R4000 Received / Quick Review & Comments

I think it is funny that I received my custom ordered R4000 before receiving the ZV6000 I ordered from Costco. I even tried to cancel the Costco order before I ordered my R4000, and Costco told me that it was too late and "about to ship" and I would have to return it to the store. Well, several weeks later still no word from Costco when the other notebook will ship, but I have received my R4000.

My config:

R4000Z
AMD 64 4000+
Media Center 2005
2 gigs ram
200M 128
80GB HD

Before this notebook I had a Dell 9100 3.0ghz, 9700 mobility, 1 gig of ram. It sold for $1500 on ebay, paying for this purchase completely.

Screen:

The screen is beautiful. It is very clear, the lighting is pretty uniform across the screen. No dead pixels. The resolution does not compare to the WUXGA I had on the Dell, but the quality level is higher, colors more accurate and overall more constrasty than the dull screen the 9100 had.

Video:

R4000 3DMark2001 score: 6542
9100 3DMark2001 score: 11520
R4000 3DMark2003 score: 1721
9100 3DMark2003 score: 3425

I have not had much time to try gaming, but a brief run of HL2 the machine held up with lowered settings. As you can see from the scores the older 9700 AGP mobility trounces the 200M. The 3DMark2001 score seems very odd for the 200M though, it should be higher as the 3DMark2003 score is pretty comparable to the MR9600 or X300, so there might be some driver issues.

The driver issues might take time to resolve. Right now Omega Drivers cause a bluescreen at reboot when you try to use them. Patje's mobility modder is unable to mod ATI's drivers to install with the 200M, so it appears the only choice is to use HPs drivers. Games seem to run, but the performance does not seem to match up in the 3DMark2001 test to what it should be getting if comparing what the 200M is supposed to be equiv to.

Photoshop CS:

Photoshop loads extremely fast on the new notebook, filters zoom through, and the time it takes to do highly complex actions (such as a photo-to-sketch action) takes nearly half the time it took on the Dell 9100 on the same photos. This may be a result of the extra gig of ram, since photoshop is ram intensive, but overall performance is worlds different.

General tasks:

Everything seems snappier. The machine takes far less time to boot, test renderings with Poser just blow away the 9100, the keyboard and layout is nicer and everything seems just more accessible. The Dell had a lot of problems, such as keyboard flex, a dull (but beautifully huge resolution) screen, almost no battery life, sounded like an airplane ready to take off to just name a few. The R4000 is a very quite machine with the 2nd fan only coming on briefly during a few of the tests in 3DMark2003, never came on with photoshop or maya. The machine remained very quite and cool; you will hear the HD more often than the fans themselves unless in a dead silent room where the only sound is being generated by the notebook itself. With that said, if you are playing music or anything with sound, that sound will make the fans virtually inaudible. This may be just me coming from the louder than hell Dell 9100, but it is amazing how much quieter this machine is in comparison to that monster.

In summary, the machine is great for almost any non-gaming task, and is good enough to handle most current games. You won't be playing things like HL2 with everything maxed, but you will be able to play it with decent frame rates with options turned down to medium. It would have been nice to have a better video card in, but I am happy enough with the real world gaming performance since it was not my primary concern to begin with when I decided to change notebooks.

 

Nice review! I didn't know that MCE was an option on these systems. That 4000+ is definitely making me jealous. [ ]

 

Thanks for the review! About the 200M 3DMark 2003 results, I really don't think it's that much compareable to the X300. The Mobility Radeon X300 gets 2562 3DMarks with a Pentium4 560 (3.6GHz).

 

<blockquote id='quote'> quote:<hr height='1' noshade id='quote'>Originally posted by cy007

 

Guess I might be off on comparisons to x300. I just skimmed through some of the results in Orb for the x300 and many of them (that were not overclocked) were in the 1500-2000 range. There were some over 2000, but a lot more that were not.

I do think things seem a bit off with the drivers. Hopefully something will change the picture, and gaming performance seems to be better than the benchmarking tools suggest, so who knows?

Hopefully we'll be able to use drivers other than HPs and see what happens then later.

 

<blockquote id='quote'> quote:<hr height='1' noshade id='quote'>Originally posted by scottman

 

<blockquote id='quote'> quote:<hr height='1' noshade id='quote'>Originally posted by cy007

 

spybyscript: when did you order the r4000? I'm still waiting for mine from costco. Estimated ship date was the 24th. I'm hoping it comes before that

I have pretty much the same set up as you but with 1 gig of ram rather than 2.

 

check your credit card. they charged mine 7 days after ordering it got it on 8th day

Desktop:
P4 2.4GHZ 800MHZ FSB
20gb maxtor,120gb Samsung Spinpoint,120GB WD
Geforce FX 5700LE 256MB,
Antec Sonata case W/480Watt TruPower

Laptop:
Compaq R4000
80GB 5400RPM
Athlon 64 4000+ 2.4ghz 1mb cache
128MB xpress 200m
15.4 BrightView screen
1GB ram (2X512)

 

Three questions for anyone who owns a R4000/zd6000:

1) What is the XPress 200M of you laptop clocked at?

2) How wide is the memory bus? 32-bits, 64-bits, or 128-bits wide?

3) If you have the Sims 2, how does it run at 1280x800?

edit: I'd really appreciate it if you answer my questions BTW. Thanks. [ ]

 

Hey guys! I found out something great.

https://support.ati.com/ics/support/default.asp?deptID=894&task=knowledge&folderID=27

You can install the Motherboard/IGP drivers straight from ATI without modding. I downloaded them last night and they installed without a single complaint and everything seems to be working. It opens a few options up that weren't there before, but unfortunately the performance seems to be unchanged. These are based on the 5.4 drivers.

LightC: I ordered my notebook from HPshopping on 4/22. I ordered my ZV6000 from Costco on 4/10. I have not been charged, no notification of it being shipped from Costco, and I have called 3 times to cancel and each time they told me it was "too late" and about to ship. I think it's pretty rediculous that I got a custom machine so much faster than a preconfig, but hey! I have a much better machine for deciding to switch to hpshopping at a much faster time.

cy007: Answers to your questions below. BTW, the scores I was looking at were the Mobility X300, not the regular X300 or X300SE. The top score for the mobility X300 was 2500, but there were quite a lot that did not touch 2000. But anyway, I did retry the 3Dmark benchmarks using the ATI drivers and the scores did not change at all. Actually, 3DMark went down about 150 points from my previous score.

1) The core clock is 301. Can't find out the memory clock as the tools I've used all reported '0' which is obviously wrong.

2) Unsure what the memory bus speed. Is there some utility that shows it?

3) No idea about the Sims. However, I did get a chance to try Guild Wars last night. I ran it at 1280x800 with everything maxed and it was a little choppy. If I dropped down to 1024x768 I could run it maxed out, or if I drop the quality slighter to about 2/3rds I could run it fine at 1280x800. Either Guild Wars is very well coded or the cards real world performance is better than the benchmark programs suggest. I think Sims 2 would run ok with the settings turned down, but don't quote me on that. I know it is a resource hog since my old Dell 9100 hated it almost as much as Doom3.

 

What kind of battery life does it get? And is that with the 8 or the 12 cell battery?

 

I have a 12 cell battery... haven't really tested to see how long it really will last, but I've used it roughly ~3 hours on battery just doing web browsing without it giving me a warning. This was on max battery saving mode and the screen dimmed down a 3-4 times from the max brightness.