M17x Refresh Discussion

ROTFLMAO

dx 10 was nothing vs dx11 improvements

http://www.fudzilla.com/content/view/16327/1/


you are right .... they will not be much faster.... but we as tech enthusiast enjoy talking about this

 

you're totally right, DX11 is just a gimmick atm. but give it some time, it will DEFINITELY turn into a beautiful thing(especially without a hated-OS as its only support).

 

how is dx11 a gimmmick. if you even looked into what all dx11 can do you wouldn't be saying that or what it does even if you don't have a dx11 card

*
Does anyone wish they could customize the glowing alienhead or the ALIENWARE lettering on the m17x/m15x to something else. Now that alienware laptops are so unique and recognizable I kinda want to be able to customize the alienhead or the lettering to something else

 

the screenshots seem more like cartoon to me. anyway i am sure dx10 has the same effects.

 

I wonder if DX11 will have the same issues on the new cards that DX10 did on say the 8800GTX. It was a constant crashing BSOD nightmare that I just eventually stopped using DX10 all together.
Also since we're getting close to December I'm hoping there is some difinitive news about a refresh to the M17x soon or a new card available to the M15x. Otherwise I'm gonna have to go with a Sager soon, i7 + GTX 280M FTW!

 

everything is a gimmick until its proven that it works(this seemingly applies ESPECIALLY to directx releases).

just pay attention to directx releases. they all show photo-realistic renderings. do we ever get those results though? not even close.


ps, i know very well what is coming with dx11. i also know how to not fall for marketing. you should try the same?

 

That's not entirely correct. In fact, something can work perfectly and still be categorized as a gimmick. For example, the AW lighting scheme and logo: they serves not practical purpose other than to look pretty.

In order to get away from that definition, a component, program, feature etc., would have to be useful and/or make some improvement in the computers function or operation. In other words, most conveniences tend to be gimmicks.

LOL, the markers just see you as a challenge. Remember, it's their job to make you want to buy stuff.

 

tesselation isn't about eye candy its about using one character model and adjusting the level of detail depending on distance from camera. instead of having to go back and get several different models that have desired characteristics. letting the computer take less resource to render one object.

Multithreaded rendering — to render to the same Direct3D device object from different threads for multi core CPUs. as described would help games run better.

You apparently don't know as much as you think you do. I don't pay attention to the hype, I read articles on technology and try to learn how it works. Today was the first time I even saw pics trying to hype dx11.

Brock I'm not sure if you will have same issues but I think the chances are low that you would have issues with it. Unless you had this happen to you with other updating dx 9 to dx 9b. Simply because this isn't a whole new directx its an improvement over dx10.1 Which was an improvement over dx10. Of course major driver improvements have been done to fix the bsod.

 

Well then I might just chalk it up to the hardware because even today I can't run anything in DX10 with my 8800GTX's more than 5 minutes without BSOD. DX9 works just fine and I've never had an issue with it.

 

They need to skip i7 and drop a nice i9 on the refresh.

http://www.engadget.com/2009/11/24/early-core-i9-benchmarks-promising-make-you-wonder-why-you-even/

but mobile of course.

 

Yep that would be great.

 

i9 in a laptop? The heat is very intimidating..

 

Yeah. Maybe they can put the processor outside of it, like internal hdd in hdd enclosures...

 

I thought gamers primary concern were GPUs? Not to mention Intel's pattern of stepping down with each CPU update. What does that tell you?

 

It tells me nothing. I want them to skip i7 and use i9 because I don't use my computer primarily for games. It's truly my desktop replacement and main computer. I work with it.

I'm sure a lot of M17x users are power users too, not just hardcore gamers. Even if not the majority. In the end, anyway, everyone wants the latest. Can't blame me for wanting this too

 

Yep, I am with you WaR...

 

i9 being a 32nm piece the heat might not be as much of a problem but they would have to make a custom mainboard that might take some time and cause a delay of the refresh. however that could be a reason that they skipped putting the i7 into m17x

 

Agreed. CPU is just as important as the GPU in the last few years of games. GTA4.

 

gtaiv is one of the most demanding games. m17x can play it in very high settings but you have to reduce the distance. it is also a fact that the game recognizes 986mb video memory and not the double of it if on sli.

yesterday my brother bought a totally new desktop with i7 920 2.66ghz. win7 gives a rating of 7.5 while my qx9300 set at 3.08 ghz right now has 7.3 . only 0.2 difference in comprasion with one of the best desktop cpus. so whats the difference will be in comparison with a i7 set at 2.00ghz on a laptop on which we all now everything is not so powered as on desktops? the conclusions are yours.

