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| David -- I'm strongly considering buying Hypersonic's version of the Voodoo m:860 when it's released in a few weeks. I've never owned an AMD machine before. How does yours perform for gaming and other graphics apps? I'm going to get mine with the Athlon 3400 + ATI 9700 128 MB. |
Yeah good! I've installed Prince of Persia, GTA Vice City, Max Payne 2, Total Club Manager, No One Lives Forever 2 and Pro Evolution Soccer 3. All that are running are lightning fast! Graphics look fantastic with the 9600 Turbo Pro, I wish I could have waited for the 9700.
I did make the mistake of plugging the AC power in while in the middle of Prince of Persia (it was actually running fine before hand), Prince of Persia's CPU speed limiter had already set itself to 800MHz and after plugging into 2000MHz, it was like the game was on speed!
Pro Evolution Soccer's menus are a bit funky but the game engine ran very smooth, I think it's more an issue of the programming rather than the laptop, and there are many updates that can be installed for it now (it looks like it's a rough emulation from the PS2. The graphics menus still have graphics of the PS2 controller buttons to prompt you through the menus.
No One Lives Forever 2 has been crashing and is unable to get into the game engine, not quite sure why.
GTA VC, Max Payne 2 and Prince of Persia seemed to run particularly nice. I'll be renting Far Cry from the games shop as soon as I can find the time. That'll be a great test for it.
Photoshop is booting real fast. Still need to install Macromedia Dreamweaver and Nusphere PHPed but imagine they'll run fine. I'm going to be downloading some PCMark 2003 today to see if I am getting the expected results.
I've been getting about 3-3.5 hours of battery life as I have been breaking in the battery. I've been installing and playing a few games at the same time so it's surprising how much battery life it's retaining.
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| I hope the M860 and Hypersonics equivalant doesn't have the same problem with the PowerNow drivers. I also hope that for the extra money Hypresonic's 72 hour burn in will show if its running at the proper speed. Last thing I want to do is spend over $2K to have to reinstall everything all over again. |
I'd say Hypersonic would do it right. They seem like a great company and know what they're doing. I would have purchased from them if I had the time (you can jump the queue at cyberpower) as I'm just about to take off overseas to Europe and USA. Cyberpower (accidentally?) threw in a free copy of XP Home too. I received a HyperData badge with my laptop (normally just have a crater), interesting.
