Asus F3SC and F3Sv

F3SC
F3Sv

Check out the GPU listed. Anybody heared of these?

 

Yeah, those are ASUS F3-series SantaRosa refresh which are appearing through Europe now, shipping date seems to be 5.15 and price for the Go 8600 about ~1500€. F3Sv sounds so sweet that I'm thinking to change current A6Ja for it right away.

 

Very nice! I cant wait to check them out in person. If they are not too heavy and battery is good then I will buy one for sure. Price is very good too.

 

Wow - I didn't think they'd actually announced the mobile chipsets for the 8000 series? Apparently I'm wrong! Would love to know how these 8600's bench compared to the 7600's and 7700's.

Petrov.

 

I think Go 8600 will be somewhere around Go 7900GS performance.

 

If Go8600 > Go7900GS that would be awesome - would make the existing 14 and 15" gaming notebooks look sloppy (like the Asus G1).

What makes you think that the 8600 will be quicker than the 7900GS?

Petrov.

 

Maybe not quicker but somewhere around it, well did some research of desktop 8600GT benchmarks and TDP values. Then the fact that last generations there has been similar speedjumps, Go 6600/7600 etc.

 

Link this place gives a bit more detail. I wonder if the go8600 with 512MB Ram is for real. The desptop cards dont even have that much. 1GB with hyper memory is just WOW!!!
I cant see anything with robson. I guess its not included.

 

I wonder why they aren't using DDR2-800 memory since the whole point of Santa Rosa is the new 800 MHz FSB.

 

Wow go8600 w/turbo cache? Hope that can be disabled...-3/4 a GB of RAM :s

 

also new is t7100 cpu

 

Santa Rosa doesn't support DDR2-800 since Intel has been quite explicit in saying the power consumption difference isn't worth it. Besides, it's not needed anyways since dual channel DDR2-667 already more than fills the FSB. Intel is going to skip directly to DDR3-800 in their next platform next year.

In terms of the Go 8600 having 512MB of RAM, that's not really shocking considering there are Go 7600s with that much. It's been discussed many times whether it can actually use that much, but benchmarks have shown GPUs up to the desktop 7950GT don't benefit from more than 256MB of RAM. There is some hope that the newer architecture in the 8xxx series may help, but I wouldn't count on much. Besides, the new architecture seems to perform better in shader heavy games, but shaders are used to reduce texture usage which actually relies a lot on the memory subsystem.

 

Ahh, thanks for clarifying that. I've seen a few preorders for Santa Rosa based laptops already and was surprised to see them still using DDR2-667.

 

I'm a bit disappointed the specs don't seem to support Draft-N wireless out of the box - at least per the link to the Dutch website.

Petrov.

 

http://www.zeptoforum.com/QuickRev/index.htm

 

Yeah, well you can read the specs of the Crestline northbridge here:

http://www.hkepc.com/bbs/itnews.php?tid=631838&starttime=0&endtime=0

Last time I checked, the chipest won't be supporting DDR2 800 SODIMMs although they do exist. AMD will be using them for their new mobile platform. (It's interesting to note how the TDPs for the new northbridge and southbridge are noticably higher than the current ones).

 

ACER has one model also already which is quite cheap: http://geizhals.at/deutschland/a253397.html

Acer Aspire 5920G
T7300 2x2.00GHZ 4MB FSB800
Go 8600M GT 256MB (TC 512MB)
2048MB
160GB
etc.
1199€

 

battery is listed as 2,5 hours for the acer. what does that mean in real time? 1.5 hours?

 

No, actually it reads 3.5 with min stress, which is probably right with 8cell battery.

 

Where does it say that? When I look at the 2 shops that have the acer listed both say 2.5 hours.

 

http://www2.hardwareversand.de/7V3UOFk4ulxcqB/1/articledetail.jsp?aid=9876&agid=728&ref=13

ca.3,5St.(EIN)/ca.2,5 St.(aus)

 

That is the charge rate. It fully charges when on in 3.5 hours and when off in 2.5 hours.

 

Could be, but 2.5h with 8cell sounds pretty low estimate for me.

 

After the 8600s benchmarks im not so sure getting one will guarentee much stability in the future. They got raw power @ very low resolutions but once you turn any settings on that eat up memory they drop to unplayable way too fast. That saying i'd rather have a 7900go then an 8600go. I'd actually rather have a 7700go because once you turn on AA/AF then the 7700 is actually BETTER than the 8600.

