ViDock 2 - My experiences so far

Please could you open the box and take some pictures? I want to see wha is inside.

 

Look on the first page. There is a picture of what is in the box.

 

I mean inside of the vidock .

 

Done. check out the first page for more pics.

 

Thanks for the pics +rep

BTW it seems that you could just attach a bigger card and feed the card with an external PSU.

 

Exactly. That was my thought last night before I went to bed. Only problem is I don't have a 4890 (or any other ATI card for that matter). I would love to hook this thing up and really test the hell out of it.

 

When are you going to do the video?

 

I took video today- will try to convert and post tonight. If not tonight - tomorrow morning.

 

Ok thank God, try to get it by tonight if you can i really apreciate this.

 

is that $379 with or without a graphics card?

 

That includes the ATi 4670. The ViDock 2 Blank, without a video card, is $299

 

epic expense. thanks for the info, +rep.

 

@OP
Thanks for attempting the 3dmarks.

@Paladin44
I have a vostro 1500, which is pretty much a rebranded Dell small-business side of the Inspiron series. On the compatibility page, it said that the Inspiron 1420 works with Vidock would this be the same for the Vostro series?

Edit: I think people are missing the point, it is not meant to be a full desktop replacement, but a substitute if a person only has a laptop (like me). In this case, I can spent $400 for just the vidock or $800+ for a brand new desktop (I have a 5 years old desktop, not worth upgrading at all).

 

OK - So I created a video. I posted it to youtube and am waiting for it to finish processing now. I will post to the original post as soon as that finishes.

BTW - I am a geek - and not a video star.... I swear to God that if anyone so much as critiques the video I will strip it from youtube and shove it up your......

-- enjoy and let me know what you think.


OK - so YouTube deleted it because it was too long. Finishing encoding another version that is shorter - will try to get it posted before I go to bed.

 

i think you overestimate the cost of a desktop...

not counting the monitor (you need to get an external monitor for the ViDock anyway) you can end up with a desktop solution as fast as the ViDock for about the same amount of money.

and you can upgrade all of its components...

i think there would definitely be a market for this if they could make it a lot cheaper. i'd like to have seen the ViDock for about half the price, or even 1/3...

 

I think you underestimate the price of a desktop. An additional machine costs a ton more- especially if you are running all software legally.

And - regarding your wish to see the price lower - me too. I would like for it to cost 9.99. That would make me very happy.

 

When are you posting the video?

 

i run all legal software.

as a student, i use windows server 2008 x64 for free courtesy of microsoft's dreamspark program. (available to all students with a .edu email address)

all the other software costs the same whether you pay for it for your laptop or for a desktop.

as far as me wishing to see the price go down, i don't plan on buying it either way. i just think something like that should not cost a hair under $400 (obviously early adopter cost will be higher, but you know this already, and i early adopt sometimes also). anyway, i wasn't being self serving, just stating my opinion. it's as if i had stated that i would like to see such an such a house cost 2.3 million instead of 4.4 million.

$400 is a ps3, $300 is an xbox...


Processor: $100
Video Card: $100
Motherboard: $50
Case + PSU: $50
Memory: $50
DVD Drive: $25
OS: free for students / .edu email addresses
Mouse + Keyboard : $25
Hard Drive: $50

You would be surprised what this $450 budget gets you in terms of computer. You can actually part out a machine under budget for each component and still rocks. You could spend that extra money on your OS and still stay within the $450 budget. go to newegg.com and price it out if you don't believe. this is why i really think the ViDock outprices itself.

Quad Core Phenom CPU or Triple Core Phenom II or a Core 2 Duo.
9800 GT or an ATI 4830
4 GB memory

 

I think it's a great idea with a possible market niche, but I agree on the price issue. At the end, you are paying almost $400 for a $70 videocard.

 

And I can build a small dedicated PC for that much with more power and versatility.

Until an external gpu solution uses the laptops internal monitor and gives great performance and at a good cost, a computer is better.

This is nothing more than a computer in a box with no motherboard/ram/cpu instead you have to set up your laptop and use your laptops hardware in lieu of the desktops more powerful hardware.

 

Posted.... Sorry - I uploaded it before bed last night. It was not finished processing - so I crashed.

Now back in the office.

