Sneak peak on up and coming laptop technology - Page 2

Stetching 4:3 ratio games (say, a 640x480 native resolution game) to widescreen makes it look very nasty This is my biggest beef with my current laptop which has widescreen. For my next laptop, a widescreen will almost certainly be a deal breaker.

Too bad someone can't come up with a utility (or a graphics driver with settings control) that would let you stretch a native resolution 640x480 game to 1600x1200 on a WUXGA display, leaving black bars on the sides. Currently your only options are to stretch it to fullscreen (very ugly and distorted) or using only 640x480 pixels in the center (using only less than 1/4 of the screen area).

If this is already available, PLEASE let me know. But I've looked high and low, and can't find it.

why dont you choose a different native resolution from inside the game?

as i understand it... you should choose the one that fits inside your screens native resolution

Good point...but how many of the average desktop users actually have four harddrives in their desktop right now? No one I know has that....most people i know use one if not two max. The same thing goes with the speed as well, as probably only real power users will need hard drives above 7200rpm at this point. So really I guess the notebook could take over for the average home desktop user while those power users would still be using regular desktops for their 4 hd's running at 10,000rpm....that is until we get a new storage medium which from what i hear isnt too far away....

I'm talking about games that aren't in 3d--eg, Starcraft, numerous adventure games with prerendered background, et al. Typically only games in 3D allow you to switch the native resolution of the game. (And besides, modern 3d games would run really slow at 1600x1200 on a laptop).

RAID 0 is pretty popular nowadays. Considering most have it onboard with some sort of a controller, it's not nonexistent.

Add to that people then have a storage device in case the RAID fails.

You can easily have 3 drives ... 2 for performance and 1 for storage for not a lot of dough.

Super

Something that would solve this hard drive issue for me at least would be the adding of external S-ATA ports on laptops (two would be sufficient)...

As S-ATA drives are hotswappable, that would give you the option to without any fuss directly connect large size 3.5" HDDs to your laptop and enjoy full S-ATA speed, as opposed to much slower USB2/Firewire speed available through HDD enclosures. There would be no need for any enclosure or power brick, either. Also, externally connected S-ATA drives should be fully bootable and configurable for RAID setups, etc...

There would of course be other uses for external S-ATA ports than just HDDs. Optical drives with S-ATA interface are appearing (DVD burners etc) and would benefit from this but also any other external hardware in need of a high speed and high voltage connection and using S-ATA...

External S-ATA ports are available on some ATX size motherboards and S-ATA PCI cards. Is there any chance that we might get to see this feature on upcoming laptops?

That's true if they're native SATA drives. However, those are few and far between at this point. I have a WD HD that was having power problems on the line it was on, and when it'd spin up, it'd crash the system. Don't know if Seagate's are native SATA, but I know WD's aren't.

From everything that I read, there'd still need to be power from somewhere, as the power doesn't come from the SATA interface itself, rather there's a separate power line for the drive. It definitely doesn't supply power like USB or there wouldn't be a separate power line.

http://www.maxtor.com/_files/maxtor/...hite_paper.pdf

ASRock mentioned that there may be limitations in the chipsets to whether hot plug is supported or not.

http://www.asrock.com/news/SATA_HotPlug.pdf

Umm.. current PCI bandwidth is in the multi-GB/s range.

Perhaps you're thinking of something else?

There's absolutely no problem finding 3.5" S-ATA HDDs today, there are lots of brands and models available, and virtually all new ATX motherboards have native S-ATA support. The only thing that's still scarce is S-ATA based optical drives as well as 2.5" HDDs, but just because it's scarce doesn't mean it's unavailable. If you want it you can buy it, and it's going to be the norm sooner rather than later whether we're talking about 3.5" HDDs, 2.5" HDDs or optical drives...


Of course, both the S-ATA data line as well as the power line are supplied through these external S-ATA ports. Here's a cheap $10 internal-to-external S-ATA converter giving the same external S-ATA connection as those motherboards and S-ATA PCI cards I mentioned.


Let's say some chipsets wouldn't support it for whatever reason. That would only mean in this worst case scenario that you would have to reboot your computer in order to use the S-ATA interface. Even then it would be well worth it considering the advantages. However given the fact that this would have to be preinstalled in a laptop motherboard (as opposed to desktop computers where you can add it yourself) the motherboard manufacturer would be aware of this issue and would make sure that no such problem would arise...

I never said there was a problem finding SATA drives. I'm running 3 of them now.

I said that a lot of them are still running with a PATA to SATA converter in them, therefore not NATIVE SATA. WD does this with their drives ... even with the Raptors.

Interesting. How do you connect it to the outside? It doesn't look like a typical SATA connector. I take it there's a cable that would go to an external "cage."

Guess we'll have to wait and see. Seems like a lot of extra work for not that much gain with optical drives, especially when firewire and USB 2.0 do the job well enough.

Super

It's because it's a two-in-one connector. You simply connect the data and power cables from your S-ATA HDD/DVD directly to this external S-ATA two-in-one port and off it goes. No external power supply or enclosure needed...


It's very little work if the motherboard already has native S-ATA because all that needs to be done is extend an internal S-ATA data and power connector cable pair to an external port. Nothing more. All that is needed is a place for an extra S-ATA connector and place for the external S-ATA port. Given that you get rid of the clumsy internal P-ATA connector, there should be place for an extra S-ATA connector and more...

As for the gain, this beats any USB2 or Firewire connection by a good margin, with an external USB2 connection you get 60MBytes/s, while with an external S-ATA connection you get at least 150MBytes/s, 2.5 times the speed of USB2. Also, no need for an enclosure or power brick, also fully bootable and configurable.

Regarding optical drives, they would also benefit from it given that they'd get the power from the laptop (easy to travel with an external optical drive), but the greatest benefits are with HDDs...