8600 needs 512 dedicated memory badly

 

It couldnt just be. That is what it says. I do speak German. But yes it is a low estimate and I am hopeing for better!

 

Aah, OK. Is ein/in and aus/out?

 

ein = a i thought

 

ein can mean many things but in this case it is short for eingeschaltet which means switched on. aus is short for ausgeschaltet (swtiched off)

 

Now they are really starting to emerge:

http://geizhals.at/deutschland/a253458.html
http://geizhals.at/deutschland/a253501.html ATI X2600
http://geizhals.at/deutschland/a253506.html

 

http://www.zeptoforum.com/QuickRev/index.htm

The Zepto's look like they have 512mb on the 8600 in the 15.4" form - would you prefer that over the Go7700?

Petrov.

 

Im not sure if its the memory bus or the memory. but considering the difference between the 8800 320mb and 8800 640mb im going to have to say its the amount of memory. Yea id prefer that

 

Agreed. In this day and age (and for the near future), I couldn't imagine having a video card without at least 512MB of dedicated memory.

Link to this information? This is definitely got me down because the whole reason I've been waiting on getting a laptop is for the DX10 cards and how much more powerful I thought they'd be over the 7 series cards to help futureproof my laptop. After reading this, what was the point in waiting if the new cards have WORSE performance than the old ones. What the hell

 

http://www.hothardware.com/articles/NVIDIA_GeForce_8600_GTS_and_8600_GT/?page=1

And those are the desktop versions with the cards at clock speeds of 700+mhz, they won't be anywhere near those in a laptop especially with their power consumption.

Its just a disappointment since the 7600 was better than the 6800, same with the 6600 and 5900. With this the gaming performance between a 8600GT and 7600GT isn't huge.

 

I'm probably sounding like a broken record but I still believe that the Go 8600 will not have the power to realistically use more than 256MB of RAM

http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/video/display/gigabyte-foxconn-gf7950gt.html

The desktop 7950GT has been shown to have no benefit from having 512MB of RAM over 256MB of RAM and it's about the speed of the desktop 8600GTS. Both will definitely be more powerful than the Go 8600. Besides the lack of raw power, two other factors make the Go 8600 needing 512MB of RAM unlikely.

First, is that in general, the thought/hope is that the 8xxx series will show better performance gains in newer shader heavy games. However, the point of shaders is to avoid the memory subsystem since visual details are created on chip instead of loaded from memory. Newer games will certainly increase in video memory requirements, but if the stress is on shaders, you'll probably be worrying about shader power before worrying about having more than 256MB of RAM.

The other point is that the bottleneck with the 8600 is not likely amount of memory but rather memory bandwidth. With only a 128-bit memory bus, it has significantly less bandwidth than the 7950GT, equivalent to a 7800GT. And this is all talking about the 8600GTS of course, the Go 8600 will be less powerful, probably closer to the 8600GT.

In terms of actual performance of the desktop 8600GTS, 8600GT, and 8500GT you can see the benchmarks here:

http://www.google.com/translate?u=h...vidia&rid=774620&langpair=zh|en&hl=en&ie=UTF8

In there respective price segments, the 8600GTS loses to the X1950Pro, the 8600GT ties the X1650XT, and the 8500GT loses completely to the 7600GS. This is why people have been saying the new 8600 series is disappointing because other than DX10 support, they bring nothing over the current GPUs in their price segments. The only benchmark the 8600 series does really well on is 3DMark, but they just don't have the real world performance to back the synthetics up. Hopefully newer drivers will help.

If the Go 8600 performs close to the desktop Go 8600GT, it'll probably come in just under the performance of the Go 7900GS, which is still a very decent jump from the Go 7600 or Go 7700. The only good thing about nVidia holding off on the Go 8600 is that it increases the likelihood that the it'll be based off of a newer chip design since I can't see the desktop 8600 series holding off against ATI's upcoming mid-range parts. If nVidia has a new mid-range design up it's sleeve, possibly a 65nm one allowing them to increase the stream processors to say 48 units, perhaps the Go 8600 will be based upon that instead of the current generation.

 

Do you guys think we'll be seeing GF Go 8800 series in 15-14 inch notebooks?