Posted the link on the first page - but here is the link again.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fCK5dLWiO2Q

 

I understand what you are saying - and I think it is well thought out, but 450 does not get you the same gaming experience that you can achieve from this. My last "gaming" desktop cost me a little more than 450 to achieve a similar experience to what I get using a decent laptop with a dock.

Not for everyone - but this technology IS for me.

I would think that for students - it would be perfect as well. You have a monitor, keyboard and mouse in your dorm room with the dock, but you keep your laptop think and light for classes.

 

very nice video, thanks for uploading that.

 

Steiner thanks for the video, i got to give you rep, What are the specs on that lenovo that you tested, iam curious.

 

The specs are in his original post that started this thread.

 

^^ Exactly.

• Lenovo T400 – 1280x800, 2Gb RAM, P8600 (2.4Ghz), Intel 4500 integrated Graphics, Windows 7

 

Thanks dude, i really appreciate the time and effort you put in this.

Chuckd

 

I think in time the Vidock will be able to drive the laptops internal screen. If it never does this then I think they are shooting themselves in the foot. They must realise that being able to drive the internal laptops screen is essential for some of the market.

If this never happens then I will simply keep on buying gaming laptops with built in high end GPU's. There is no way in hell I am going to be limited to having to use a big external screen. I want to be able to game where ever I wish, not be limited by the technology, I want to be freed by it.

 

excellent video.

i stand by the $450 desktop as totally crushing the performance of the ViDock, and therefore the ViDock outpricing itself...

however, I also accept that it is cool and can make a laptop that has no real gaming potential suddenly have gaming potential. it is good to support it to hopefully bring the price down instead of ViDock just closing up shop. I would also be more impressed if the ViDock could beat the performance of mainstream discrete graphics cards, but this is a good start anyway.

the ViDock in its current form isn't going to be driving the laptop screen. i agree that this type of functionality would make it more practical (every extra PC component required to make this happen just gives more validation to getting a cheap gaming PC)

the limiting factor here is bandwidth. we need a specialized but standard port, so that we can have a legitimate 16 lane pci-express 2.0 type bandwidth, and then we can do whatever we want. we could have ultra-power GPU's, SLI, and/or drive the internal display.

 

http://secure.newegg.com/WishList/PublicWishDetail.aspx?WishListNumber=14303028

$450 build that will be a faster gaming system than all but dual SLI GTX 280M's, SLI 9800M GTX's, or CrossfireX 4870's.

ViDock may be good for some people, but I think most people don't realize how absolutely dirt cheap it is to build a gaming desktop these days.

 

Yeah I have dual 4850's in the desktop and dual 4870's in the laptop

Its nice to be able to game on the go.

 

Nice video, good explanation it looks really good.

 

Request for performance data

The ViDock would be operating at whatever your expressport speed is (expressport 1.0), which I assume is 1x speed. The HD4670 capable of 16x speed in a 16x slot. So can anyone with a ViDock provide 3dmark06 results when using the 1x slot? notebookcheck gives 3dmark06 of HD4670 of 6995 in a 16x slot.

 

first off, the expressport is less than 1x pci-e 2.0

second, 3dmark gives "normal" results even with 1x speed (3dmark stresses the actual gpu as much as it can and therefore keeps everything in the GPU buffer)

games do not give normal results with 1x speed, depending on the card (i know for a fact that the 3870 and 9800gx2 lose 25-75% of game performance depending on the game at 1x, but lose basically nothing in 3dmark at 1x)

i 2nd the request for some performance data... i'm still really interested to see this. i just request that you don't use 3dmark. i *hope* that we will find that since we are using a 4600 series card instead of a 9800gx2, we won't see much drop in performance. still want to see the numbers to back this up.

 

I am just going to ask instead of guessing.... What do you want to see? I ran 3DMark06, Vantage and played with Crysis a little bit as well.

 

ok. i want numbers or graphs.

Crysis is good. the 9800gx2 at 1x saw about a 20% performance cut just rigged up normally in a desktop. I could imagine that means the 4600 series card might have *no performance drop* in Crysis? thats what i *hope*, but I just want to see the benchmark results.

So maybe take a few of the big names: Crysis, CoD4, Fallout 3, or whatever other intensive games you have available.

