly tried NGO set (6.6 based) and they were fine. Don't know about custom resolutions though. They are at www.ngohq.com

Even for X1600, only 6.6 (I believe) version of drivers can run HDR and AA. The specific patch even has a name. ATI promised to include the patch into upcoming WHQL driver.

By the way, I just read on driverheaven that Omegadriver is doing some final touches on the omegadrivers based on 6.7. and it should be out soon.

Good news!