Video Card Clarification for T60

As a final clarification, the T60 uses the ATI Mobility Radeon X1300 and X1400. This is stated both on IBM/Lenovo's site as well as ATI's site.

Contrary to PC Mag and what I said, it will NOT use the X1600. And once again, the X1500 mentioned on this site was a typo and is a non-existant product.

 

Yep, and it's not really nice, but there's also this:

http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2006/02/06/ati_launches_mobility_firegl_v5200/

The T60p will use a FireGL V5200 which is an X1600. And with 256MB of RAM!

 

That's no surprise, Lenovo (as before IBM in the past always too) follows to include only conservative GPUs for their business oriented Thinkpad line.

Thinkpads were never meant as gaming machines and it seems that at least this tradition is kept.

 

Oh, and that X1500 was taken from a typo in a Lenovo marketing document I got in December, not guilty, I swear points to Lenovo

 

There's still nothing about any T60 or X60 here

 

I got the same document. In December as well. The typo was indeed there. And in fact it was on their site for quite some time.

 

And I don't think it's a good tradition. I mean, if they can put a FireGL V5200 in T60p, they can sure put a regular X1600 in their T60, which will cost far less than the FireGL version. I don't expect them to come out with huge overheating 7800GTX cards, and I wouldn't want to buy one if they did. But sometimes it seems as if they are deliberately limiting the graphics options on their non-P models. And I can't see why.

 

Well, actually you don't know how the thermal design of the T60p or the T60 models in general will handle a FireGL V5200 or X1600. Maybe the T60p will get hot under load and will produce undesirable fan noise.

Look at the T43 series and you might possibly know the reason why they don't put in some more powerful GPUs in general into the T60 series. - It might be due to their overall thermal design and in order to keep a somehow still flat case.

 

My guess is that it's to avoid cannibalizing T60p sales.

 

Yes, that would be another marketing wise possibility. Good for Lenovo to maybe sell some more expensive T60p models, bad for the common users which are looking for cheaper but still well GPU equiped T60 models.

 

Talking about the V5200 in the T60p, does anybody know clockspeeds for its chip and memory? Aren't the FireGL chips usually clocked pretty low?

 

That you will not know until you actually get one, since manufacturers sometimes clock the chips differently than the designer. But you can always clock it higher.

 

dr st,

How to overlock the chips? Could you give me some links?

 

Notebook Hardware Control does it.
ATI Tray Tool that comes with the Omega Drivers does it.

It's software overclock. What's good about it is that if you get too far and your computer locks up, just restart and it's back at default clocks. You can set various profiles, to automatically overclock for performance when needed or underclock for battery life when possible, etc.