Asus A8Js w/ C2D + Go7700 Review link

Looks like LAPTOP Mag got up a review of the Asus A8Js 14" notebook; theirs has a 2GHz Core 2 Duo and a 512MB GeForce Go7700 graphics chip:
http://laptopmag.com/Review/Asus-A8Js.htm
Not very in-depth by our standards but at least there's a review out there.

 

I'm seriously considering this laptop when it's released here. I've signed up for a W3J in MilestonePC's group-buy, but I might change it. Obviously, we don't yet know what the exact specs will be for this laptop once it reaches NA, but it is indicated in the review that the screen is 1,440 by 900 (WXGA+). I know many people criticized the W3J for NOT having WXGA+, but my concern is that this resolution makes text and icons too small.

Does anyone have experience with a 14" with this resolution? I have tested the existing A8Jm and W3J, and I thought the resolution made text and icons small enough as it is.

Also, with a native resolution of 1,440x900, will there be a problem running games? I'm assuming the picture quality will not be very good at lower resolutions, so I can just imagine the trouble the 7700 will have with Oblivion at 1,440x900! I don't have experience with LCDs (still love my good ol' CRT!), so maybe it's normal to run games in non-native resolutions without too much problem - what do I know.

Any input (speculative or not!) would be appreciated!

 

LCDs nowadays are capable of non-native resolutions that look decent. For the picky gaming bunch, most will opt for the lower resolution 1280x800 just to make a perfect pixel to pixel match, but it isn't that big of a deal of you don't fit into this category and can't really tell the difference once it is slightly distorted. Many people find the wsxga resolution (1680x1050) legible on a 15.4" so 1440x900 shouldn't be too much of a problem. You can also turn up the dpi in your display properties to make text larger, although it sometimes looks funny in programs.

 

Great review, this picture is not even A8 but A7 :]

 

Try this link for a very useful table of screen resolutions.
14" WXGA+ is roughly equivalent to 15.4" WSXGA...really squinty for regular work. But the A8Js is a gaming laptop. Now, if they put a WXGA+ on the F3Jv, that'd be something...but it looks like ASUS is decontenting it.

SS

 

It's not much of a review, but someone already posted it here:

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=74948

 

my god, that is a fast laptop.
i have a w3j with a t2500, and already it is looking old. However, i would also be concerned by the high res display. I was worried that i was going from a 1280 x 800 sony to a asus with 1280 x 768 after two and a half years, but i am happy now because games run so incredibly well. I bet the 7700 will be a big step from the 7600 and the x1600, but not enough for frame rates to be better on a wx screen. Also, the 7700 still wont support HDR and aa.

I havent been to impressed with merom vs yonah comparisons either - especially with gaming. no doubt when programs use 64bit it will make a big difference. Still, i am not tempted to suddenly dump my laptop on ebay. I like my swappable drive bay a lot.

By the way - what is the rule with lcd and non native resolutions - i have changed resolutions on lcd before and anything but native has looked really fuzy and awful. This is a worry for me if i have to play a game on a big external lcd monitor with a high res. Like the 20" wide samsung 1650 x 900
or that new asus monitor which looks awesome. If you keep the ratio does it produce better results when chagning res?

 

Any idea if there will be a full configurable whitebook version? I don't have a need to run XP because I prefer Linux and would prefer to keep the $100 it probably cost to bundle it ;-)

 

kenyee: Doubt it, usually Ensembles come pre-bundled with WinXP.

 

This is very likely the lcd used

http://www.auo.com/auoDEV/products.php?sec=notebook&func=info&product_id=14&items_id=2

 

I keep seeing this getting cited as a mark against the GeForce 7 series, but I feel compelled to ask, is this even relevant at this level of performance? It's my understanding HDR+AA works in Half-Life 2, so about the only game I can think of that can even use this capability right now is Oblivion, and if you enable them together on that game it'll run like a slideshow.

And I gotta be honest here. I've enabled AA on my desktop and my laptop, and at native I have to really look to be able to see the difference and it's almost never been worth the performance hit (unlike AF, which has a tremendous effect as far as I'm concerned). About the only AA I get any use out of is Transparency AA honestly, which is amazing.

This is why you want an nVidia card. On a widescreen monitor it can scale a standard aspect image without stretching it horizontally. It keeps the aspect ratio and just puts black bars around it, which looks a LOT better.

