FS series

As far as the performance capabilities of the machine...I think I can shed some light. We're reading in reviews that the 6200Go is about on par with the ATi9600 Mobility for all intents and purposes.

You will surely be able to play the games you listed above...not at full resolutions, but surely in a manner that they will look and feel very good.

Check to see how much dedicated memory the 6200Go is using...if it is the same chipset/mobo as the S370 it is using 32 megs of dedicated RAM (not so good for gaming) and pulling the rest of it from the system memory. If that is the case on the FS, you just need to be aware and close down any programs you may have running in the background of XP before firing up HL2.

From the sony site - NVIDIA® GeForce™ Go 6200 128MB TurboCache™ (32MB Discrete Video Memory, 96MB Dynamic Video Memory) - optional

Its 32megs dedicated and sharing 96megs from the computer.

It's no slouch, but its not any better than the 64Meg 9600 ATi.

damn, nvidia has really been disappointing me recently.

Craig, isnt the 6200 TC better than the X300?

Does the FS series support Azalia/High definnition audio?

the X300 is not that exciting...its much less of a GPU in terms of power than the 9600...its PCIE and new which is why many people believe it is the schiz.

Now the X700 would be great! But I digress...

I wouldn't see why not.

Many people are under the illusion that Longhorn is going to be equivalent to running Doom3 when infact it's very basic in terms of 3D graphics. More like running ZLDoom or something of that effect. Microsoft would be at odds with the masses if they released a product that required a graphics workhorse as most biz desktops are severely underpowered by our standards as gamers/enthusiasts.

But I've never played with Longhorn...but I know someone who has and I'll PM him to reply to us in this thread.

Hang in there.

Craig is dead on, you will have no issues running "Longhorn." Here are the "current" system specs from MSDN:

Here are the requirements that MSDN subscribers received with the PDC Longhorn.

[SNIP]
End User Desktop Minimum System Requirements. Pentium III 800 MHz or equivalent. 256 MB RAM. Graphics: GPU: Dx7 support. Display: Minimum resolution of 1024x768, at 32 bits per pixel. VRAM: 32MB at minimum resolution.

I have the developer preview running on my Dell D600 laptop here at the office and it's only a Raedon 9000.
[SNIP]

Another snippet here as well:

[SNIP]
Longhorn will use what it can of your video card. If you want all the eye candy and features you will need a DX9 compliant card. My personal choice would be one of the ATI cards. If you are using a card lower than DX9 you will not be able to see some of the features shown at PDC.

The PDC build does make use of D3D hardware for graphics acceleration. Graphics acceleration is enabled independently of the Desktop Composition Engine (DCE) being enabled. [DCE is not in build 4051, but when it is part of Longhorn it will use the GPU as well.]

If you have the proper hardware (Dx7 or better) with the PDC build, 2D elements will be accelerated and render anti-aliased. Text will be rendered with sub-pixel cleartype (best quality/perf when the card has PixelShader 2).
[SNIP]

At this point as you can see they are basing the specs on DX7, they stated at a developers conference last month that it will ship with a new version of DirectX in the 06 relase. As stated above and at the conference they are giving some suggestions that they are using ATI as their development platform.

I'm still waiting for the "eye candy" version due out later this quarter to see what exactly they are talking about.

EDIT: I can try and get some screen shots up later on tady if anyone is interested.

Thanks TP! And yes, I'd love to see some pics of LH thanks!

Well I guess the chipset supports it, but it is not enabled or connected in the FS. I'm not sure why they wouldn't use it, it's there.

Well it's going to be a bit longer, I can't get my lab machine to boot now I'll try and work on it today and get those screen shots.

Ok, screen shots of Longhorn are up, posted them in the AW photo section and here is the link to the thread:

http://notebookforums.com/showthread...317#post726317

I've saw over the weekend, the 6200GO is a total disappointment. It was par up with ATI X300!

http://www.neoseeker.com/Articles/Ha...200turbocache/

The FS is a nice laptop and great design. Sad it was par with some crappy as graphics controller.

I just talked to someone at Sony who told me that there probably wont be any updates or new options added to the FS series until maybe this Fall. No surprise there I guess but it was worth asking.

Don't get the model with the integrated GPU. Check out this review here on the FS550 model.