Anyone knows why the NP8120 has dual 5870 instead of dual GTX285M?

I think this changed a few days ago. Last week I was on Sager's website, the same NP8120 had dual 285M.
Did they change this because dual 5870s are better performance wise?

 

5870's perform better and are cheaper then the 285's on top of it. Add in likely consumer demand for 5870's instead of 285's and you have a case closed.

 

Joker on these forums has a m17x alienware revision 2 with crosfire 5870, and hes pretty dissatisfied with the crossfire driver implementation. I wonder what are the real bad issues with the crossfire implementation ?
On paper, dual 5870 sounds amazing performance and price wise, but what about in real day use ? I doubt there's anyone who bought the new sager allready, so joker is the only one who can shade a light on this issue.

 

And it's also possible the 285's are gradually getting phased out which would mean the supply of chips they have to build a machine with is getting thin.

 

DELL released a new ATI driver along with a new vbios to Joker and according to him at least almost all of the problems are now resolved with xfire.

 

Oh, should i understand on the alienwares one needs to use dell made drivers, instead of the generic ones ?
Maybe "old" drivers were the culprit, and the new ones are doing the job pretty good.

The new option of using the mobility radeons in the x8100 is eyeing me also.
Origin pcs offered it i think before everyone else.

The only retailers so far in europe to offer this would be mysn.de
Ich spreche ein bisschen Deutsch, so i rather order from an english website.

What would be really interesting to see would be a SLI 460m in the x8100. However the 460m isn't launched yet.
I wonder why amd don't give us something similar to physics from nvidia.
Games with physics would benefit the most from a dual gpu setup. However there are few such games.

And the crossfire 5870 is really cheap and big in performance.

 

The guys at mySN speak English - so that should be no reason not to order from them.

If AMD would offer something like physics, it would make their cards more expensive, as all those licenses and extra stuff that Nvidia has are the reason they can demand such high prices and people, especially in the professional world, have to buy from them. AMD knows that they cannot get into this market without going bankrupt, what they can do, however, is offer slightly better or equal cards at much lower prices, especially for consumers. But yeah, the X8100 with MR HD 5870 crossfire is damn cheap.

 

And that's exactly my feeling towards ATi cards: They don't have physX. This and the problems some people have with cfire are the reasons that hold me from purchasing ati cards.

 

It's all fine and good while Dell is offering drivers, but what happens when a machine is 2 years old? Go look at drivers for a M1730 for example. See any Win 7 drivers there? Nope!
Things may well get sorted out, but there is good reason to be concerned that folks spending $ on M17's may end up hacking their drivers, their vidbios's and so forth just to get things to work in a year or two. For 6 months people have worked JUST to get public ATI drivers to work. The fallback has constantly been to the the core Dell drivers. But sooner or later those drivers will be perilously out of date a some buyers are concerned before spending their money.

 

What does that have to do with anything? The M17x accepts the regular ATI catalyst driver updates anyway. My 9800GTX SLI can't take any drivers past 186.81 for whatever reason with stability as many other users point out, its a pretty moot point. Any laptop past 2 years old should accepted for what it is, and that's pretty much SOL.

BTW with physX there's all of about 5 big name games that support physx. You'd really reject ATI because you can't use PhysX on the Batman series anymore?

 

DirectX 11, faster, cheaper...why would they take the GTX285?

 

The real Kicker would be to have a 5870 and a 285 for physics !
But that's , i think, a waste of the GPU slot, as the 285 could only be used for physics and physics alone while the 5870 is the primary GPU.
The best option would be 2x460m. The second could be used for video and some physics.
Even though it might take a while before the 460m is officialy announced, i think we will eventualy see them inside the x8100.

 

As already stated, the 5870m are faster, cheaper, use less power, use newer cores still in fulltime production and have a larger relevant feature set than the 285ms (they lose CUDA which is mostly used by devs, and Phsyx...which is no great loss and is looking more and more like a dead duck as time goes by, but gain DX11, and HDMI capilities which is great for those who are into media as well as gaming). What's not to like?

Dells machine previously needed custom drivers (because of Dell's modified VBIOS) to run happily, before the new VBIOS which just came out arrived; so I think in many ways that makes it a slightly invalid comparison, because issues could be coming from multiple sources.
Joker has happily stated that with the new VBIOS and drivers, his machine now works great and in his own words is virtually a perfect gaming laptop.