For what it's worth, on my 21" Samsung (1680x1050), I prefer native, but the image quality hit at lower resolutions isn't too bad, and it really depends on the game. Serious Sam II looks almost indistinguishable at lower res; Doom engine games are fine; Far Cry scales badly on my screen.

Honestly, though, most modern monitors have good scaling, and when you introduce an nVidia card into the situation, it does the dithering on its own and takes the monitor's scaling out of the equation entirely. I don't know if the same is true on modern ATI cards, but I've never seen an option for it.

 

The Go 7700 is just an overclocked Go 7600.

Nonetheless, the Asus A8Js sounds like an awesome deal since it costs as much as the A8Jm but looks better, has Core 2 Duo, and a higher resolution screen.

 

I think it's gonna look exactly the same as the current A8 series. The image on the review is actually an A7J as ppl have said.

But yeah it does sound like a great deal... depending on how much battery life Core2Duo reduces it...

 

Here is a translated Chinese site that talks about the A8js. Now, yes the translation is not even close to perfect, but it has some pictures and some other useful information.

http://translate.google.com/transla...t&prev=/search?q=A8js&start=20&hl=en&lr=&sa=N

 

i think they are using a different manufacturing scale to make the 7700 - i know ati is with the x1700.

So, i dont think that qaulifies as overclocking. It will be faster, but run cooler - or the same temp as the old card.

I take your point about the AA and HDR, but it is still something that nvidia should have overcome by now. HDR is pretty popular, and if you have a card with the horse power to run AA then it is worth running - so to have a great card like a 7950 and not being able to run hdr and AA is dissapointing if not disastrous.

I also prefer nvidia cards for image quality - actually the image quality on my old ati mobility 9700 was WAY better than what i have on my x1600, so maybe it is just ati's current range that is sufferingh. DVD play back is dissapointing on my w3j.

 

I don't think ATI is using a different process scale in the MR X1700. The MR X1600 is a TSMC 90nm chip and the MR X1700 is going to be produced at UMC using their "improved" 90nm process. UMC's process isn't as much improved as just different. Otherwise the MR X1600 and MR X1700 look like the same chip. If the MR X1700 is faster it's just because the stock clocks are higher and perhaps UMC's process will maintain power and heat levels, but I'm not expecting much.

For the Go 7700, we don't know much about it's manufacturing process, but performance differences are also going to be due to overclocking. The performance difference between the Go 7600 and Go 7700 look too small to be from any major architectural change. I'm not enthousiastic about the Go 7700 using TSMC's 80nm process since nVidia doesn't look to be hyping it up as much as ATI is. There are 80nm shrinks of nVidia desktop parts, but their timeframe is behind that of ATI's.

 

Has anyone got any "real life" pictures of the A8J ? or any pictures at all for that matter?

 

I'm pretty sure it's exactly the same as the A8Jm.

http://www.google.com/translate?u=h...?storyid=2360&langpair=zh-CN|en&hl=en&ie=UTF8

This review also shows shots of the Go 7700 and the X1700. For one thing, the X1700 looks exactly the same as the X1600 so it's almost certain that no shrink or architectural changes have occured. For the Go 7700, I haven't actually seen a picture of the Go 7600, but I'm fairly sure it hasn't undergone a shrink either. It's size looks pretty much what I'd expect for an 8 pipeline chip. (It's smaller than the X1600/X1700 because those have the ring-bus memory controller that takes up a lot of transistors. A desktop 7600 which has 12 pipelines is larger than the X1600.)

Also, Labtop Mag noted that the A8J offers shorter battery life with the Go 7700 than with the Go 7600 which is an indication that overclocking rather than a combination with die shrinking has occured. Granted the fault may also be Merom, but the latest Merom benchmarks shows that on average it doesn't use much more power than Yonah, if it does shorten battery life at all.

 

Ok lets put this together.

A8js and a new w3j are supposed to be released in october.


A8js and a8jp ( i think it is) are for sale globally.

so a8jp has x1700. For sale in europe probably. I think they like that brand more in europe. Thats an offhand observation based on nothing though.

So, do you think that the next w3j refresh, core duo 2 will have the x1700?

Is there precedence for this?

ok now this is a bad theory for one reason in that the w3j doesnt have the gpu cards, its motherboard welded x1600. I predict the 3j will have c2d and x1600

Btw im signing up for the group buy on this machine.

Im about as sure as I can be a whole month in advance. I think this is the one to hit for me.

