D900C Vs C90 - Duel Of Giants

Here is a quick comparison I've made by quickly looking at the specs. I', just posting the differences not what they have in common:



Hope it helps,

Trance

 

Trance you gotta clean up that HTML tagging, its leaving too many spaces.

Just wait for a few days, confirmation is about to come in that D900C can use Quad-cores.

And did you read my Computex news, about the new G80's for mobile use?...
it should be out by Summer says Nvidia.

 

Yeh I agrere with Gophn - are there supposed to be any images there or is it bad tagging. I can help you clean them up if you want - just send me the code for you post via PM.

My nature I hate fingerprint scanners because I've had some bad experiences with them but I presume that this is optional.

I absolutely LOVE the 3 HD Raid Clevo D900C and I've got a Clevo already and really like it so I'd naturally have to say I prefer that.

I so wish that my current model had raid support! Also 17" is always my priority as I find them a descent size that you can run at good resolution but nevertheless still portable.

So yeh, DEFINITELY the Clevo!!! Go Clevo!

 

I just PM'ed him the cleaned up HTML coding.

It should look like this (i'll delete it when hes got the new one up):

	Asus C90	Clevo D900C	Comments
Screen Size & Resolution	15" (1680x1050)	17" (1900x1080)	Asus will launch a 17" this year
GPU	NVIDIA 8600M GT 512 MB	Dual SLI NVIDIA Go 7950 GTX
GPU Upgradeability	Standard MXM 2.0 Interface	SLI (New Proprietary Modules)	Asus confirms upgradability to all 8*M Series. Still no confirmation from Clevo
CPU	Upgradable up to X6800	Upgradable up to X6800
Interfaces	HDMI, E-SATA	DVI
Hard Drive Support	1 HD	3 HDs RAID
Memory	Upgradeable up 3GB	Upgradeable up 4GB
Keyboard	Standard laptop keyboard	Full Keyboard with Keypad	Althought in the 17" version might come with full keyboard
Nice to haves	2.0 Megapix Cam, Fingerprint Reader	1.3 Megapix Cam

 

Great! That looks better!

Edit: I would give you some more rep for doing that HTML, but it won't let me.

 

Thank you Gophn, I'll keep you HTML for future reference. For the time being an image will do.

Back to the topic. It seams that the C90 is more Multimedia oriented and the D900c gaming/server oriented.

Why would someone need RAID to play games it's just beyond me. Now an SSD for primary disk combined with a fast sata HD that is another matter. That extra space migh be in the future usefull for this in my case. But that is it, isn't it?

As for quad core support, maybe it's something that C90 can also do in time (I don't see any reason why). I also like the capability of automatically use overclocking settings when in gaming mode. The HDMI output, E-SATA are a plus for anyone. As for the fingerprint reader and the 2.0 cam are becoming standard in top end computers.

The C90 seams to have a something of the RU, something of the D900C and something else by it own merit. If one likes both like I do can't really dislike this.

Just make your pick. I haven't done mine yet, just keeping my mind open.

Trance

 

RAID 0 is used to improve the data access time greatly, comes in great for a real world improvement when loading up zones or maps which can be huge with the textures and whatnot. It won't improve your FPS, but it will help guarantee that if you play online FPS games, you will load before the match starts. MMO's also tend to see a nice improvement.

 

Quad cores are actually slower for gaming then a dual core. Most games aren't even setup for a dual core system properly, so all the OS can do with it is push processes to another core so the game gets a single core all to itself.

There have been some benchmarks and whatnot that show the slow down. It's caused by the bridge that is between to two core duo's in the quad core chip. Task's like transaction systems, and perhaps professional applications for CAD or video/image editing that have been written with a means to work with multi-threading. That doesn't mean support won't be gained in the future, but still try to keep the facts straight.

 

DF,

fix your chart, the first CPU should say GPU

Thats a true statement... until the next gen games come out.

UT3 [and other UE3 games like Gears of War, Brothers in Arms: Hell's Highway, etc..] will be wanting the quad-core for the processing of physics.

 

Some very fun stuff coming in the not-so-far-out future...

I hope it all comes with nice scalable engines (Unreal Engine rocks for scalable features) so everyone can enjoy to the best of their systems ability

 

According to some Chinese websites Clevo announced they are going to use 8700M, check the following Chinese websites:

http://translate.google.com/transla...rev=/search%3Fq=8700M&start=10&hl=en&sa=N
http://translate.google.com/transla...sult&prev=/search?q=8700M&start=20&hl=en&sa=N

these news are posted on 23 of may, is it after Clevo removed 8700M from their site?

The problem how trust worthy Chinese news are ?

