K53TA.. The best deal ever... could be!

^^^But some went through lol

 

I wish AMD would stop calling the 6620G IGP "Discrete-Class Graphics". It's not. It's the same general performance as a very very low power discrete card from two or three years ago, but it's nowhere near as powerful as a something like a 5650 or GT330M. I occasionally game on my IGP in my 4820TG and while the A8 IGP is a bit faster, neither is going to be satisfying at higher gfx or res settings. A 6650 is easily 3 or 4 times as powerful.

But for folks who only play older games like Half Life 2 and older, the A8 with IGP is plenty powerful. But make no mistake in thinking that HP has discrete graphics, it definitely doesn't.

 

Thanks to you I followed up today at local BB. Indeed, they transacted a return of mine at $449 and resold to me at "clearance" price of $427.

Not sure why they would discount a deal like the K53TA when many would be willing to pay a premium for it, but I'm happy. The $22 difference will just about cover a 4GB stick of Ram. Thanks again

 

I agree. Although it is definitely good enough if you only plan to play games periodically and are fine at 720p and low details for newer games. Even a few years ago, integrated graphics were a far cry from playing nothing but seven+ year old games.

It does sound like AMD's Trinity is shaping up to be a true game changer though. Possibly at least twice the power of the 6620G. You'd still be relegated to 720p gaming, primarily because of the RAM, but at least you could run 40+ fps with some amount of detail. If only they could find a way to integrate 512MB GDDR5 on the die, or even have a way for the iGPU to access optional GDDR5 on the mainboard, that would be awesome.

 

Yeah, that would be amazing. Or hell, just make the whole thing have like 4G of GDDR5 dual ported RAM that the CPU and IGP shared. Well, we'll see what the future brings.

 

The desktop Fusion APU already has half of its die dedicated toward graphics. Adding additional power and GDDR5 would certainly make the size of the CPU too large and/or impossible to keep cool.

A nice idea but probably not going to happen anytime soon.

 

When they're all using the same chipset though I doubt it would really be that hard or costly to spec out a separate memory channel that's strictly on-board and call for 512mb.

Now the reason it won't ever happen is the reason HP's getting out of hardware, the bottom line. Let's just say a dedicated chip adds $100 cost and if everyone used them on every notebook it would drop the price to $25 a chip. They could sell every model for another let's say $30, make a higher profit and give the consumer a far better product. It won't ever happen though because someone won't and they'll lose enough unit sales to that company that even if the higher profit balances it they'd rather have the units. Race to the bottom.

 

Can the stock AMD version play the latest games at 720P res with medium settings?

 

6650m is not 3-4x as powerful as a 6620G. Do the math and compare the stream processors + GPU clockspeeds. They're much closer than you think.

 

Notebookcheck.net shows the 6620g on par with a older 5650m which is a tad slower than the 6650m, which by looking at the benchmarks seems about right.

 

Those of you who have the SAMSUNG or LG lcd screen........

i've got a quick test I hope you can provide feedback on.

set your windows in 32bit color, and Take a look at this closely to the screen-


do you see a super smooth dark gray, or do you see tiny faint boxes or uniform dots, kind of like the square below ?



I'm asking because I need to know what dithering pattern asus is using by default.

I went to best buy, and most laptop lcd's show tiny square patterns on the dark gray. I only saw 2 laptops that showed perfect dark shades, and oddly enough, one of them was a chimei screen in an HP laptop.
the other was a samsung panel also in an HP.

 

I see 8 horizontal black lines spaced throughout the graphic, and although the gray isn't what I would call super smooth, it doesn't have dots or boxes.I have an LG screen. What are you going to do with the data you have on the dithering pattern Asus uses by default?

 

But it's the old problem that when you split the memory buss between the CPU and IGP it's not really as fast as it seemed in benchmarks. It seems a LOT slower to me on more modern games, to the point that running on the 6650 gives much better framerates at the same settings. On Crysis 2 the K53TA running the 6650 alone was buttery smooth at the lowest settings and not bad one up. The IGP felt like a slide show to me.

