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  • onix - Tuesday, November 23, 2004 - link

    "I'm very disapointed with this article for a few reasons:

    1) There is no point of reference. Where are the benchmarks for a radeon 9700 Mobility or Radeon 9800 Mobility? We have no idea how much faster these things are than existing mobility parts "

    Agreed. I am about to buy a ThinkPad T42p with a 128MB ATI Mobility FireFL T2, and don't know what I'll be passing up.

  • Neekotin - Friday, November 12, 2004 - link

    who plays in a laptop anyway?
  • Shadowmage - Wednesday, November 10, 2004 - link

    The Mobility X600 uses 1W idle and 9-10W on max power. I would like to know how the Mobility M28 and nVidia 6800 go compare in wattage and heat. Remember that the X800 whoops the 6800 in both heat and power.
  • stephenbrooks - Tuesday, November 9, 2004 - link

    Nice review, though it would have been nice to see the difference in power consumption (and hence battery life) of the desktop vs. notebook GPUs in the previous and current generations, so we could see how much good the 'clock gating' that was nicely explained at the beginning of the article does. Probably a hard thing to do with limited time though.
  • Terr1 - Tuesday, November 9, 2004 - link

    Hey im in the proccess of buying a new laptop, which im using with my studies and of cause gaming (since its going to be faster than my stationary computer. I dont want a normal Pentium 4 M, because of the low battery usage. My choice is 100% on centrino (dothan CPU), so my question is, do you think this come to the centrino chipsets as well? Since it prob. require a new chipset that suppports PCI-Express, as far as I know the next chipset will first come in about 3-6 months. I need mine around january, and pref. faster.. So is it stupid to buy ATI 9700PRO 128mb card now?
  • Woodchuck2000 - Tuesday, November 9, 2004 - link

    It's hardly surprising that the 6800 loses in the majority of benches given that it's clocked 100/100 lower than the M28 and both are 12 pipe parts.... It would be interesting to compare the solutions at equal clock speeds.

    Is 400/400 the likely shipping speed of the M28 and if so why is ATi's DDR3 clocked 200MHz slower than nVidia's high end solution?

  • Live - Tuesday, November 9, 2004 - link

    You really should include the minimum FPS recorded in your benchmarks. Average FPS doesn't say it all. Other then that it was a good first look at these new GPUs.
  • Camylarde - Monday, November 8, 2004 - link

    # 16 thats nod needed. WIll lack comparison to desktop GPU's

    Thanks Anand for your review, yet, I agree with all those negative comments about quality of the review. I am considering you as one of the best reviewers on the net and your articles never disappointed me. This one is far from being best and as you wrote, you know that. Rather wait one more day for a full work than "launch not available product".

    Cheers, Petr
  • klah - Monday, November 8, 2004 - link

    " I'm hoping to have a shipping version of M28 by the end of this month for more thorough tests."

    How about some benches using the native resolutions of the displays(1690x1050).

  • skunkbuster - Monday, November 8, 2004 - link

    i think they named it that way to reflect that the mobility 9800 performed on par to a regular desktop radeon 9800.
    i think that if it performed closer to an x800, then maybe they would have called it that instead...
  • bollwerk - Monday, November 8, 2004 - link

    bah, #13 beat me to it. I was also going to point out that the mobility 9800 was based on the X800, not the 9800. I think it was confusing of ATI to do this, but what can ya do... *shrug*
  • MAValpha - Monday, November 8, 2004 - link

    For accuracy's sake, the Mobility 9800 was based on the R420 core- not the desktop R350/R360 (cite: http://www.trustedreviews.com/article.aspx?art=611... Granted, it was an AGP chip, but it bore more technological resemblance to an X800 than to a 9800. Even so, I think that the name "Mobility X800" does make sense, in keeping with ATI's naming convention; then again, remember the Mobility 9700.
  • DeathByDuke - Monday, November 8, 2004 - link

    not a good comparision really. 8 pipeline chip vs 12 pipeline chip. ATi no doubt plan a Mobility X800. Which is no doubt the '9800' with 12-16 pipes. It'd be fun.
  • ActuaryTm - Monday, November 8, 2004 - link

    Anand:

    Thank you for the review, and for the clarification regarding the available testing time for each machine. Especially enjoyed the clear, concise portion regarding clock gating.

    It should be noted to those with negative comments that this was not a review of either machine, but rather a simple comparison of the two GPUs.

    Look forward to the coming reviews, Anand. Well done.