 

Well considering they are closer to the ODM's then we are, I'd imagine they know a thing or two.

 

"... you will load before the match starts ..."

True, but honestly with a computer such as this even without RAID 0 you will load the game before the match starts unless something is wrong with the HD at 7200 RPM or the RAM. Furtermore the upcoming SSDs will be faster anyway.

RAID are mainly usefull for security and in software arquitecture were uses heavly multiple read/writes (of 64K and below) to disk such as databases. In case of games usually maps are loaded in large chunks of data (over a megabyte).

But yes it improves load times in any environment, in case of games the benefit is that you'll wait for longer for others to finish loading the maps

Trance

 

I've got desktop's built with and without raid 0 that have very comparable specs, and the ones with RAID 0 will always load the map's faster then without.. It means alot to me when I have time to pick my gear before the map loads and over half the rest of the players so I can get a drop on them before they are done picking stuff in Battlefield...

And in instanced MMO's like guild wars, I appreciate not waiting for load screens when zoning. Raid 0 does make a noticeable difference. You have to remember, your HD is still the bottleneck in your system...

 

Where did you find out that asus confirmed the c90 will be upgradeable to the 8800ms and whatever else the future holds?

 

I've read somewhere from Asus that it was designed upgradability to any 8*M that will come. I think that is natural since why would they use MXM type 2 and start with 8600M GT if not for that reason?

I've never said it would be whatever the future holds. I know for instance that it will not support Quads almost for sure.

The more I read about it I don't think that the C90 will really be a contender for D900C but more of 750RU in all honesty but then again I'm not sure. It all depends how big will be the powerbrick really IMHO. The price seams to be also lower about 1000 compared to the D900C. I know the graphics card it is used on the C90 is cheaper then the one used in D900C but not a 1030 dollars cheaper. I know also that usually the difference between a 15" and a 17" is of 200 dollars.

http://1toppc.com/Merchant2/merchant.mv?Screen=PROD&Product_Code=C90S
http://www.rjtech.com/d900c.htm


I'm no expert on this things, just looking for a high performance portable that fits my needs at the right price. Will just have to wait and see. Most probably the Clevo will have at last a contender in the market and that can only be good for us consumers.


Trance

 

For me the c90 is more than enough. The d900 is just way too expensive and I think with its configuration its just overkill, sli and all that. Plus the c90 is semi portable at least considering it gets decent battery life and all that. With the d900 ur getting a bigger screen and sli and room for extra hard drives. I configured a c90 and a d900c with exact same specs and what is they price difference you say? A whopping $1,200 price difference all for sli enabled, a bigger screen and room for 3 hard drives not worth it in my opinion? Not to factor in that if you want to to add the 2nd 7950 its another 500. Though I know the 7950 gtx is more powerful then the 8600 once you put the 8800s in both that advantage dissapears. Besides sli doesnt offer a huge improvement in gaming anyways. All my opinion.

 

Yes the difference is around a thousand (a lot IMHO). I believe that I will probably get a 8700M GT for +300 dollars not long aftwards. The rest of the money can be torwards this:

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B000OE02G4/ref=nosim/6580890-20

And connect throught HDMI and play and play and play .... Talking about value for money

Having said this, I'll wait until the clevo 750RU hits the streets as is still definitely an option for me (I like big screens and high resolution). I think probably Clevo will launch the RU right after the C90. They are probably doing the maths at the moment and waiting to see what will be the C90 to launch the bomb (that is the main reason we don't really know ho much will the RU cost IMHO). I am too and many others for sure.

Asus has a strong presence in the both in the high end and the mass market. Here in Portugal I can see them in every computer shop and shoping malls, but Clevo I can only buy it one shop and online. High end laptops doesn't mean over the top prices any longer (If you actually technically look at what you are buying). I don't know how are things in the US. Gaming laptops are not just for geeks and entusiasts anymore!

Trance

 

Will only the C90S be able to get blu-ray/HD-DVD or will the 9260 be able to too?

 

the Blu-Ray and HD-DVD drives for notebooks are standard.. which means that pretty much most of these high-end notebooks can use.

They are extremely expensive, so you have to contact the vendor/reseller in order to get a notebook with one.

When the prices get better, then you will see the options for them on the sites.

 

I woudn't think of buying Blu-Ray or an HD-DVD drive for a notebook, a thing that in an year will be probably for half the price if not less. I think there aren't even HD-DVD drivers for notebooks in the stores, only Blue-Ray. Blue-Ray RW drives are still over 600 Euros, the price of a PS3. It will be nice when they come down in price as being able to store a 50 Gig backup on a disk is a plus IMHO.

