Alienware M17x vs Asus W90 (it's really nVidia vs AMD)

Well apparently both of these notebooks are becoming increasing popular in the tech press lately, namely in theinquirer.net and brightsideofnews.com and it's because of a test one guy ran comparing the M17x with GTX 280Ms in SLI and a QX9300 to the W90vp-X2. According to the tests, the M17x handedly won, which is sparking a debate between the two GPU factions, nVidia and AMD. Here are the articles on the issue:

http://www.brightsideofnews.com/new...ed-a-war-of-words-between-amd-and-nvidia.aspx

http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/1433397/nvidia-dodgy-benchmarks-prove-superiority

From the gist of it, it seems the author @ BSN is defending nVidia while INQ is giving AMD the benefit (and interestingly, Charlie hasn't mentioned anything about it, though he no longer writes there).

Thoughts?

 

I'm not following the W90 too closely but wasn't there talk of discontinuing it already because of some issue it had?

 

Meh, yeah it's annoying marketing nonsense but it's not unique to nVidia. They exploited a weakness found in their competitor's market and used it to their advantage. I would say it was a bit of a cheap shot, but that's not uncommon between competing technology companies. Thanks for the links, it was pretty amusing actually.

 

Never leave it to Nvidia or ATI to do a benchmark comparison of their own products.

 

Well ill be able to tell for certain since i have owned both here shortly . Once i get the CPU squared away which should hopefully be sooner then expected ill be on to benchmarking .

 

Did you save your W90 benchmarks?

 

Rule 1 - never listen to inquirer.

 

There all over the W90 forum , i didnt personally save anything but i looked the other day and i think most if not all are still there . Just gonna take me some many hours to dig for them. I might ask Dahdah to look for them since he seems to enjoy that sorta thing .

 

I don't believe theyre discontinuing the X2, although the X1 is being talked about (rumors) being discontinued, and yeah there's still alot of BIOS/software problems to this day. Basically WITH the QX9300 the W90 is trading blows in 3dmark06 and in various game benches *cough anti alias*, although the M17x seems to be comfortably outpacing the W90 in Vantage, which to me is what counts now..

 

Would be nice to see them side by side

 

Lol ya it would, but boy its going to be hard diggin through the forums lol. i tried the other day but you can only search so much for a users name on a particular forum as it gave me like 5 pages of posts of mine and that didnt even scratch the surface .

Hopefully Don will feel like doing it as hes just good at finding and keeping stuff lol .

 

LOL, I was about to say GL finding them in 869+ pages. Just going on a bad memory maybe around pages 350+ you start benching? That's prolly a bad guess :/

 

Lol i couldnt even remember when i searched the other day and i had changed how many posts get displayed per page as well at some point, so i was all confused .

 

EDIT NVM

10chars

 

When i click on links they all take me to the last page . If you click on the post number on the right hand side in black it will take you to a direct link to that post which might be easier. Either way thanks for the effort.

 

Ok got it this time lol... had to edit out some of the benchmarks because you had some in 1280 res.

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showpost.php?p=4785276&postcount=5400

3dmark 06

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showpost.php?p=4774234&postcount=5109
http://forum.notebookreview.com/showpost.php?p=4774266&postcount=5110

vantage runs, though you only ran GPU only ;(, johnkss's vantage are the second

 

Thanks nobodie very good start , i found the crysis ones i had the other day as well but i didnt bookmark them lol.

 

I had those bookmarked but forgot to add them for some reason

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showpost.php?p=4756310&postcount=4809

 

Thanks again man , for anyone wondering why the fonts are outta whack on all the pics its because i use 120 dpi. The screen on the W90 was not every bright and left side was messed up on it (which i had to RMA it ) this was causing me severe eye strain and headaches.

 

Definitely looking forward to your write ups Quad. Your W90Vp contributions were excellent.

 

Thanks man and ill sure do my best .

 

Quad, Pm'd with your w90 arsenal.

 

We should find some way, or start an official thread when it all gets together of benchmarks comparisons/screenshots of the W90's 4870x2 DDR3 512GB vs M17's 4850x2 DDR3 1GB vs M17x's 280mSLI. Preferrably all the benches have QX9300 procs though.

That would be schveet.

 

Slightly off topic, but of interest here. There is a review by a NBR member of the Novatech (Clevo M980NU) here.

13,828 with SLI 280's enabled. In fairness, I believe it's a pre-production unit.

 

Why didn't he do Vantage?

 

He's doing some driver installations and mods, Vantage scores should be up sometime tonight.

 

I just read through the thread. Looks like SLI is not working.

 

sli isnlt working.