 

Were you running dual channel memory on the K53TA? Or the stock configuration of single channel with one stick of RAM?

Dual channel gives the IGP a huge boost.

 

Stock singe stick config. I'd like to try dual channel and compare the two.

 

I see the exact same thing, and mine is a Samsung panel.

 

Has any of you tried ubuntu lucid lynx or natty narwhal on this laptop?
I'd like to know if it has any problems with it

 

I know, I have too many questions. The Samsung I believe is in this laptop is SAMSUNG 4GB 204-Pin DDR3 SO-DIMM DDR3 1333 (PC3 10600) Laptop Memory Model MV-3T4G4/US.

Specs show 9-9-9-20, while G.SKILL shows specs of 9-9-9-24. Does the difference matter? Will they play nice together?

 

Performance is much improved since the CPU and iGPU aren't bandwidth starved like they are with single channel.

 

I asked but it seems no one has tried as I got no replies. You should be just fine but read this post I made earlier and read my Linux guide.

 

I concur. My screen is Samsung.

 

just exchanged my old k53ta for a new one, didn't check what type of screen I had before but the new one has no more grainy blacks on the lagom lcd test anymore! im happy lol

 

Quick Question,

Whats the best memory to buy with these memory timings? or will any memory work no matter the timings.

 

okay so I just updated my bios to 207, latest one, and now i have grainy blacks. 100% sure i didn't have those on bios 203, but i had screen banding with that bios. version

does anyone with BIOS 206 have this issue? if anyone feels like it, might be a good idea to downgrade to 206 or 203 to confirm if its BIOS or monitor issue.

i used http://www.lagom.nl/lcd-test/black.php to test my blacks. first 3 blocks used to be solid blacks, now they have temporal dithering

 

TL;DR = Call your store and give the SKU # They probably have some in stock

The last couple weeks my boss has been looking for a new work laptop and since K53TA is always out of stock I recommended he should get the K53E (i5 sandy for $479) since at the time it was in stock and it would be better for non-gaming anways.

Well hes lazy and didn't actually get around to buying it until last week and the K53E was also out of stock on the website. So I told him to just call and make sure (one store kept showing as available/out of stock every other day)

So he calls and is talking to them and they are asking him lots of questions -- what hes going to use it for, how many he wanted, etc.. Kinda strange. So then they say they found one that was returned unopened and would reserve it for 30 minutes.

So he runs over there and a few minutes later calls me and tells me this story about how they actually had more but they are screening buyers to filter out resellers. They also sold it to him on "clearance" for $450

 

don't exchange your laptop anymore.

it's just a bios bug that needs to be fixed.

bios 203 didn't have graininess because it didn't display all the colors in the first place. it only showed 262k colors, and doesn't show all the shades of black on the lagom page. The first 3 blocks should show different shades of black, not the same level as bios 203.

the dithering we have doesn't seem to be temporal dithering. the pattern doesn't shift. it looks like temporal, but it's a static pattern.

bios 206 and 207 are the same in screen graininess.

asus just needs to dial down the dithering.

it should be an easy fix. it's now just a matter of when they'll put out a fix.

hopefully the more people complain, the faster they'll release a fix.

 

If we can organize mass email complaints with a generic complaint message like we did for the screen banding then they might fix it. I'll see what I can do if I have time during the week.

 

the complaint doesn't need to be long.
they are taiwanese, so it's best to keep it short, like-

"grainy garbage" is actually their own wording from 5 years ago, when they had the ati x1600 grainy problem.

 

Screw the graininess I want crossfire to work

 

Any thoughts?

 

Bump, please comment

 

^^^Just buy a new set.. It's only like $5-$15 more for 2 x 4gb...

