New M6500 Discussion Thread

Yeah but looking into that list, its rubbish!

I mean than V7750 is ranked 1 above the 3800M

The 3700M out performs the 3800M

 

Check the list again. The 3700 (w/o "M", the desktop version) outperforms the 3800M. The 3700M is 4 positions lower than 3800M.

 

I've had the covet for 4 days - so far, so awesome. Our code compiles so fast, I don't have time to go and get a cup of coffee while it finishes (bummer!).

Has anyone used vmplayer on a i7? During configuration of a virtual ubuntu, it allowed a maximum of 4 cores. Does anyone know how to get it to see all eight?

 

Much of the determination of which card is the "best buy" will depend on how successful the "Open CL" initiative is. If Open CL takes off, then many more applications will be able to take advantage of ATI's Stream technology, which will overtake NVIDIA's proprietary CUDA technology (for video processing, etc.)

Based on the state of drivers and software for both systems, I'd say that the limiting factor for both is currently drivers and software that can take advantage of the parallel processing capabilities of the hardware. NVIDIA seems to be investing more resources on the driver/software side, and now that ATI has released their 5000 series, I wonder how much effort will be allocated towards updating the M7740 drivers since it didn't seem to gain much momentum in the marketplace. Hopefully Dell and others will continue to put pressure on ATI to update the M7740 drivers.

The Dell driver for the M7740 still doesn't fully support 10-bit color, and the card isn't recognized by software written to take advantage of Stream parallel processing. (Video transcoding software takes advantage of the Stream processors in the Radeon series of cards, but not in the Firepro series. This is a serious oversight by ATI!) Since the M7740 is only sold through resellers like Dell, there is no official support on the ATI site and we need to rely on Dell to keep the pressure on for driver updates.

 

I ran the G3DMark on my m6500+3800M and the score was 811 when the average was 819. I compared my 2D score to an Alienware m15x and it was lower! Alienware m15x with GTX 260M scored 226.2 while I scored 194.8.


http://www.epinions.com/review/Dell...GB_dkcwfw1_7_PC_Notebook/content_491061153412


Anyhow I don't really worry about what the benchmarks say just giving everyone some perspective on it. The reality is the 3800M is overpriced compared to the ATI and Nvidia can get away with it due to the cross-marketing with some of their partners.

 

You have three things going on here. 1 - Passmark is having issues with the newest Nivida drivers on the Direct X 10 test. 2 - The older Nvidia drivers work, but are 5% slower on some tests. 3 - I have no idea of how they got the 3800M result to be 819.

The worst composite result I have been able to get is 955.

There is also the possibility that the M7740 is not able to support 8x multisampling on the Directx 10 test. Being able to fall back to 4x would be another possible advantage.

 

Maybe processor has something to do with it then. I get steady 954.9 - 955 scores with the Dell drivers.

 

A 955 score with 8.16.11.8843 drivers?

 

I have dealt with Dell over the last 15 years and my experience mirrors yours.

 

Yes. The only change I made was to go into the nvidia control panel, and tell it to emphasize performance over quality since this is raw testing.

Are you running the February update to Directx?

Also - change your display resolution down from 1920x1200. This is how I got my best composite score of 1195.8 on the D3D test.

3D simple - 1812.0
3D Medium - 671.5
3D Complex - 40.1
Directx 10 - 10.8

I still think the Directx 10 score is glitched since it throws a error at the end of every run.