Unusual 3d marks on x1600

Thinking of going for a laptop with radeon x1600 which from whsat i have read should have 3d marks for 03 of around 8000. I have however seen a review which says the laptop gets a score of around 6200 for this mark with the Radeon, it is a worry.Reasons for this? Poor drivers on laptop? Poor configuration? Please help!

 

The X1600 typically has a 128 bit memory bus, though some systems have been known to implement a 64bit bus, which does have a dramatic impact on performance. I dont know for certain, but that could explain the low score.

 

Iceman is correct. In addition, there are 128MB, 256MB, and 512MB versions of the card. The 512 and 256 versions are nearly identical in performance but the 128 version is severely limited by the memory and benchmarks suffer quite a bit as a result.

 

The card has 257 dedicated memory. However the bus issue is something that has been mentioned to me. The company are finding out this information. Could it be that the card has 128 bus and it is a problem elsewhere....for example drivers etc?

 

no not really, drivers wouldn't take it down that low.

Its not the amount of memory its the memory bus (how wide it is), if its lower (i.e. 64-bit) less GB/s (memory bandwidth) is allowed to travel over the bus therefore hindering the card's performance.

 

Its possible but unlikely, what kind of review was it? Most units sent to be reviewed are usually cherry picked and very carefully setup. User reviews will vary, some review straight out of the box, some update drivers,some dont,some do a clean install, I would look around for multiple reviews and compare. I'm sure you meant 256 for the mem, you might want to clarify if it actually has 256, My 7400 is sold as 256, but in reality it only has 64, it uses system ram for the remaining 192 which is fine for me as I do my serious gaming on my desktop. I reccomend staying away from all ATI hyper memory cards for gaming, its a software based solution and it doesnt work very well, NV's turbocache is a hardware based solution, and benchmarks between 64 and 128 dedicated memory are nearly identical.

 

Can somebody clarify this for me.

Is it memory bus or dedicated memory that affects these lesser x1600s , i'm kind of getting mixed messages.

Is it the x1600 has 64mb dedicated memory + shared memory with 128-bit bus.
Or
Is it the x1600 has 128mb dedicated memory but only 64-bit bus.

I'm confused now (either way i know its 64something) =/

 

As far as I know there are no X1600 cards that only have 64MB of dedicated RAM and no X1600 cards that have 512MB dedicated. They only come in 128MB or 256MB dedicated configurations. 256MB dedicated configurations should all use a 128-bit memory bus. Some 256MB dedicated cards may be advertised as 512MB, but that's because half comes from the main memory. I believe ATI activates Hypermemory by default in their drivers since it's only a software feature so all cards with 256MB of dedicated memory can probably steal main memory even if they don't advertise. It's not a big deal since the X1600 isn't powerful enough to use more than 256MB of RAM anyways.

As for the 128MB dedicated variations, some come with 128-bit memory buses like the MacBook Pro I am using. Others cut cost by using a 64-bit memory bus to attach to the 128MB of dedicated RAM. Regardless of memory bus, they can all use Hypermemory since it's a software function.

 

Great post; all the quoted information above is 100% factual.

The 128MB 128-bit X1600 sees about a 1/3 performance decrease *overall* compared with the regular 256MB 128-bit X1600. If the 128MB version has a 64-bit bus the performance will be even less although it will still be ahead of a Radeon X1400's performance significantly.

 

Ok i guess so i was both right and wrong in my post then.

 

Cheers, as a last note the raeding of 6200 was actually taken from a laptop with only 512mb Ram whereas I believe 1gb is recommended for games. Could the lack of RAM account for this drop in performance?