G2S-A1 Benchmark and photos

Wow GentechPc nice comparison man.

Could you pls tell me when is your Seagate Momentus 7200.2 160GB 7200rpm S-ATA 300 (Back-Ordered) is gona be available.

And those who have been asking about C&C Tiberium Wars Frames per sec. I heard it is locked at 30FPS and wont go over regardless of the system specs.

A rather disappointing article on the darn Intel Turbo Memory & Santa Rosa's 800mhz FSB is useless vs 667mhz.

http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/intel/showdoc.aspx?i=2985

 

That would depend on the other components, the 256 with higher clocks would be better with faster components, whereas if they were in mid range systems (DDR533 memory, <2.0 GHz processor) the 512 would win out, mostly because of the size. In a system with a lot of memory the 256 would probably win because of its incredible TurboCaching ability (I don't believe turbocaching works as well with DDR2 RAM.)

 

Alex, very informative, thanks. What's key about DDR3 that makes it a better turbocacher (is that a word? ) than DDR2?

Petrov.

 

The shipment of Seagate 160 7200rpm drives came yesterday, might still have some left after ship to all pre-orders, but I'll have check with out warehouse tomorrow since they are very busy putting together for pre-orders.

I did a test of ITM last night with F3SV-B1 there result:

F3SV-B1 boot time:
3GB RAM
160GB 5400RPM
CPU T7500

Start time: press the power button
Stop time: Asus Splendid splash screen

Without 1GB ITM card: 1:02
With 1GB ITM card ready boost enable: 1:33


the boot time even slower than with ITM, my guess is, the idea is rather old at the time when Microsoft start to introduce this technology in Vista, at the time, the laptop hard drives has small capacity, it might help for slow hard drives, but today, the larger capacity hard drive performs better or faster than ITM, at least the test result tells me that.

If the technology really works then we should see the performance boost immediately as soon as the ITM is enable without any questions or asking for updates of drivers or BIOS.

 

Higher Clock speeds for memory, DDR2 is happy to get up to 800, GDDR3 is routinely clocked up to 1200 Mhz, which means that it is more efficient at sending information back out to be processed then to the screen. With DDR2 the low clocks become a bottleneck (a lot of DDR2s aren't even capable of Turbocaching, which is why I said having more RAM would push the 256 ahead). Turbocaching creates a repository of extra information for the card to access whenever in the system RAM. That leaves open the vRAM to handle information that is actively being manipulated. It is faster for the vRAM to pull out the information it needs from the slower system RAM when it needs it than it is for the RAM to request the data from the software itself. It allows it to, well, Cache all of the important info for use any time. The 512MB DDR2 does not have this Caching ability and must therefore make due with giving up some of its own space to caching and using the remainder for processing (i.e. the GDDR3 is almost 100 percent processing power where as the 512 of DDR2 is 25-35 percent caching and the rest processing, then when you account for the higher transfer rates [but also laggy latency] the GDDR3 comes out somewhat faster.)

As a disclaimer let me say that this is purely speculative, as I have never seen the same architecture used with both DDR2 and GDDR3 before, and assume these conditions based on what I already know about the hardware. I could be wrong.

 

Excellent reply Alex.

 

Thanks Ken, I was wondering...do you have a system with a 512 DDR2 card around to benchmark against the 8600M GT? Possibly a desktop card even? It would have to be in the 8 series, because you can't really scale the 7 and the 8 series against each other. Something to give some sort of subjective angle to this anyway?

 

I am sorry Alex I don't have it , maybe we will have to wait for C90S with 512MB card to test.

 

Alex - the 8600GS card on the new F series Asus also seems to show a marked pickup using 3gb system RAM, and that GS card is only DDR2 I think? Is this what you would expect based on the above?

Ken - what brand of 2gb SODIMM did you use in the G1S to go to 3gb?

Thanks,

Petrov.

 

Rumor is that vista is lagging the capability to make use of ITM. If you follow Sony Vs Microsoft debate about ITM.
Claim is that Microsoft will be coming out with first Service Pack for Vista in December and that might include the working ITM.

Oh man this Sh***t never ends. I was about to pull the trigger on G2S from you Ken. Now i am gona wait and see if new 8700M GT 512mb (8600m GT on Crack) comes out in new G2S

Toshiba has already released 8700m GT 17inch notebook in Japan today.
http://www.engadget.com/2007/06/13/toshibas-17-inch-wxw-with-geforce-8700m-gt-graphics/

 

That Toshiba's one gigantic notebook ... thicker than the Dell XPS by a long shot and I don't think the 8700M GT is better than a 7950GTX

 

will the g2s be upgrade with a 8700M GT?

 

I just ordered the G1S from GenTech primarily because of the comments on this forum and I have been really impressed by how helpful Ken has been in trying to meet everyone's requests for benchmarks

 

10x for all the replies on my 2,3 - 4 GB of RAM question guys! It was quite helpfull for me to see your oppinions.

On the M8700 - I do not believe Asus will be making an upgrade to the G2S series with that card. It's not in their style really, Asus has not made a truly high end (having really powerful GPUs) laptop to date and I don't think it's a part of their marketing strategy or target auditory!

