Benchmark Results: Media
It wasn’t hard to guess the outcomes of our gaming tests—a simple gander at each laptop’s spec sheet tells that tale. Less predictable are the media tests, some of which are optimized for threading and others aren’t.
Interestingly, iTunes demonstrates the best performance on Eurocom’s Montebello, which is only a dual-core chip, but does feature the fastest clock speed in our roundup. The ASUS, with Intel’s newer T9400, takes a second place finish and is followed by Killer Notebooks’ Odachi. Alienware’s m17x, with its older Core 2 Extreme X9000 comes in last place.
Clock speed matters less when your software can take advantage of parallelism. The Odachi blows away its dual-core competitors here, with the nearest contender being Eurocom’s Montebello.
The DivX test takes advantage of as many as four cores, while this version of XviD tops out at two (in the future, we’ll explore a newer version able to take advantage of four threads). The results are pretty clear: in threaded apps, Killer Notebooks’ Odachi does very well, slashing minutes from our rendering benchmark. When parallelism isn’t in play, the results are much closer together. The Odachi’s Core 2 Quad Q9650 still wins out in XviD, but by a much smaller margin.
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Please use Propper size pictures as i am not zooming every one (takes 3-4 secs to load each one when doing that)
even when i use the Print option thay are still in 200 x 120 pixels when it should be 450 x 271 pixels for both print and per page viewing
rest of the review is good
Okay, I have no idea about the battery life of ANY of the contenders - no mention of them in the text and that one vital image of the battery chart is missing from Toms. Good going guys!
Not that you can claim credit for any of the graphs on this article - all the rest are borked as well. They do show up - as tiny thumbnails. Nice one. Real classy.
Now back to the actual article subject, aka Rant#2. Hasn't it occured to the OEMs that we have a major niche going unfulfilled here? I can think of several nomadic user bases (how about students for starters anyone?) who want gaming laptops but who are unwilling to part with €5000 for something that has the same performance as a €500 desktop. Even with Centrino 2 bringing the RAM and motherboard back up to scratch the near-inability to run games such as SupCom and Crysis shows that the gap between standard and mobile CPUs and GPUs is now reaching crisis point.
You'd think that with such a large potential user base some of the big facs or OEMs would be innovating, but they ain't. AMD seem to have given up on mid-high-range lappies entirely, which give nVidia and Intel carte blanche to sit there doing very little (note to Nintel fanboys - this is what would happen to desktops if your hated AMD died for you - €5000 desktops to not-run Crysis). And yet OEMs continue to specify WUXGA screens that the tiny GPUs cannot hope to power, and all that HD clarity will go out the door if you drop down the res - LCDs suffer badly when running resolutions that aren't native or a root of 2 of the native (and the root-2 res for WUXGA is 950*600 - nonstandard and way too small for use!). Why aren't OEMs using high-quality (and potentially cheaper) 1650*1080 or even 1440*900 screens instead?
As for processors... if Intel really gave a damn they should have implemented mobile quads that electrically isolate half the cores when away from AC, halving TDP. Even without this some OEMs should have put in BIOS tools that overclock and underclock CPU/GPUs depending on power status (battery, AC...). Nope. Asus did try, bless 'em, but their lappy isn't even a high-end gaming machine! Desktop-replacers take note. Alienware should be taking notes - they could really do with those features, especially as their machine is supposed to be a gaming lappy - unlike Killer, who isn't afraid to admit their "laptop" is really a small desktop light enough to be carried
At least AW got the ventiltion right... everyone else still has easily-blocked fan ports on the bottom. Why hasn't Clevo tried to put some side intakes on their larger units yet?
guess thay do not bother to read these posts any way
them pictures are to small mite be ok if my desktop was at 640x480, mite even be viewable on my PDA (if it was not for the best of media stuff)