 

He's got a spare SLI cable he's going to install so hopefully we'll see the performance go up accordingly. Obviously, he should be seeing the same performance as the M17x. At least as far as benches and gaming are concerned.

 

Sli may be working, the t9900 may be the problem, with a quad qx9300 it wold score more points

 

I had orginally ordered the w90vp-A1 before i ordered the M17x, My order was delayed and after reading about the issues asus was having and hearing that it was getting discontinued because of it with no reliable word from asus themselves i canceled and went with the M17x instead.

 

yeah. I'd probably get the new Clevo over the W90 at this point.

 

Nah,

I've got an X9100 with the same clocks and just 3870's and I get just over 14,000 stock so with the 280's he should be well above that.

 

3870's can get nearly 17k, sli 280m can hardly do that, so that's not really a good point. You should know by now the 3870 architecture was built for 3dmark06. The sli 280m would trash them in vantage..

His seemingly low 3dmark06 score is because of the T9900, and perhaps a weak driver. A single 280M and T9900 will be about 2000 points lower, so 13800 is right on the money. With some overclocking, say 3.5ghz, he'd be over 15k.

 

But then compare the GTX 280m's with 3870 CF in Vantage - is much more indicative of real game play. And the GTX280m's destroy them.

 

16K

10 char

 

Ya you actually beat me by 1 point!!!! haha

 

Now just get the 4850s and see what happens to your vantage score.

 

already working on that - sadly I'm a whitebook owner so have to find someone to get 4850's through lol

Also take note, I got that score with a weak CPU OC I got a lemon of a QX9300 ONLY 3013 MHz haha

 

Nah, the processor speed is the one thing his rig and mine have in common. We're both using a dual core @ 3.06.

Maybe the problem is bad drivers or different GPU properties but the CPU is not the issue.

 

I got a pretty good boost once I did some software tweaks in windows.

I'm sure with a little work he would be in line with what we expect for scores.

 

Like I said, his vantage score would trash yours. 3dmark06 is the best thing 3870's got.

 

The 4850's should level the playing field though.

3DMark06 in general is a very bad benchmark. It is way too CPU dependent in the scores. Vantage is just an all around better benchmark as it properly isolates the CPU and GPU scores.

 

Of course it will. It it supposed to.

 

people imagine this:

x9100 + 4870 xfire vs qx9300 280msli

in 3dmark 2006 Ati wold win but it wold be smoked in Vantage.... Forget 3dmk 06 is dead... vantage is the way, and games benchmark tools is the way also...

 

So what exaclt ywas your point to begin with? To say 3870 = 280M in 3dmark06? I thought we all already knew this.

 

3DMark06 was the cats meow in it's day and as far as benchmarks go it has been extremely successful.

Now we have Vantage which by all accounts is much more accurate benchmark.

There is no doubt in my mind that like 06, Vantage will become long in the tooth and be replaced by a more accurate bench as well.

So do the tools of the benchmark evolve to reflect rendering advancements, or are the benches designed to shed favorable light on the latest hardware?

Hmmmm.

 

I didn't say 3870 = 280. My point is that the main difference between our hardware is the 3870's and the 280's. We should have seen increased performanc of the 280's over the 3870's even in 3DMark06.

You mentioned both the W90 and the M17 getting 17,000 plus scores. In those instances the rigs were tweaked and overclocked. What I'm reffering to is stock clocks.

And you don't really need to point out that Vantage is a different story. We've all been here long enough to know that.

 

In time, Vantage will become like 3dmark06. GPU's will grow out of it, and they'll create a new one. Problem is, there are only a handful of games that stress the GPU's like Vantage, (Crysis, Clear Skies, Cryostasis), so 3dmark06 is still somewhat a valid GPU benchmark for many other games, if you take the obvious CPU dependency into consideration.

It should be kind of obvious at this point why the 2 rigs get similar scores in 3dmark06 at the same CPU clocks. And it should be obvious why vantage tells an entirely different story.

 

I am only a year and a half into computers (I was a late bloomer) so I wasn't around when 3DMark06 was in its hay day - but it is good to hear that, I guess those were the days when the GPU didn't so far surpass the CPU in power then? At stock clocks, and with a minimal amount of OS tweaks, you can get up to 14000 with 3870x2 and QX9300 still. The score in my sig is the result of as much tweaking as I could get my hands on (And sadly a weak CPU in the OC department)

My only grip with Vantage is how it handles physics. If you have a dedicated physics card and use that, it still can't be compared to other systems due to the artificial inflation of the CPU score. The best way around this would be to add a third score for physics, this making the category comparable between systems.