 

Damn sir That was extremely helpful to me. It definitely surprised me since I'm so used to the desktop industry.

The fact that not only will it only have a 128-bit memory bus but that it will be equilvant in performance to the current Go 7900GS has really throw my plan for a loop. I wonder if I should wait even longer now (beyond summer/start of school in the fall) to see what will be coming out on the market.

Any opinion? I was waiting with the intention to buy a laptop with a great middle-high range card but seems that the Go 8600 will not fit that bill.

 

you can wait to see if the hd x2600 fits the bill. if it doesnt then wait!

 

Got any details on it? Best I've been able to pull up is a bunch of foreign websites and the wikipedia entry which doesn't really say much at all.

 

Since nVidia hasn't released their mobile parts anyways you should just wait until around June. ATI should be releasing their parts in May and it'll take a bit for them to become available so by June things should have settled down and you can consider between ATI and nVidia then.

In terms of the ATI X2600, the specs I've been seeing list it as having 32 unified shaders. That may appear to be the same as nVidia's but it's not. ATI's unified shaders are vector shaders as we see in DX9 and earlier GPUs which means they can process more data at once than nVidia's simple scalar stream processors. I'm still unclear about exactly how the archicture is implemented, but the unified shaders are reported Vec5 meaning that they can process 5 components at a time. ATI is comparing the 32 unified shaders in the X2600 to 160 of nVidia stream processors. For that comparison to work I would assume ATI has some way of internally dividing a Vec5 unit into finer granularity if needed since the point of scalar stream processors is that you can independently arbitrate them versus a vector unit which groups components lowering efficiency if the entire group isn't full.

In any case, the point is that the X2600 looks quite a bit more powerful than the 8600 architecturally. The caveat is that while nVidia's 32 stream processors are independently clocked extremely high at 1450MHz on the 8600GTS, the 2600XT's shaders are likely clocked at 800MHz like the rest of the GPU. Still, I think the 2600XT's sheer processing power will win through. I do hope is that ATI decides to equip the X2600 with 16 TMUs and not stick to their underperforming 3:1 TMU to PS ratio otherwise I'll probably have to run around kicking and screaming. The other thing about the X2600XT is that it also appears to have a 128-bit memory controller. I guess this is understandable since 32 unified shaders take up quite a bit of die space. It will use GDDR3 clocked at 1100MHz versus the 8600GTS's 1000MHz so it has a little bit of help there. But in the end, the memory bandwidth limitations will bottleneck the architecture. The X2600XT will no doubt beat the X1950Pro which the 8600GTS can't do, but probably not much else. The Mobility Radeon version will probably overtake the Go 7900GS, maybe scrap the heals of the Go 7800GTX before hitting the memory bandwidth bottleneck.

There is a RV670 chip coming up to replace the RV630 based X2600 and it's supposedly due in Q3 for a Fall refresh. Frankly it seems too soon since the X2600 would have only been on the market for a quarter. Still, it's likely with the 8600 performing so poorly, the X2600 is designed to beat it, but not to revolutionize the mid-range product segment. ATI will then wait for nVidia's mid-range refresh and counter with the RV670. Given the the R600 has a 512-bit memory bus and the RV630 has a 128-bit bus, the RV670 seems to be a prime target for a 256-bit memory bus. They'll probably use the 55nm half node in order to fit everything in which may delay things since nVidia is moving to 65nm with their refreshes, so ATI will likely be the 55nm guinea pig. 55nm really only benefits ATI in order to keep die size and costs down, but won't offer much benefit in terms of power consumption, so it doesn't matter that much to the end-user if they stick to 65nm.

Anyways, all this is still speculation until things are finally released, but the ATI information seems consistent with the way things have been moving for a while. One way or another, you probably won't have a DX10 notebook selection until June so it's no reason to get worried until then.

 

After reading these two, I've got plenty of time to see what gets cooked up by Nvidia and ATI.

http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2006/10/11/intel_centrino_roadmap/
http://www.trustedreviews.com/notebooks/review/2007/04/17/Intel-Santa-Rosa-Revealed/p8

Definitely want to wait for the Penryn revision for Santa Rosa but since it's so close to Montevina, might as well wait till then.....

 

Nah no need to wait for penryn or montevina. Santa Rosa is just fine.

 

how much do you think an Asus with a go 8600 will be? I want either a 15.4" or 14.1"