X700, X600, 9700? - Page 2

In the words of ancient and revered Jedi Master, "The force is strong in this one, yes."

wat about this

The Hp zv6000 is a amd 64 lappy with 128 mb dedicted graphic memory, and its dirt cheap right now. check it out on hp's website.

you can tap into an additional 128MB of shared system memory that you can configure up to 256mb, including the dedicated 128mb. Also, the card is integrated.

Nothing last for very long, hell Geforce 4200 Ti, 4600, & 4800 used to be the baddest thing around the block. Now there just collecting dust. Hardware becomes obselete after 6 months, someone is always coming out with something bigger & badder.

What is the exact laptop you want?

If that is the case, then definitely go for a 64 bit CPU, 64bit applications will be fairly common for specialized tasks in the next 18 months, and I'm sure that network administration will be one of the areas that will benefit earlier.


Most games which are not first person shooters are relatively easy on the graphics card. And for most genres of games, the 9700 will be plenty. But I suspect that playin WOW with high resolution + AA/AF will be difficult on most notebook cards. To get the best out of WOW and later games, one really would need X800XTPE, or Dual 6800GT in SLI.


If you are not a fanatic gamer, and would be satisfied to play games at less than max settings and maybe somewhat slower frame rates (40-50), then a machine with 9700/X600 will do fine for you. However, if you have to have the latest and the best games on max settings, then nothing in the laptop world would suffice. I think a laptop will do you well, since it seems like you are not that avid of a gamer.

Not really, 200M or X300 are not really designed to be gaming cards, and certainly won't have the pixel pipeline and memory bandwidth to play the latest games well.

But even the best graphics cards, such as an X800 would be pretty poor on the gaming front; the only laptop GPU that is worth anything is the 6800Ultra, but that comes in a Dell XPS, a machine with terrible reliability, and one that I certainly would not consider as a network administrator. Trying to do serious work on that machine is just asking for trouble. That is a pure gaming machine for people who don't need anywhere close to professional quality and reliability.

That information is unfortunately incorrect.

PCI-Express and PCI are completely different technologies that share nothing in common.

Furthermore, PCI-Express is serial in nature; each PCI-Express slot has dedicated bandwidth that is NOT shared with any other device.

In otherwords, there is no negative performance from a PCI-Express graphics card.

I wish it was indeed incorrect, but unfortunately not.

http://www.rme-audio.com/english/tec...rce4_tests.htm

It's fairly scathing.

PS. "RME Audio" are the leading sound-card designers and manufacturers for professional audio recording.)

Also, see expert audio user testimonies:- http://forum.nuendo.com/phpbb2/viewt...er=asc&start=0

Kieran

Those benchmarks are highlighting problems with the nForce 4 chipset, and primarily the SLI versions of them at that. Apparently it is due to a very slow AMD HyperTransport link on certain revisions. This of course has nothing to do with the Intel 915 chipset used in notebooks.

It looks you are hyping up a problem that doesn't apply here, and that furthermore isn't a problem as people are unlikely to do high-end audio recording with laptops.

915 chipsets are indeed mentioned alongside nforce4 to a lesser degree, but because the 915 chipsets have only very recently been released naturally full-scale "official" experimentation is sketchy, but the strong word on the ground is that PCI-Express graphics cards are a massive backward step for non-gamers and are currently best avoided, particularly regards high-powered PCI-E cards such as the GeForce 6800 Go, etc., whereas lower-spec'ed cards such as the ATI X300 are toted to offer better audio integration and performance at least closer to when the old specifications of graphics cards such as the 128mb ATI Radeon 9700 were employed.

This is not advancing in technology as far as the non-gamer is concerned. The problem has been officially recognised, which is a great first step forward, but no-one appears to realise or work out what the cause is.

Apologies Guspaz, but I also feel your vision is extremely narrow regards laptop users, probably purely as you only see mostly gamers in these forums who are primarily interested in frames-per-second and resolutions. Further afield, very-high-end audio recording, sequencing and sound engineering is currently going through something of a huge revolution where portable recording is concerned, and I'd hazard a guess that laptops feature as the central main computer in around a third-to-a-half of professional music recording studios, and that figure is expected to rocket as laptops become even more powerful along with increasing battery lives.

Music production using laptops is as prevalent as 2D/3D graphic artists using the same. As just one example, Liam Howlett of "The Prodigy" even used a single laptop running Propellerheads Reason and Pro Tools software to produce the whole of the last album.

Furthermore, many professional soundcards upwards of $1500+ have been released purely for integration with laptops (using PCMCIA cardbus), and many, many more below $1500. Thus, when other aspects such as PCI-E graphics seriously hinder the workings of such expensive soundcards compared to the previous graphics-card forebearers, it becomes a big issue that really shouldn't have arisen. Graphics don't play a big part in music production.

Remember that completely different benchmarks are required when testing high-spec audio data response compared to gaming, as gaming benchmarks are wholely useless in the professional audio context. In essense, in our (music) line of work we test how responsive the system is for getting the audio into the computer, massively processing it, and then getting it back out again as quickly as is possible - and this needs to be done for many tens of 24-bit 96KHz audio channels of sound, all within a couple of milliseconds or so. The process is wholely different to gaming, as it stresses (demands) quick response and data communication of completely different areas of the computer, otherwise you end up with clicks and pops in the sound, or a significant latency (delay) of timings between audio channel playback/recording, synthesising, and sequencing, making the resultant music sloppy and impractical.

The fact is that PCI-E graphics cards unduly significantly increase the CPU overhead and latency of such audio/data manipulation and communication. For what reason, we don't know.

Due to exponentially increasing popularity for audio production using solely laptops, new dedicated professional laptop audio companies have sprouted up everywhere, but currently none of them have chosen to stock the latest Sonoma platform purely due to the PCI-E graphics card issue and higher CPU usage and latencies.

Do you have any further evidence for this claim?

No problem, always glad to help a fellow forum member with anything, with my limited knowledge.

If the problem truely is that the PCI-Express graphics cards are causing interference on the regular PCI bus, then this should be solved when laptops move to the new PCI-Express based card slots.

Regardless, hopefully this problem will be fixed; PCI-Express should theoretically not produce any of the problem musicians are experiencing. Obviously something went wrong in the implementation.

http://www.rme-audio.com/english/te...orce4_tests.htm

RME are as pro as you can get in the music tech world. Very high end, if not the very top.

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I think she did what a lot of folks do, and that is confuse PCI-Express with actual PCI-X. PCI-X does utilize the normal PCI bus, and decreases the amount of PCI devices that can be placed in a system due to it's level of load. However if I ever saw a loptop with PCI-X for anything I think I'd say wtf and get the designer fired :P