 

Has it been mentioned what kind of materials the A8Js is going to be built from?

I am gussing a hard plastic but would like to be sure.

 

I think it will be very similar to the current A8jm... Perhaps even use the same shell?

 

If they could just make the W3J with an Nvidia card and HDMI port, I would buy it in a heartbeat.

 

According to DailyTech the Go 7700 is 80nm

link

And the A8Js is "only" going to be $1500 for all that!

 

It's confirmed by both nVidia and ASUS.

http://www.nvidia.com/object/IO_35500.html
http://usa.asus.com/news_show.aspx?id=4251

So the Go 7700 is 80nm. That's news to me. The problem is that the 80nm half node is designed for cost and not for increased transistor performance or decreased power consumption. Since the Go 7700 actually features 12 pipelines up from the Go 7600's 8 pipelines, the power difference will definitely be felt unless nVidia has something else up it's sleeve. I believe that Labtop Mag found that battery life is down half an hour or something from a Go 7600 so it definitely plays out.

What I find interesting is that nVidia has appeared to have snuck another GPU in on us.

http://www.nvidia.com/page/go_7600.html

There is now a Go 7600GT. I've never heard that before, but if you look at the figures it actually has more memory bandwidth and processing power than even the new Go 7700. If the Go 7600GT is still 8 pipelines they must have clocked like crazy to be faster than the 12 pipeline Go 7700. The other conclusion that can be drawn is that while the Go 7700 will have 12 pipelines it's frequencies will be lower than the Go 7600. This would actually make sense to control power and will explain why benchmarks so far haven't shown a huge increase for the Go 7700 over the Go 7600 despite 50% more pipelines.

Edit: Here are the nVidia marketing numbers (I've posted them):

http://translate.google.com/transla...earch?q=%22mobility+radeon+x1450%22&hl=en&lr=

The Go 7700 gets a decent 400 point bump in 3DMark05 over the Go 7600, but that only puts in on par with the MR X1600. The bump in 3dMark06 is only 100 points which definitely means something's up since that's a really low gain for 4 additional pipelines if they are clocked like the Go 7600. The MR X1600 seems to do very poorly in 3dMark06 so the Go 7700 definitely has the lead there. The MR X1600 is really crippled by it's 4 TMUs. No results on the Go 7600GT although in theory it should be even better than the Go 7700. They did provide results for a Go 7600SE that nVidia's website doesn't list. Strange.

 

Nvidia has finally posted the specs on the 7700 in the same chart as the 7600:

http://www.nvidia.com/page/go_7600.html

Looks like the only difference between the 7700 and the stock 7600 is the fill rate -but that's not a bad thing when you think about it. The current 7600 class GPU can comfortably drive a 1280x768/800 display. Since the A8Js has a higher resolution screen maybe it will be able to play the current games at native resolution since it has a faster GPU?...

As for the 7600GT it makes sense that Asus didn't use it: It runs hotter, uses more power, and pretty much requires DDR3 memory (making it more expensive).

 

That's kind of the idea, but it really isn't that much faster than the Go 7600, nowhere near what the extra 4 pipelines should provide. Either it's memory bandwidth starved or they lowered the frequencies to control power and heat. It was probably a combination of both.

In terms of ATI's MR X1700, it's been confirmed through direct testing that it's identical to the MR X1600.

http://xtreview.com/review139.htm

Same 4 pipeline, 12 PS implementation and it's only 3% faster. It doesn't seem to be 80nm, just switched from TSMC to UMC production. I think nVidia's caught ATI being lazy again. I guess we can only hope that programmable ring-bus memory controller of theirs still has more driver tweaking room to go.

That XTReview is actually a great read since it also compares Core Duo and Core 2 Duo performance.

 

the 7600 gt go had been available in sony computers for some time, months.

Ive never seen a speed test of it. Its in a model that is not extremely popular, some sort of 3k 17 inch machine.


asus manufactures the 7600 go and the 7700 go. So um. It makes sense they use that lol. I just have to respond to them deciding not to use the 7600 gt. Theyre gonna use the 7600 to death lol.

This model, the a8j, is their halo machine to sell it to the other manufacturers.

 

I've noticed that Acer and Asus use coper heat pipes but aluminum heat sinks in their laptops. A coper heat sink would be more efficient at dissipating heat, but it's also heavier and more expensive than aluminum...