XP 64 on R4000z Results (UPDATED May 12)

My notebook:

R4000
AMD 64 4000+
2 gigs ram
80GB HD
200M 128meg

**** UPDATE MAY 12, 2005 ****

I recommend this beta IGP/IXP driver set video over the current 5.4 video only drivers available on ATIs site. I'm not sure which is newer, but the system seems to be more stable and 3DMark was posting higher (by only like 50-60 points) when simply just using the above driver set. Remember you will need it anyway if you want to get your southbridge installed and audio. The audio chip is actually ATI AC97 chipset, since our notebook's mobo is essentially ATI's version of the nforce platform.

Also note that under 32 bit windows you CAN install ATI's latest motherboard IGP/IXP driver set completely without modification. The regular drivers will NOT work with our card, at least for now. This will allow you to keep 32 bit XP more up to date than relying on HP's drivers.

I think I can actually recommend XP64 for our notebook. Minus the bluetooth and memory card reader you can get a driver for everything on the system, and it runs well. Any XP64 problems you run into most likely will be a general XP64 problem that affects anyone using the OS, and not in particular to our notebook. YMMV if you really need bluetooth or the memory card reader because those two things most likely will not see drivers until HP decides to roll one.

Tried the following software:

Firefox: Runs, no installation problem. Seems to be laggy and sometimes cannot be dragged smoothly, especially with several tabs open. IE64 on the other hand is smooth as butter and more safe right now since it only accepts 64bit addons, and none of those exist yet.

DreamweaverMX: No problems.

Office 2003: No problems.

Painter 9: No problems.

3DMark 2003: 1503-1580 score.

Guild Wars: Playable at 1280x800 with all advanced options turned on and the graphic quality slider set one tick away from max. This looks better than the graphic slider set max, with advanced options set to default so it's good. I'm very impressed by the performance. The game "feels" a bit more laggy under XP64 with the same settings, but no concrete proof (did not monitor FPS in anyway, just played the game).



**** UPDATE MAY 11, 2005 ****

Beta IGP/IXP driver

The above link will take you to a website that has beta drivers that work with our notebook! It contains the motherboard drivers, video and audio. With it the only items that will not be installed under XP 64 would be the memory card reader and bluetooth.

I tested 3DMark2003 under XP 64. I got a score of 1510. A little less, but not that much less, than under XP Media Center I use on my other partition.

Everything seems to work great and with the information in this post you should be able to get XP 64 (mostly) working with the R4000/ZV6000 notebooks. So far performance is good and I haven't ran into any software that refuses to run. What little 64 bit software I have (photoshop CS2) runs really great, blowing away 32 bit windows.

I will be testing the following software over the next few days to see if they run fine:

Guild Wars
Poser 6
Office 2003
Dreamweaver MX
Trillian 3 Basic

I'm sure they will run fine, if anyone has requests for other software please let me know. I'm not going to go out and buy it but if I have it, or it is freeware, I will try it out.

**** Original MAY 10, 2005 ****


I installed XP64 on a second partition of my R4000 machine. It installed without giving any problems, with 5 devices having no driver; the video, audio, expresscard56, modem and memory card reader. The wireless adapter was seen automatically and immediately after setup was finished it connected right up to my wireless router without having to ask me a thing.

I was able to install the XP 64 beta ATI drivers by manually telling XP where the INF file is (the standard setup would give a can not find inf error message) and thus video works. No need to find hacked drivers. The device comes up properly as a mobility 200. One of the nice things about this driver is you can specify in the OS how much shared memory you want the video card to use instead of the bios.


Performance wise the machine boots much faster into XP64 than Media Center / XP Pro / Home. Photoshop CS2 is faster in XP64 by a large degree, but other than that performance seems to be about the same.

The OS really is a lot more snappy than XP 32 overall! So far I'm happy, just have to test out more software.

 

That sounds really cool. tell us how it gows. im especially interested in installing x64 if i can get most of my essencial drivers to work. try a game please!

 

Got my R4000 today. definitely interested in XP 64 if you get all the drivers working on it.

i kinda like the X6000's design better for some reason. The compaq logo on the top of this one makes it look cheap. the x6000 compaq logo is sleek. maybe i'm just too use to the 17" screen ...

