Z80K or Z81K

I am a previous owner of the Emachines M68XX series laptop and was really impressed. I ended up selling that one, and am now looking to buy another one. Problem is I cannot decide on which one I want to get.

I built a Z80K for a friend of mine and he likes it alot. I am however partial to the Widescreen models for watching letterbox DVDs on.

That brings the Z81K and the new 17" screen Clevo that I have seen around for 1250 for just the barebone.

THe Z81K only has 64mb of vram. I cannot really compare the 9600mob vs the 9700mob , but they are both plenty fast for what I need.

The Z80K uses PC3200 ram vs the PC2700 i nthe Z81k, which I am not sure why this is as its a CPU thing not Chipset which they infact have the same (Nforce 3 150Go)

Regardless of which model I get I am going to get PC2700 memory. DO any of you Z80/1K users recommend a certain brand? I replaced the 512mb samsung that was in my Emachines with 2x 512mb Corsair LL PC2700 chips that ran at 2-2-2-5 but they are expensive vs the PC3200. Normally I buy Crucial/Micron memory, but any other brands would be good for price/performance ratio.

 

Let me fill you in on something we've learned.

We are partial to using Kingston's performance ram... this is different from they junky "upgraders" value-ram.

This ram is what they use in the apple powerbooks... it's a little more expensive, but it is burnt in really well.. So well infact that they have a 2 day turn around time for life.... It's something that helps us out with our customers because RAM can die at any time... it is more expensive but it's worth the piece of mind.

For DDR333-- search kingston's site for the ram for the g4 powerbooks... thats what we've been using for the last year on our Asus based systems.

J

Thanks,
Justin
PROPortable
www.proportable.com
[email protected]

 

The 2 models have identical chipsets and identical motherboards. The difference was in the video cards ( if I am not mistaken) and the screen. Most places, including ASUS's web site, have the specs for the z80k also listed as only supporting ddr333. The truth however is that both barebones support ddr400 however at the time of the release of the barebones ddr 400 for laptops was non existing for consumers and even notebook builders for that matter. So if you really like widescreen that much go for it however stuff like word processing will most likelly look slightly deformed because of the screen size and the not very good support of wide screen in windows. (this might have changed with SP2 but I have no information).

 

What is the total memory capacity for Z81K? I'm shopping around for one and see a couple places listing 2G (2@1GB) RAM options in the system configurator, but product descriptions copy/pasted from the old Asus web page say it's expandable up to 1GB total.

What gives? Has a BIOS update allowed 2GB now, or are these guys making mistakes or being malicious, or what?

 

z81k or z81ka is the real question, the answer neither
unless your a technical kind of guy like myslef and
would sickningly enjoy dealing with driver conflics betwen the nforce gart and ati catalyst.

for best results i go w/

write combing disabled
fast writes enabled
+ omega drivers