    Regards,
    Michael
  • Anand Lal Shimpi - Monday, November 8, 2004 - link

    We wanted to run more tests but we only had the M28 laptop for a matter of a few hours and the Geforce 6800 Go laptop for less than a day before we had to send it back. Given more time with the solutions we would have gladly performed more tests. I'm hoping to have a shipping version of M28 by the end of this month for more thorough tests.

    As far as a comparison to other notebooks, the best comparison point is the Dell XPS equipped with the Mobility Radeon 9800, however Dell isn't very eager to send out review samples unless the review will benefit Dell - in this case, it definitely wouldn't, thus we could not secure a review sample in time.

    The request for desktop reference scores is a good one, while we didn't have time to include them in this review I'll make sure they get in the review of the shipping M28.

    Take care,
    Anand
  • skunkbuster - Monday, November 8, 2004 - link

    anyone know why ati can't make better OpenGL drivers? they really need to work on those more.
    thats the only thing i see lacking with their offerings.


    also #7 and #8? i think a person who buys this sort of laptop isnt really concerned about battery life. its more of a 'desktop replacement' than a 'portable'.

    i agree on the point of reference thing though. it would have been nice to have something to compare them to other than each other.

  • LoneWolf15 - Monday, November 8, 2004 - link

    I am greatly disappointed by the lack of battery life tests. Unlike desktops, where fastest with good image quality is important, if the numbers are relatively close (say, within 5-10%) performance-wise, a laptop-buyer will almost always go for the setup with battery life. I understand like others that the notebooks aren't identical, but there has got to be a way to test this. Also, there were no tests regarding CPU usage during DVD playback, something I consider a big deal. Numbers are nice, but this review is like a cake without the icing --it's kind of bland.
  • Guspaz - Monday, November 8, 2004 - link

    I'm very disapointed with this article for a few reasons:

    1) There is no point of reference. Where are the benchmarks for a radeon 9700 Mobility or Radeon 9800 Mobility? We have no idea how much faster these things are than existing mobility parts

    2) There are no dekstop points of reference either. Users want to know how these compare to desktop processors.

    3) The configs were not identical. These are desktop CPUs in the laptops, why didn't you take out the 3.4 and put in a 3.2?

    4) Why was the lower clocked 6800 Go used to test? Was the 450/600 not available?

    5) Why are there no battery runtime comparisons? I understand they are different notebooks that can't be directly compared, but if they have similar hardware with similar rated batteries, the results would be ballpark at least. Even so, there could have been runtime benchmarks comparing having the power saving features on and off.

    I'm sure there's some other missing things I just haven't noticed. Because Anandtech has grown into such a well respected site, there is an expectation of quality and quantity that we readers have come to expect. I feel this article just isn't up to the Anandtech snuff.
  • gordon151 - Monday, November 8, 2004 - link

    Damn, now my 9800xt is getting whooped by laptop graphics cards *sigh*. Wonder if there is gonna be an M28 XT or 6800 Go Ultra?
  • dextrous - Monday, November 8, 2004 - link

    Where's the battery life numbers Anand?
  • gibhunter - Monday, November 8, 2004 - link

    Yeah, nice performance, but it's not a laptop. First of all, you need to keep it on a flat surface so that the fans under the system are not blocked. Second, at 12 pounds it's rediculously heavy. An 8 pound notebook is already pushing the limits. At 12 pounds, you can't call it a notebook with a straight face.

    The only exciting part of this product launch is what Anand said. The possibility of the 9800 being the new midrange and being found in smaller notebooks.
  • HardwareD00d - Monday, November 8, 2004 - link

    These new graphics solutions are going to give Intel's upcoming integrated graphics solutions a beating. Hooray for ATI & Nvidia!
  • allnighter - Monday, November 8, 2004 - link

    Nice comeback for nVidia. And a very good review as well. Not exactly apples to apples but under the given circumstances more than enough. If M28 is not availabe at a launch it seems ATi may see another piece of the market chipped away in the mobile sector. Nice indeed. I'm actually happy for nVidia. Can't believe I said that lol, but I really like to see some real competition in the mobile market. It's been a one player game for a long time.
  • Aquila76 - Monday, November 8, 2004 - link

    Let me be the first to say, Holy sh1t! Doom3 at 1280x1024 High Quality 4xAA on a LAPTOP at 40+FPS? I'd love to see these vid cards on an A64 proc, though. I remember not too long ago you had to settle for a couple gen's ago graphic capability. Now they're on par with current desktop offerings. We've come a long way, baby.

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