Asus Turion-powered W3Z

While checking the Asus site for updated drivers I came across the W3Z. I couldn't find this listed under the product section but a Google search indicates that Asus is now producing a Turion-powered W3 called the W3Z with the ATI RS480M chipset. It seems that this will be on sale in Europe in November.

At the time of posting there don't seem to be any English language details available. The sites describing the W3Z also have details of some other new Asus models.

It will be interesting to compare performance of this model with the others in the W3 series.

John

 

OOoohhhhh, very interesting..

 

nice find! if its $100-300 cheaper it will attract a lot of buyers.

 

You're going to be looking at a model with integrated graphics....... on that ATI chipset.... not a bad system.... something that in my opinion would sell better than the Z63a...... but basically be in the same chassis (not the aluminum of the W3v).

 

yup yup. If anyone need further clarification. The following is from Asus' Italian site.
http://www.asus.it/news_show.aspx?id=1477

 

i hope that Turion can save more power than Pentium M even having a good video chipset.

 

... it will a little bit, while giving you 64bit performance (for the future) but it's still using DDR333... the one thing I wish they could update...... and the graphics *should* be slightly better than the Z63a's intel i915 graphics.... but certainly not as good as the ATI x600....

 

MT or ML....


I wonder..

edit: Just saw 'MT' in that Italian site, sweet!

 

Both actually work -- used both in the A6u..... so it should be like that on all the Turion notebook models.

 

Aw man.

now my life just got a whole lot more complicated by this >_<.
If Asus releases a z63a with the ATI chipset with DDR2 I think my head is going to explode. (I think... we'll have to see if it does if Asus does do that )

 

Is this a built-on ASUS model that will replace the Z63a?

 

It won't replace the z63a, it's just probrably the twin of the z63a, but with a Turion

 

It will undoubtably be a "built-on" model but it wouldn't replace the Z63a.... it would compliment it........ my guess is that it would be basically the same exact model with a different color scheme at motherboard...... probably be called the Z63z or something.. If the US gets it......... if we do, it would be the most popular Turion system to date...... once they create a Turion with high-end graphics in a late-model centrino platform... then we'll have mass hysteria!

 

that would be drool worthy!

in any case, I found this picture on yet another Italian site. the label says w3z.. looks kinda like the w3v's color? in either case, it's sure sexy in black!

 

... that's just one of the original W3 marketing pics....... My bet would be on coloring of the W3n... or maybe something totally different... like all silver or something like that. Right now, this isn't even on the roadmap and if it were, I'd be under an NDA not to talk about it...... so take that as a - "I haven't heard of it yet, so it's probably not going to be here any time soon." sort of post.

 

I was told their latency was better... memory matching on AMD boards at 333, and compensates for the lower bus. So the difference is negligible.

are there tests to show the difference between AMD333 and Intel533?

I will hunt down the source if this is proven untrue.

 

Noooo I hate those posts! >_< Heheh..

Well I'm sure you'll tell us in good time Justin. We all don't want the Asus Police knocking on your door for violating a NDA

 

There are a couple things I keep pointing out....... and the first is that for the last two years at least... Asus has released new AMD models in opposite quarters as Intel stuff.... that usually means around US Thanksgiving time..... I don't anticipate anything great, but nothing gets less talk around Asus than AMD stuff.... it sort of comes and they say "Hey, guess what we got" ..... There's never really a big build up like there is for the Intel systems. We'll see what happens.

 

Looks like it'll be a pretty popular system if it comes to North America... esp. if it's in a nice dark black colour

 

Yeah... well the A6u is still a big system... and if you're not going to have dedicated graphics, you should at least make a small system.

 

With DDR, the latencies are much better - for example, where a typical DDR333 stick has a CAS of 2.5, a DDR2 stick will have 4.0 - that's the norm for DDR2, I haven't seen anything lower (at least for notebooks).

There isn't that much of a performance increase between the two - DDR2 is faster somewhat, but it's not really an advantage. The one nice thing about DDR2 is that it consumes a lot less power than conventional DDR - 1.8V versus 2.5V for DDR. You might get more bandwidth with the DDR2-533, but the access time and latency with Intel processors are higher because their memory controllers aren't located on the processor chip, as they are with AMD processors. Instead, they're on the northbridge, and use a 64-bit bus...not the best solution.

My memory benchmarks for DDR2-533 (dual channel) are as follows:
* Read: 3018MB/s bandwidth
* Write: 762MB/s
* Latency: 108.5ns

Chaz

 

you can have the ATI RS480M coexist with a dedicated gpu.. thats what my ms 1029 has the integrated chipset with the dedicated gpu.

so maybe they will possibly add a dedicated gpu option.

 

... yeah... but it won't be. AMD wants to push the mobility of this cpu and honestly wants to push it away from the dedicated graphics systems... especially if it's a small system. This unit won't have dedicated graphics.