 

am i the only other person who things compaq tags their name across everything too much? i dunno, the name isn't really that cool or reputable to me and it seems like they try to hard to employ product identification and promotion. o well. [ ]

 

Awesome, im excited to see what you have to say about guildwars. Thanks for keeping us updated man! Also, can you revert back to xp pro? i need to learn how to partition just in case things down work out when i get mine. looking foward to your reviews! (do you have counterstrike or wolfenstein et?)

 

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

 

Due to brand loyalty.... It's like the Subaru, GM's last study showed that 75% of Subaru owners planned on buying a Subaru again, but for as an alternate choice it would be an Asian car company (NOT GM!). As a result, keep the name, but have Subaru use only car parts that are part of the GM company (a few years back Subaru used its own parts).

 

Sounds like there's a lot left for improvement.
Firefox not that great, wow... that'll impact me every day.

How about your printer, does it work?

The essential question, for right now, which is better, Winxp of Winxp64? The answer, WinXP, i'm sure WinXP64 will be as good in 6 months, and better in a year. That's longhorn territory however.

 

It's a canon printer, no drivers for it. Not so much an impact for me since I have an old computer acting as a print server, but would be an impact for most people since printer support for x64 is almost non-existent. This is probably a major reason why you have to go through a trade in program to get x64 or have an OEM pre-install.

Overall, which is better? XP32 just because of driver support and a general lack of 64 bit programs. I'm keeping x64 for now simply because for photoshop it is far faster and I use photoshop quite often. Everything else is roughly comparible in speed, although OS functions itself (such as booting, built in programs like IE64) are faster than the counterparts in XP32. Installing XP64 was just an attempt to see how things were under that OS and if it were viable with this notebook. The R4000/ZV6000 certainly can run the OS very well, minus bluetooth and card reader, so it definitely is an option that I hope is easier to do with the information in this thread. I had to do quite a bit of hunting to find the missing drivers, as according to ATI that IGP/IXP driver pack I linked doesn't exist and HP is saying the notebook was not intended for 64 bit use and has no current plans to support it with x64.

 

There is a third party compiling of a 64bit version of firefox, you can get it at http://www.mozilla-x86-64.com/ should run better than the 32bit version, but it doesn't support the 32bit extentions.

Spybyscript,
Any chance you could give it a try and let us how well it performs?

"If you find yourself in a hole, it's time to stop digging."

 

I'm glad to hear it can handle Guildwars. I have a renewed hope. now i wish costco would just give me my dang laptop...

 

Did you get the modem to work?

 

3DMark 2003: 1503-1580 score? It's pretty low for those specs. My Toshiba M40-YP3's scores are between 5600 to 6100. Or am I missing something?

 

Nope! You're not missing anything... Unless you didn't know that ATI gave us "brand spanking new" JUNK! The ATI Xpress 200M is a complete and utter joke on the notebook consumers of the world.

BOHICA

B-end
O-ver
H-ere
I-t
C-omes
A-gain

- Microsoft(R) Windows(R) XP Professional with SP2
- AMD Athlon(TM) 64 3200+ (2.0GHz/512KB L2 Cache)
- 15.4" WXGA BrightView Widescreen
- 128MB ATI RADEON(R) XPRESS 200M w/Hypermemory(TM)
- 512MB DDR SDRAM (1x512MB)
- 80 GB 5400 RPM Hard Drive
- DVD+/-RW/R & CD-RW Combo w/Double Layer Support
- 54g(TM) Integ. Broadcom 802.11b/g WLAN & Bluetooth
- 12 Cell Lithium Ion Battery

 

That's not fair. The Radeon 200M is very good at what it's designed for: low-power graphics for thin-and-light notebooks. It beats Intel's best shared memory GPUs by a wide margin. It's supposed to be paired with a graphics card slot in DTR notebooks so people who need high performance can upgrade. The failure to do that is HP's fault.

 

Yeah, it is pretty low considering the rest of the specs.

I have returned the notebook since for other problems, such as dual channel being disabled, screen resolution ultimately being too low, and a tablet that came out that had superior specs in every way other than not being 64-bit. x64 turned out to be not that much different/better than x32 so... A lot more happy with my new choice. It's faster in just about everything and is a tablet.