 

Windows 7 WEI Is hardly a proper benchmarking tool.. you shouldn't compare performance differences with that at all.

 

Being 32nm isn't going to keep the heat at acceptable levels for a laptop when you're pushing 130w through 6 cores.

 

Intel® Core™ i7-975 Processor Extreme Edition is in sager's notebooks and it's pushing 130w on a 45nm die so it is possible.

 

Agreed. I can't take anything you say seriously if in this day-and-age you're still resorting to the WEI score.

 

On a single GPU solution.

130 watt CPU + 75 watt GTX-280M = 205 watts cooling for Sager 9280.

45 watt C2Q + 75 watt GTX-280M + 75 watt GTX-280M = 195 watts cooling for SLI M17x.

130 watt CPU + 75 watt GTX-280M + 75 watt GTX-280M = 280 watt theoretical desktop CPU SLI fire?

Desktop CPU and SLI high end graphics cards are... not heat friendly. And remember, these are just TDPs, which is the power needed for the _cooling system_ at max. This doesn't include the power to actually run the goods, as well as all the other fun stuff a notebook needs, like hard drives, USB, etc.

 

do you think we will at least see higher clocked mobile i7's on the m17x? Should they decide to put them in the refresh.

 

there will not be any more higher clocked mobile i7s out right now or in a while ..... if anything they would be the same socket and could fit in any mobile i7 socket which means any computer could use them.


The M17x is not special. It gets the same stuff as every other computer

 

I don't know. I agree with Moo in that I doubt we'll see any higher clocked mobiles in a while, apart from Arrandale, which is naturally clocked a bit higher (albeit dual-core instead of quad, so not really an advance in terms of overall processing power).

The problem is simply where we're at right now in terms of usage. Unless you're doing some heavy mobile video editing or database/virtual machines, you're not really going to push the i7s we have now, let alone higher clocked ones. And if you are doing the kind of things that require that sort of power, you're unlikely to need SLI graphics, which means you'd just go for a Sager 9280 and be done with it. Remember, the bottleneck for 95% of all gaming is the GPU, not the CPU, and probably even more so in the future, when you start tossing in DirectX 11 and GPGPUs.

Will we see mobile i7s and SLI? Probably eventually, although with the i7 idle temps I hear from people with the M15x and the Sagers, I wouldn't be surprised if they skipped putting it in the M17x and moved to a M18x (18.4", naturally). Either that, or someone will have to come up with some sort of radical cooling solution (first liquid cooled notebook, maybe?). Or maybe they'll limit it to the cooler dual-core i7s.

 

We are falling for a simple marketing trick by Intel (hopefully Dellienware will not do the same mistake) There's no need to go i7 in gaming machines. With all the artificial benchmarking and "unbiased" reviews, i7 is just another way to shuffle cards. It's not a desktop i7, it has to sacrifice 3 cores to boost a single one to wow 3.7ghz. wow again. Do you remember Intel's presentation in Santa-Clara with QX9300 oc'ed to 3.55Ghz (all 4 cores) and according to Intel capable of 3.7Ghz? When it comes to gaming you will not see a huge difference in performance, many games are ported to and from consoles, will they put money&time in polishing support for mobile turbo boost ??? No and that's why many people will have issues when running demanding games optimized to fully utilize 4 cores (and expect the numbers of those games to grow). Already we have issues with sudden FPS drops in GTA 4 and DA among i7 owners.
To cut things short, I'd focus on refreshing GPUs to 5870x2, SSDs, Fixing the stuttering issues (the most important of all) and enjoy some 5-6 years of happy gaming.

 

i guess i was wrong about tesselation helping performance.
http://www.hardocp.com/article/2009/11/06/unigine_heaven_benchmark_dx11_tessellation/

what would the best configuration for m17x be on a budget of about $3500?

 

While I do agree with you on the lack of a need for i7 in gaming machines (currently), I disagree with your views on where things will go in the future. I think future games will not be optimized for quad core (at least not C2Q style quad-core), and will remain optimized for either dual-cores, or, moving to the future, dual core i7s. It's kind of like what happened with Crysis; everyone saw how hard it was to hit those hardware requirements, and everyone backed off. I think future games will try, as always, to optimize to be as mainstream as possible (that's where the money is, after all) which means dual-core for now, and dual-core i7s in the future.

