ATI chip adds desktop features to notebooks

[MIK3]

just one more reason i want to get a lappy, but does it compete to any of the Leadtek's?

how is the Geforce 4 Go in comparison to this?

my friend is considering the area51m from Alienware
but it only offers 7500 at the moment so this is good news for her

but i really wish it has more options to choose from
like the Geforce 4 Go, if it performs better than the 9000 mobility

i heard that geforce 4 Go 460 is gonna be out too
or is it already out?

Does anyone have an Area51M laptop from Alienware?
any one care to comment on the colors? Specifically do they get dirty from hand oil / sweat quickly? i have had sony's that are great, but they get nice dark hand marks on the plastic from usage. Wondering if the 51m gets this too??

i was thinking about the green, as its pretty sweet color, but im scared if I order it, Ill get pissed everytime Im working on it, typing a paper, or playing a game with all that green.. Im considering standard color or the blueish grey color, and possible white. I want a system that will stand out at the parties not just another grey notebook.

thanks :P

sorry, im not subscribed, my contact is liquidousr@hotmail.com


would most appreciate any one who has experience in owning one of these boxes. I am about to order a new one in a few weeks.

althought I hear the 2.8ghz matched with pc2100 ddr ram is a TERRIBLE and slow match, gamespy.com does a great review of this and figures this out... its a damn great article. i suggest you check it out.

ive been helping a friend to decide a good laptop too

and i can conclude that alienware's Area51m isnt a good laptop

-first of all
CPU is not mobile
therefore drains alot of power

-second of all
battery life is short on that
so short usuage time

-third of all, it only offer Radeon 7500 mobile

-fourth of all, its heavy
its like carrying a chunk of big cement

so i suggested the Compaq's Presario 2800
really mobile...
good battery life time
AND
Radeon 9000 mobility!!

P4 2.2GHz M
512MB PC2100 1 Dimm
40GB ATA100 HDD
Radeon 9000 M

in a compaq comes down to about 3100 USD
and about the same price for Alienware except 7500m instead of 9000m

well apparently PC2100 is the fastest ram for laptops and its the most practicaly now
i do hope it can be faster...

I have yet to check the compaq, but i personally won't be getting into any more comcrap . Their server base is outstanding, as are their pizza boxes, but pc and laptops, uhh.. no comment.

Area51M has a lot of places to improve. But Im going to have to disagree with your comment of its not a good laptop.

My reasons are this :

buying an area51m is buying with the mindset that you are going to game the hell out of it, and use its power. Power comes with compromise, its batt life, and its heavy. But note it is still mobile, and beats the hell out of dragging your tower and monitor , cords, keyboards, mice all over the world. I travel a lot, and i would love to have a laptop, even if its 3lbs heavier than a slim book. Slim books don't game like area51m does. As for the power comment, its like saying you want a ferrari's speed but want to buy a honda civic. It doesn't work like that.. you want a ferrari, you get the ferrari with a v12, and it will drink gas like u won't believe. You want a 2.4 ghz laptop then it takes power.. SO .. your other option is to go invest in another 120dollar battery.. When you're playing games, you don't need your cdwr right... or your diskdrive right.. so go get 2 batteries, and you'll have a 3 battery laptop that adds to the life. Or sit there in teh coffee shop or your friends lan party and plug in. honestly, its not difficult. you won't be as mobile as you think. Im not assuming your use, but its realistic.

about my 2.4 ghz comment... 2.4 is slow now.. area51m is going to be releasing the 2.8ghz in first to the 3rd week of october.. According to PCGAMER magazine and my conversations with Customer service about 4 times. ive spoken to 5 different people over there and they all say the same thing.. only one guy knew more about it, the prices, (2800$ and some change) and the hardware, etc.

But for all you wondering, you can find the specs of the new 2.8ghz area51M WITH Radeon 9000mobile 64mb ram in the first 7 pages of PCGAMER magazine for november.

with battery 9lbs is not a bad laptop... I only wish they'd up their screen to 16" than the 15"....

does anyone know how to upgrade screen?

as for the ram. pc2100 is standard, but according to gamespy.com's latest article on ram and the new 2.8ghz processor. pc2100 has some bad effects on performance. I think it has a lot to do with a weird combination of the 2.8ghz and the 2100 ddr.... if you look at their benchmarks it will shock you at their multiple findings..

Im trying to influence alienware with emails and talking to customer service about letting who ever is in charge of building the laptops in the top management about this ram problem, and hopefully they are already ontop of it....

the next area51m is going to be sweet. price is not bad either if you look around for the performance it offers. the only other thing I am dissapointed is the 5400rpm drive.. i found on pricewatch.com a 7200rpm drive that you can buy and swap it out.. however it might run hot, maybe too hot.. .. thus this is already a hot machine, with many fans...

if anyone has any info on how the paintjobs hold up in terms of getting dirty with useage, hand sweat/oil etc, Id appreciate it.... hopefully the paint they use is aluminum based or clearcoated or something.. the sony laptops get stained quite often.

thanks

snip >

The Mobility Radeon 9000 is a 30 million-transistor part that sports up to a 250MHz core speed coupled with a 128-bit 230MHz DDR memory interface. If you're going to be in the market for one, you're most likely going to want to put your hands on the part from ATi that has the 64MB of DDR integrated onto it, as this is going to make for a wider and more quickly accessed buffer.

The Mobility 9000 has hardware support for version 1.4 programmable pixel and vertex shaders and is a fully DX8.1 compliant part. It packs in four 3D rendering pipelines as well. Does all of this sound somewhat familiar to you? It just might, as what we're basically seeing here is the current Radeon 9000 family of desktop VPU already migrated into mobile form. Instead of boring many of you with a rehash of those specs, our original Radeon 9000 review can be found here with a more in-depth look at the technical aspects of the chip. The only real difference I can find in the two chips is the addition of ATi's POWERPLAY power management technology. POWERPLAY has the ability to actually throttle back the VPU clock should you want to, even during 3D gaming. In the past on mobile products, scaling back performance was simply not an option, as taking away what little performance there was would most likely leave you with a nonplayable experience. That does not seem to be the case with the Mobility 9000.

What I want to concentrate on here is the performance that's delivered to us in a gaming environment.

Yes, that's correct. We now have a real "gaming environment" on a laptop. While products like the GeForce 4 Go and previous Mobility Radeon 7500 solutions have allowed us to "experience" gaming on our laptops, there's simply no comparison to this new technology from ATi. You can now play those current DX8 games like Jedi Knight 2, Soldier of Fortune 2, and Castle Wolfenstein and see them how the game developer intended you to experience them while playing them on your laptop. Will they only be clicking along at 20 frames per second at resolutions above 800x600? The answer to that is, "hardly". The Mobility Radeon 9000 has the capability of delivering stunning frame rates. Let's look at some benchmarks.

yes you do have to check on the compaq

they have changed a bit after their merge

all the factors that goes into a complete and good laptop includes battery life, portability, designs, performance, capabilities ... etc

if that is your life style of carrying 3 batteries then fine, all im suggesting is 90% of the people using laptops buys it because of its portability

clearly, we are talking about technology and what is in the laptop at the moment of the post, not the future because there will always be better things fitted into the alienware and same as compaq

but due to the time of your post and question, compaq's presario 2800 has better graphics than the Alienware's area51m

no one suggested in having the fastest CPU that saves the most power
i was taking the factor of portability, battery life time and performance added up all together to make the suggestion
the SpeedStep technology for the P4 M helps the processor to optimize the performance of applications and power consumption