CoD4, in particular, is a good example of a game where the 9800gx2 suffered a lot at 1x. Also if you have flight simular x, that is a good benchmark. If these benchmarks turn out pretty good, that would be a good sign, because these two in particular really struggled at 1x with a 9800gx2.

 

I have COD4 installed on this laptop -- can try to figure out a way to test it (it is installed to an SSD in the expresscard slot) on Monday when I get into the office.

I ran Crysis tool (results were posted in the first thread) and here are the results.
Run #1- DX10 800x600 AA=No AA, 64 bit test, Quality: High ~~ Last Average FPS: 19.18
Run #2- DX10 800x600 AA=2x, 64 bit test, Quality: High ~~ Last Average FPS: 17.45
Run #3- DX10 800x600 AA=8xQ, 64 bit test, Quality: High ~~ Last Average FPS: 17.44
Run #4- DX10 1024x768 AA=No AA, 64 bit test, Quality: High ~~ Last Average FPS: 17.20
Run #5- DX10 1024x768 AA=2x, 64 bit test, Quality: High ~~ Last Average FPS: 15.51
Run #6- DX10 1280x960 AA=No AA, 64 bit test, Quality: High ~~ Last Average FPS: 14.57

If you would like I can try and create something pretty with that - but I am not a professional reviewer and don't even claim to be one on TV.

If you want to see numbers and test it out, why not just do what I did? Buy one.

 

I want to see the numbers before I test it out.

But yes, this crysis benchmark is spot on. I want to compare this performance to a similar laptop with a mobility 4600 series card with the same GPU clocks and shaders and such... might be a mobility 4650 or 4670... I'll try and find that stuff out.

thank you for the effort. +rep.

 

Tag and looking forward to the release of the power model.

 

Sure, it might be expensive, and I might be able to buy a cheap PC for the price, but I don't want a second computer. Say you've got a latest gen laptop, with C2D 2.8GHz, SSD drive and 6GB of RAM, but with a graphic card that dosn't really do games. Plug this in, and you have a gaming machine. This seems to be a better solution than buying a second computer solely to play games. (I really, REALLY don't understand why NO ONE ever offers a docking station with a proper PCI-Express, 16x; it's ridiculously simple, from an engineering point of view, to add a docking connector capable of doing this. Think about it, if you can have USB/Firewire/DVI/whatnot on a docking connector, why not a proper PCI-E???)

That said, I'd like to see cheaper version ;-)

What's the limiter on ViDock2? Why is 4670 the best card you can use? Is it physical size of the card or power supply? It shouldn't be too hard to just make a slightly bigger box!

 

First its the Power which is 75W i think the 4670 is 65W someone double check. also because its using Expressslot anything higher would see a high Drop in preformance because of the limitation from the Express. a 4670 only suffers a 6.45% drop, however something like a 9800gtx would hit a 20-25% loss, which 1/4 the card, alot of power not being used. however the ViDock4 is set to fix this because of the Demand for ViDock2, and that hits market August (Speculation) or later. Because of a higher Watt PSU and Some fancy Engineering... So ive heard...also the Express 2.0 will be used to its full potential

 

Just how did you arrive at that conclusion?

Here's what I think (I'm a programmer, not a game programmer though; So I can only guess what are the common practices for engine programming):

I was thinking about technical limitations of EC (bandwidth) and how it could affect the GPU. So, what has to go through the cable? Textures and scene geometry, shaders, etc, etc. But once they're there, in the RAM of the GPU, you don't have to transfer any data (until the scene changes). Goes in one end (through EC), gets out the other end (through DVI).

So, my first conclusion would be that a GPU with 1GB of memory would perform better than GPU with 512MB. Or rather, you are more likely to see a performance drop when running in ViDock vs running in the computer normally.

Now, the fact that GPU is external enclosure doesn't affect it's speed in any way. 9800GTX is still as fast as 9800GTX. The question is, can you utilize all this power?