 

spyby: have you found a modem driver for xp 64 bit edition? i've got the same config you have... thanks for those drivers from ecs.. they seem to be working fine...

all I have left in the device manager is the modem and a "mass storage controller"...

 

BOHICA sounds about right.

Bought and tried 3 Compaq R3000Z AMD64 based systems.
(these comments extend to the R4000 series equally...)

Each came with:
.. a DVD/RW of various speeds
.. WUXGA resolution at 1920x1200 (a must have on the 15.4")
.. modest sized HDD above 40GB (rpm's really didn't make difference)

processor speeds were rated as these models:

3400 - 2.2Ghz -- 512MB
3700 - 2.4Ghz -- 1,024MB
3200 - 2.0Ghz -- 1,536MB

By far the 3700 powered through the applications that I loaded up on the machine during the course of a typical trading day. These were graphics intensive, online overlapping applications that fought for usage of the 54g bandwidth, which left me wishing for the Netgear (or any other) 108g cards. I had at least 3 active chat room sessions open during any typical day, along with highly processor intensive charting and order processing applications, along with the customary 5 or 6 browser windows open in either Netscape, Firefox or Opera as they supported multiple tabs instead of the IE 1x1 basis.

Frequently my machine would clog itself up with various performance settings under WinXP either Home or Pro editions. I fully regret that Win2000 did not work on these platforms after loading the Application CD Restore that activated the AMD64 processor extentions as well as the other applications that were provided. These worked somewhat well under the Win2000 basis, but some did not at all, and it was not worth trying to debug which ones they were.

Eventually after using MsConfig to limit the amount of surplus applications that were more basic consumer oriented stuff, I ended up with a processor speed that was halved from advertised by using benchmark tests while running all the above mentioned applications during a typical day. There were significant improvements over the typical Intel based laptop configurations, namely on the:

.. HT capabilites and multi-tasking applications..
.. 400Mhz FSB and its associated speed over the much slower Intels..
.. Video display using the WUXGA systems....

beyond those three improvements there were none, and significant software problems especially on the Win XP platforms (both Home and Professional). After a while I had a number of system freezes that requires pressing the power off, as the 3 fingers didn't work and we never made it to the blue screens. Eventually we made it to the blue screens time after time, which caused a full system rebuild from the original reinstallation disks.

I could not confirm what the system instabilities were, other than the notion that the XP did not work the same outside of the WinTel platform, especially given all the applications that I worked with.

I finally concluded that the basic fabrication differences between these robust laptops and the performance desktops was more than transparent and as a result necessitated returning these laptops one by one and closing out our trials of the AMD64 bit laptop series.

We recently looked into the configurations both on HP and Compaq and noticed that they dropped both the:
.. R3000Z series
.. WUXGA 1920x1200 resolution offering.

Evidently others have had significantly similar findings and these machine combinations were sunset, and not just by this mfgr, but by the others to, including Emachines and others too.

Perhaps the desktop processor AMD64 4000+ will prove more stable than the notebook configurations, but after three strikes at the plate, its hard to ask the Umpire for a fourth, especially since they've abandoned the greater screen resolution basis.

I'm having a hard time desiring to try a fourth time with them or AMD64 notebook basis.

 

I doubt the problem is the R3000z hardware. HP's larded up WinXP config, maybe, but not the hardware. Besides, this is a 64-bit WinXP thread, so you're off-topic.

The R3000z has been replaced by the R4000. New model year and all that. Sadly, HP seems more interested in building cheap machines these days than anything for power users so the display is limited to 1280x800 res.

 

I have an r4000. I recently upgraded to XP pro 64bit. I was looking forward to see the differences, but am stuck like anyone else trying to upgrade. I've got the processor, but I don't have the stuff to support a 64bit OS. I'm hunting down piece by piece all the drivers. So far I found a SB bus, and an audio(thanks to you guys), however the sound is not working, but the audio driver is in place. I just need mass storage and pci modem and I'm good. But, what does all this trouble mean, when I probably will run into problems downloading software. I know in a few years 32 bit will be phased out, but it takes time. So I'm wondering if anyone here is enjoying the 64 bit in a normal day to day environment for work and such?