The Clevo machine should be fine using stock ATI drivers from day one. The only people who this could be a shame for, are those who heavily use Linux, but that's not a supported operating system anyway.

Other retailers in Europe will have the cards for sale soon/have them available (see signature - my machine is in testing atm)

We may eventually see the 460ms, and dependant on how they perform they may ultimately make final sense, but as a progress step, the 5870s make a lot of sense over the older G92 (yes...8800GT!) based GTX chips.

 

Is kobalt prepin x8100 with 5870 crossfire ?

 

Yep. They had them on the website already at one point (although mine was organised direct with them), but they took them down again when the cards were delayed. (Was about a month delay from the initially expected ETA)
They will hopefully be back up again soon, although talking with them direct should get you more up to date information on thier exact plans and stocking.

 

Wow, the X8100 barebone is $200 cheaper than the W880CU's.

Makes me question what I'm really saving up for right now.

 

At this point you should just save up for SB like me

 

Oh yes, believe me, I'm waiting for SB and Mobility 6800.

If Mobility 6800 disappoints, I may even wait for Nvidia's next high-end GPU.

I'm looking for at least a 50% jump from my current GTX 260M. CPU-wise, I'll be content with an i7-2920XM ES.

 

Ditto, 50% GPU increase is the proper time to upgrade in GPU's/computer IMO. Anything less like this 10-15% from both ATI and NVIDIA can wait.

 

Now that, is a damn fine price for a Crossfire notebook. A steal really.

Clevo X8100 Notebook Computer

 

Eh what is SB?

 

Intel's Sandy Bridge CPUs:

 

Oh ok yeah I saw that earlier. Good thing I don't have enough money lol

 

Exactly. I see too many people jumping from 260Ms and 285Ms, expecting miracles.

I'm waiting for the mobile chips which can max a game at 1080p for a few years. The Mob. 5870 and 460M aren't up to this par.

 

Then you have to wait for another year... possibly.

 

Crossfire 5870's would have no trouble running today's games at 1080p maxed.

I mean, that is the best deal we've seen by far (NP8120), if you want the fastest gaming notebook available. $1479 with 6300 wireless. You can buy a 720QM, windows 7, 4GB RAM, and a 7200 RPM HDD for less than 2 grand total.

The NP8850 costs more lol

 

You should know by now this cycle never ends. When a year is up, the promises on the horizon continue to keep you waiting, whilst games continue to become more demanding (as well as more poorly coded).

 

Well, I definitely won't make it that long. All I really need is a 20-25% jump over the Mobility 5870.

I'd really have to do some thinking, on whether I can handle an 18.4"

The deal is incredible, but the size is monstrous.

Yeah, I could get trapped, which is why I've set a solid purchase deadline of June to late July 2011.

 

My deadline is late January... I'll see what I'll miss out. All I'm waiting is pretty much 470M.

 

You know, I would love to see a 480m in action properly. On paper, a single one is supposed to rip up SLI 285m cards... Which is why I'm waiting for the x7200 to come out. If they make a proper 460m on the GF104 core variant (so it's power-efficient, even if less powerful) I'd work with that happily. Until then, I'm saving up for a 480m kit and hopefully finding a sale for my old 280m afterwards. So far though, the 5870s are just slightly above the class of the 285ms. I wouldn't upgrade from a 280m to a 5xxx card. On the plus side though, nVidia's actually getting their butts in gear making drivers that work.

 

imho though you should save up for a SLI now if your budget allows. If two 460M can't beat a single 480M then something is wrong lol

 

Yeah, now that the GTX 470M specs are out, I'll jump on the W880CU if Clevo adds it as an option

No, wait, I need to wait and see on the Mobility 6870.

I honestly can't go longer than January myself,, because my M860 is dying a slow death, and will be lucky to see the New Year alive.

 

Hardware or software?

 

Two careless coffee spills later, it's hardware/electrical.

The fan constantly ramps from high -> low -> high, or as if Silent Mode is stuck in an on/off cycle.

So, on its good days, my GPU/CPU clocks fluctuate while gaming, meaning the framerate is terribly inconsistent. It's worse when the fan is in cycle on/off mode, but the GPU/CPU aren't throttled, so they'll both reach upwards of 100C, with the CPU temps causing the machine to shutdown.

In short, its days as a reliable gaming machine are gone.