This would be VERY engine-dependent (I think! it's all a guesswork). Let's take an RTS game for instance, something like Dawn of War II, or maybe upcoming Starcraft II. There is no way in hell that all the textures you need to cover the map, units + all shaders, + geometry will take more than 1GB (well, I MIGHT be wrong, so don't kill me if I am, but I simply can't imagine that). So, why does the game have high requirements (DoW II requires a bit of a powerfull machine)? Probably because the sheer amount of geometry the GPU has to deal with (many, many 3D units). Also, the map in a RTS game doesn't change once you load it up, so technically, you could preload all of this to the memory and then utilize any GPU at full power. So an RTS game would be an ideal candidate for tesing ViDock.

Let's consider the other end of the spectrum - FPS games. Now we have a situation where the geometry of the scene changes very quickly, textures/shaders constantly need to be loaded, etc. The big question is, can we load them fast enough and what happens when we can't? That would probably depend on the engine itself. If I wrote my code in a way to wait for the stuff to load, you'd probably experience stuttering. However, I don't think that should necessarily be the case. Take UT3 engine for instance. Common complaint is texture pop-in (I've seen plenty of it in Bioshock). The game goes on alright even if the textures arent loaded yet, it's just the untextured models that look kind of bad. With ViDock, I'd expect to see it slightly more if running in an environment rich in different textures with the GPU that has low memory.

So, this is what I would expect (and it would be nice if someone could test it!) when comparing a GPU running in ViDock with one running in 16x PCI-E:

1. Take a GPU with little memory (128MB/256MB) and try it with FPS games. I'd expect ViDock to show a significant drop in performance, however that would probably be game dependent. I think COD4 would do quite well, not sure about Crysis.

2. Take a GPU with a lot of memory (1GB) and try it with FPS games. Here the performance of ViDock should follow more closely the performance of PCI-E.

3. Take something in between (512MB?) and try demanding RTS games: World in Conflict, Dawn of War II. I'll bet you can squeeze very high settings/resolution out of ViDock and that it will work similarly to PCI-E.

Well, that's what I think. If someone can try it out, that'd be good ;-)

 

My understanding is that the limitation is on the PSU side. IF I had a faster ATI vdieo card on hand I would plug it in, use a desktop PSU and jump the PSU to see what kind of performance I could get out of this thing.

 

aule, you are on the right direction. the more data that sits on the gpu, the more normal performance is going to be with a limited bus. it is totally engine dependent. how often is information resting in GPU memory getting swapped? if it isn't much, then the low bus speed shouldn't affect performance, but it totally depends on the engine.

 

That would be interesting.

Just wondering, does anyone know how to determine whether or not your laptop has express card 1.0 or 2.0? I have an Asus M50VM laptop (purchased 12/08) and the manual and Asus website both state "1 x Express card." It doesn't specify whether or not it is 1.0 or 2.0. My assumption is I have a 1.0 version.

 

You won't see 2.0 in laptops until 2010

 

Can't think of a way to check that. Is it possible for PCI-E?

If we had a graph, say from a desktop PC, showing the amount of data transfered trhough PCI-E to the GPU on one axis and time on the other axis, for example for a half-hour playthrough of Crysis or other game, that would give us a really good overview on how the game would perform with ViDock.

 

estimated time for 2.0? q1 q2 q3 q4? im hoping b4 q2 because im thinking graduation is gonna be a great day . get a blazing cpu and then a 5xxx ati vidock . gonna rock.

aule. everything you talked about is greek to me, but it makes sense if that is true. thanks. hope your right. RTS!!!!!!!!!!

 

late 2010
and even that will be early-adopter style stuff
mainstream i'd say 2011 from what i've read

 

Excellent video Steiner. Thanks for your efforts and testing!

As for the loud DVD/CDRom drive on the T400. Call it in as it is a defect. I recently replaced mine on my T61p for the exact same reason and it was taken care of -- not one prob since nor any obnoxious sound on reads. Keep in mind it is a CRU (customer replaceable unit) part so do not let them tell you a technician is a required to swap it. I had a few stints recently where they said it was technician required and precious time was wasted on my part waiting for it. Demand a CRU and just swap yourself (9 times out o 10 it is overnighted as long as you place the call before 6PM EST).

Now, if anyone has tested with a T61p or any other recent T series with an integrated Nvidia Graphics solution (don't care about laptop monitor support -- JUST external), please post your findings. It appears all of the Lenovo/IBM lappys tested have been ATI GPU based. I am curious to know if one such as mine with the FX570 chip would work from a cold boot.

Thanks in advance!