 

With that much budget, You can get a top of the line setup(Dual 280s/Dual 4870's , and 512GB SSD Raid 0) and upgrade your CPU, MEMORY through outside vendor with the remaining left over. You probably can even get by just under $3,000 with EPP discount.

 

what is the epp discount?

 

Here is a Thread that I started. Read the first post and you'll have enough info regarding discount.

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=431207

 

Hey thanks

 

Below is the promo going on right now. Get it while its HOT !!!!!!!!!!

 

Took the issue of stuttering to the front page

I agree it's something that shouldn't be overlooked (as well as the responsiveness of the media controls). After having these problems, and going through different reiterations of products, you'd think such issues wouldn't exist anymore.

 

I would like it if they just put physical button on it. oh and make the audio controls work independ of os. that way if you have a problem with a sound loop back issue or any thing you can mute the speakers even if the the systems froze up.
That's one thing i hate about laptops.

 

It's an unfortunate truth, but it's unlikely software manufacturers will be rushing to jump on this bandwagon anytime soon. I'm not a gamer, but from what I've read, the difficulty of optimizing the software is just too cost prohibitive at present. Especially since the difficulty of moving from dual core to quad core performance is exponential.

 

You are not a gamer
From a handful of games that I play, 3 have quad core optimization (Dragon Age, GTA 4, Total War - after the patch i7 (desktop) performance rose by 60%, C2Quad - by whopping 90%, and PhenomX4 by 100%)
C2Qs are optimized better than i7 (at the moment).
And while mobile and desktop C2Qs are pretty much the same architecture and features, i-core is different. And because of the turbo boost feature of i-core mobile family (this feature will definitely be THE LAST to get supported by games developers) you can picture the fate of the Clarksfields in gaming world. So far I bet on C2Qs+5870CF for mobile segment. Combined with the fate of PC games - the situation is not likely to change in 3-5 years (this is really sad).

 

what makes the mobile i7 so different from their desktop counterpart that extra optimization is needed?
they both regulate clocks based on core usage as its called turbo boost. the mobile i7 just has a higher turbo.

 

I don't think Turbo Boost should really be considered by game developers at all, as such, because I'm fairly certain Turbo Boost is handled at the OS level, not the program. The way to "optimize" programs for Turbo Boost, it seems, is to have programs run on a consistent number of threads, rather than swapping from two threads, to 4, to 6, to 2, to 6, etc... or at least to have the swaps at more natural breakpoints where the performance hit is not as noticeable (like level swaps, airlocks from inside to outside, you know, all the old places where we used to take performance hits while new levels loaded). Of course, things may also improve as OS support for Turbo Boost improves, but without knowing exactly how the OS support calculates the need to apply turbo boost or shut down cores, we have no idea how best to optimize things.

This also leaves aside the fact that as i7/i5 becomes "standard" over the next few years, C2Q support will become legacy, and optimization for C2Qs may end up falling by the wayside. This is all largely speculation anyway, we'll be left to the tender mercies of the game programmers as to what they'll optimize for, as usual.

 

Not sure if this was posted yet?

http://www.mxm-upgrade.com/m15x.html

 

hmm i was just wondering which would be have better performance i7 with two cores turbo'd or game being processed through all cores at stock speeds?

 

Depends on whether the game is optimized for 2 cores or 4

 

That what i mean take a specific game opimized for two cores how does it perform on the i7. Take the same game and optimize it for four cores and then see how it performs on i7. The only difference being the turbo. Which would be better?

I was wondering this specifically because the moblie i7's are clocked really low.

 

OMG OMG I think it's gonna happen!

Mobility Radeon 5800 Series is coming VERY soon! Might even be on an Alienware on january!

Story from Fudzilla:

Link to the source: AMD to launch Mobile Radeon 58x0 at CES

 

Sweet Cow of Moscow!
Those upgrades are becoming too rapid and painful...
I was 99% sure the 5000 series would land sometime after CES 2010 (March), maybe May @ best...
Yeah, we'll definitely see some i7+5870CF beasts.
How to earn 10k in a month....

 

I'm hoping for a "simple" M17X refresh with those new DX11 cards, don't even need an i7. Just hope it happens and that the price won't stray too much from current offerings!

 

Has anyone contacted them? Are you affiliated with them?

 

I've been saying this for month. The 58XX will come on the M17X during the first quarter of 2010...

I guess we are all happy...