 

why spend more money ?

of course the gskill ram will work.

the bios will tell the samsung stick to clock down to match the 9 9 9 24.

that's not really an asus problem.

amd released broken hardware.

 

Yes. It'll be fine.

Gonna go tomorrow to get my clearance refund and hopefully open box discount.

 

I have the G.Skill RAM running in tandem with the stock Samsung stick. Here is a screenshot composited from two separate ones showing how the system will adjust timings to make sure they are in sync.

 

okay without a doubt, gaming is best when you are NOT in CrossfireX and NOT assigning a power profile to your game. I played an hour or more without any Catalyst Profile setting and got better frame rates, and lower temps. Only hit 71C in this setting and DX ran great in 16x AF. Best it's ever ran or looked. OC at 2.6/2.8GHz @ 1.2V max. I think the system works best at keeping the volts below 1.2

 

Someone over at the slickdeals thread put in an exactly matching 4gb stick and it doesn't perform any better than the mismatched set, regardless of timings. So don't sweat it.

Dual Graphics aren't broken. Even if it only works on Battlefield games and RIFT it's worth having the option. It's not like there are cheaper laptops with a 6650 and the 6520 cannot be removed, so it's kind of a freebie. This is a quad-core+ radeon 6650 laptop that just happens to have the option of poorly supported crossfire. I'm sure it will have improved support at some point. As many posters have mentioned, Dual Graphics might work better is split frame rendering or with the weaker card used as a secondary buffer/cache.

At the moment though, the % of the gaming market made up of people running Dual Graphics must be incredibly small compared to people with true Crossfire or single GPU.

 

See link below to reset the gpu performance profiles. Just delete the files in that directory. To play it safe, just rename the original files. Then reboot.

http://forum.notebookreview.com/hp-...xxx-series-owners-lounge-288.html#post7920103

I tried games without assigning a profile, but my performance was WORSE even without Crossfire. Deus Ex was 30fps, went up to 45+ when I set it to "high performance", same thing for Bad Company 2.

 

16x AA? Deus Ex HR doesn't even support normal forms of antialiasing, that's why it uses Edge AA, FXAA, and MLAA.

 

HTWingNut, I wish you had the same machine as us, so we were comparing apples to apples, maybe our systems just run differently for unknown reasons...

Well in my experience, and I've tried every fricken option more than a handful a times, I really feel not assigning a "High Performance" profile to the game makes a world of difference.

I meant AF 16x


Another thing I wanted to point out was MMLoadDrv.exe
This program loads under your Task Manager whenever CCC is opened or you have a program assigned to a "High Performance" profile.

In either case I remove this task from running.

This is all you should have running in your Task Manager

 

I finally got my new g.skill ram and installed it, but when I refreshed the windows index score my processor speed went for 6.9-6.4? Idk if that matters or not, but I just want to make sure.

 

You sure you bought 1333MHz and not 1066?

 

Yeah, I bought the correct one, but idk

 

I think part of your problem is that you're running much too high an overclock. Try backing down to 2.3 GHz and see if you get more stable performance. I tried my machine at 2.4 and got pretty odd behavior. I don't think these CPUs like being run past the maximum boost speed they're designed to attain on stock clocks.

 

6.4 is the default cpu score of stock A6.

sounds like you didn't properly OC this.

run cpu-z while you run the WEI, just to be sure you're running the highest clocks

 

Alright... I'll give that a try and see, but I still don't know why the number would go lower...

 

Anyone find a bluray player that will actually fit do not wanna get an external.

 

12.7mm players are pretty standard. Just look for SATA 12.7mm blu-ray (some call it 12.5mm).

 

3DMark 11 has a system info update now that shows true clock speed, memory type and speed, hard drive

 

Thanks found some nice ones.
Can I get your opinion? I usually download digital copies of software or games so i really dont use my dvd drive alot would it be better just to swap it our for an extra hard drive and get an external blu ray? or vice versa?