Pretty much any new notebook can deal with the drives in terms of hardware. In fact the problem is not the drives but the hardware required to decode full HD movies (1080p) stored on the disks, something like H.264 codec. To this, any 8*M Nvidia notebook can deal with it easily due to some kind of special embedded decoder they have, I'm not sure as I don't have one yet.

Another point of note is that RAID for notebooks in a year will be useless in terms of speed. SDD drives are coming down in force for notebooks offering much better speeds, generating less heat, noiseless and consuming less power, beating any RAID combination or SATA drive (Raptor whateve) out there.

Trance

 

SSDs are not all powerful, and are insanely expensive for the time being. Also your RAID comment is false, as you can always RAID SSDs and get even more performance

 

Actually no, it isn't false, so one of us must be false Performance doesn't sum up in a linear progression. I have no evidence that RAID over SSD are really of any practical benefit. In fact SSD's have been used in servers for quite a while to store fast rw access files (such as for databases etc etc), in combination where we have one SSD and 2..n disks in RAID for less demanding access. What we do know is that SSD are 2 to 4 times faster then standard disks. RAID over standard installation is not 2 times faster in terms of read times. Actually if you use a one Raptor disk can be faster then a RAID combination.

Do you know that RAID as been employed in Servers mainly for security and fault tolerance reasons? For instance if one disk goes balistic one could easily swap drives in realtime with no downtime (Hot swapable).

Don't get me wrong I believe that D900C and its RAID facilities are usefull but within months not due to performance reason.

As for SSD being really expensive its true, but if you buy something 1000 dollars cheaper (with no RAID) you can probably have money to buy an SSD.

I personally thinking about buying one when 80 GB SSDs arrive at about 300 to 400 dollars, something I believe will happen sometime next year.

For you to understand how fast SSD are, just think they will render the Windows Suspend Mode obsolete, just go to hibernate and you'll have your system up and running in less then two seconds.

Trance

 

I think that the D900C might be better because it can hold quad core processors and 8800m, and I still have doubts that the 8800 is small enough for the C90S to hold. Is there any info that says otherwise? Because if a C90S can hold 8800, it's better to save a few hundred dollars.

 

Also, isn't the d900c supposed to have a 2.0mp camera? Just like it is supposed to have 8700m GPU.

 

The thing with SSDs is that they have absolutley no seek time, the are only limited by the speed of electrons.

Also, yes I do understand how RAID works. RAID with SSDs would be useful, particularly more with RAID 0 than 1 because you can still increase the transfer rates to about 190% verses that of a single disk depending on what kind of controller it is mounted on.

Also I doubt SSDs will hit 80GB, PNY is already releasing a 256GB model to big name companies. The growth of Flash is extremely rapid, it is almost like a virus replicating. I bet in two years time we will be tinkering with 16TB SSDs at a consumer level.

SSDs with flash have downsides, downsides which PRAM should overcome easily. Once PRAM is viable, HDDs have almost no chance for surviving in the mainstream.

 

"Also I doubt SSDs will hit 80GB, PNY is already releasing a 256GB model to big name companies."

I dont understand the sentence. You doupt that something around 80GB will be realeased because a 256GB already is being released to big companies? I'm afraid that not how the market works. First they will squeeze us every penny t'ill 256GB and then make it affordable for the rest of us. Yes 256GB will come mainstream but doupt that will come that fast. So I bet before it happens will see a progression similar to what we have seen in HDD but faster the base start in terms of gigabytes is much higher.

As for 190%, as I've said the the progression is not linear. Haven't seen yet any data backing that up, but I'm ready to comply once I see it. I honestly technically doupt that it will be the case. In any case for a laptop, is clearly an overkill IMHO, something as fast as an SDD is extremly fast, so much that IMHO it doesn't grant an investement on RAID in a laptop at the moment. But as I've said, not for server which is clearly not the main intent of D900c, or is it?

Trance

 

Hi ! I intend to buy a quad core notebook (2GB RAM). I do not need an expensive nVidia Geforce card, I am not playing any computer games. The QX6800 CPU is very expensive, I would be satisfied with a Q6600. Where can I order a Q6600 notebook ? How much would it cost ?

 

Does anyone know if the D900c supports overclocking for it's cpu? I know the asus c90 lets you overclock the e6600 to 2.9 ghz

 

No one is support it yet.

 

I'm actually wondering that too. Could I buy it with an E6700 and overclock it up to 2.93 GHz (essentially turning it into an X6800)? I mean, since it's designed to fit within the heat/power spec of the X6800, shouldn't it be possible? Unless the increased FSB speed creates more heat, or if the BIOS doesn't support overclocking...