Unfortunately it seems like I myself will have to settle for a 8600GT in a G2S, buy hey this is still a pretty serious machine

 

I say ASUS will come out with a 8700GT. Now min2209 7950gtx might be faster than 8700M GT. But you are ignoring the directx10. Future shader models, dynamic lighting and shadows all depending on directx10. Crysis, UT3 lot other future generation games will be using directx10. If you are just going by clock speeds than you got Evgas several GTX cards that are factory over clocked for faster Ramdacs.
Directx 10 is the future of gaming after such a major overhaul of directx9. In my opinion it will be to a disadvantage for someone buying a new notebook and not getting a directx10 card especially if you are a gamer.
Asus advertising their G2 series for gamers primarily, i say they will release a 8700M GT.
I haven't shopped yet at GentechPc. But i see the reviews on reseller ratings and his motivation to help end users like us. He truly deserves respect.
64 bit OS, 64 bit games and a directx10 card will be a must pretty soon in the future for high tech games unless you play Tetris

 

Hey here is some questions unanswered:

1- How is the BF2/BF2142 test going?

2- Hows the 62hz refresh rate going to be used properly?

3- If we could not run games at native resolution(1900x1200 g2s) due new games or to gain performace, will it get blurred and get ugly at low resolution as happened before with others laptops?

Caio

 

Short but very encouraging review. Note the battery timing mentioned

(Perhaps because of its powerful components, the ASUS G2S is not the most energy-saving of notebooks and lasted only 114mins in our MobileMark 2005 battery life test. Additionally, it managed to last 95 minutes during our DVD playback test)
http://www.hardwarezone.com/news/view.php?cid=9&id=6787

 

has anybody bought the g2s?
if someone has it try making a review and posting it in this web site or say where did you put it

 

I pulled the trigger, 1806 shipped from buy.com with 7 percent off coupon. Its back ordered so maybe I will get it in 2 to 4 weeks.
I also wondered about graphics upgrade path.

This seems to be the best deal on 17 inch with dx10 I could find, used dell coupons and epp pricing from dell or hp and I could get where I wanted. Are the asus c90 c91 worth the wait? I might cancel and look into c90 c91....

 

Dang, that's a sweet price! I bought a G1S-A1 from buy.com for only $30 less!

Of course, I'll be getting it Tues

 

Thanks, the deal seemed so good I had to go for it, I wasnt looking for that much of a laptop but for 1800 I figured it was worth a shot. How do you like your GS1.

 

its taking so long for G2S review

 

I have a feeling though that to actually use the DirectX 10 technology without getting terrible framerates you'd be needing a more powerful card than the 8700M GT.

 

why? It seems perfectly reasonable that a card nVidia designed "for DX10" would run full on DX10 effects. Especially with the 8700 being in the high-end.

DX10 uses nicer effects with fewer resources. I think it is silly to say that any of the 8 series at or above the 600 level will not perform well under DX10 circumstances. It didn't happen with DX8, it didn't happen with DX9 so why in the world would it happen now?

 

I still remember the day when I had a dell i8600+MR9600 PT(mid-top end laptop card at that time). I would need to switch to DX8.1 mode in hl2 to get some constant framerate. When SM3.0 was added to frycry 1.2, it did give my i9300+6800go some framerate boost over SM2.0 but when i turned on HDR(another added feature in 1.2), the game rendered unplayable.

Let's hope DX10 is really as efficient as it's advertised.

 

Sorry for the dealy, I just didn't have enough free time to do all the test you guys request, but anyway, here it is:

1: Done.

2: You have to mod the profile Documents>Battlefield2142>Profiles>Default folder and open the Video.con file with notepad and change the default 60Hz to 62Hz otherwise the game will not run.

3: I can't play at 1900X1200 in BF2142, it only allow me to go up to 1600X1050.

 

are those with stock config ken?

 

Yes it is.

 

Ken - any views as to how 2gb v 3gb system ram makes a difference to the BF tests and whether we'd see the same magnitude of performance improvement as on the FEAR tests?

Petrov.

 

Sweet,thx Ken ^^

1-were u using 2gb or 3gb ?

2-at 25 FPS can the BF2142 still be playable?

3- Does G2S Audio Hardware supports Creative's Environmental Audio (EAX)? You can select Yes to enhance the audio quality. Enabling EAX results in a big sound improvement

 

I can answer a couple of those.

1. 2GB, Stock
2. Yes, above 20 is playable, 30 is smooth, 45 is very smoth and 60+ is like silk.
3. Dunno.

 

ic, can u notice the difference between 30 fps and 45 fps by naked eyes?

 

For me, it depends what game i'm playing. But most of the games, Yes, 30-45 is very noticable.

 

Anything above 30-32 fps is hard to distinguish with the naked eye.. So as long as u are getting a constant 30 fps thats pretty good.

But ppl prefer an average fps of 45fps to multiplayer FPS games as an avg of 45 means that minimum fps tends to be greater then 30 then resulting in a much smoother overall gaming while for a 30fps avg , the min fps may dip below 22 in heavy action scenes making it hard to play then..

 

The human eye refreshes at 30Hz, so 30frames per second is the absolute highest you would be able to distinguish. Like Alias said, the reason 45 and 60 are distinguishable is that those are averages and when the higher the average the fewer times the fps dipps below that 30FPS threshold. Above 60 and there will be virtually no dips at all.

 

hm any chance G2S can handle Lost Planet and Crysis(both DX10) at this rate without having to sacrifice those amazing Shadow/Light Details ?

i mean do u think the architecture of DX10 games would help the the 8600M GT works better then a 7950 GTX (brute force)
if it supports dx 10 it supposedly should run without problem, but the odds are not favorable aren't it? =| im kinda despaired,
despaired house gamers

 

DX10 compatible means that you will be able to turn on those features. It doesn't mean they will run well.

 

You can bet that my 8800gtx will have the same issues on my desktop