My X205-SLi3 arrives today

Beside the CPU the screen resolution is different between the sli1 and sli3. The sli1 is a lower resolution panel and the sli3 is a higher resolution panel.

 

Okay if Toshiba is thinking upgrade when the new Nvidia mobile GPU comes out around winter or beginning of the next year it makes sense wait to buy one now or it will be too expensive the people going to get regular X205 or the SLi series?

 

its got the 1440x900resolution screen right? that's actually the one I prefer, really not a fan of laptops with the really high resolution screen... everythings so small and for what I do, surf, type, play games, i enjoy the the slightly lower res... but, never spent any time with the other toshiba choice, only basing this on living with a sager with 1440x900 resolution for a few years... so, other than the screen and chip, any other difference I'd regret?

very curious how the two gpu's turn out in real applications....

 

how is performance in games? Like World in Conflict?

 

I'm really struggling with the laptop decision...

If I decide I want a DX10 notebook, the decision goes between the SLI3 and the Dell XPS m1730.

But then the DX10.1 spec is right around the corner and will require new hardware making the 8600 and 8700 chips somewhat obsolete before there's even a real gaming library for DX10.

Supposedly, the m1730 will be fairly easy to upgrade when the new mobile nVidia chips (10.1?) are released due to a healthy power supply (230W) and a fairly well ventilated chassis. Toshibas have typically been a little bit more difficult to upgrade.

But the Dell is so much more expensive, and the lack of a decent integrated sound system (two speakers and no subwoof is paltry compared to the SLI3 and the previous generation m1710) really hurts since I use my lappie as a portable stereo in the hotel room when I'm traveling. DVI port vs HDMI port doesn't bother me at all.

And the 1680x1050 resolution of the SLI3 is awkward for a laptop that has a hi-def optical drive (especially since the Qosmio has a 1920x1200...I'm currently typing on a 5205-S119 which is a 15" screen at 1600x1200...I couldn't go to a lower res with a bigger screen), and the lack of something similar to Dell Media Direct and no front panel media buttons hurts the SLI3 for me. I carpool during the week, and no one likes a bright screen at 5 am. I can fire up the -S119 and listen to mp3s without ever opening the lid. Why didn't Toshiba stick with the front panel buttons?

And then I look at the DX10 library of games...every DX10 game available, or in the works, still has a DX9 pipeline. So then I question even picking up a DX10 laptop. Why bother until games are no longer supporting DX9? Is the graphical detail that much better with DX10 and a mobile chip (ie. detail vs framerates for mobile 8700s)? That leaves me pointed back towards a m1710 or an Alienware m9750.

I really want to play Half-Life 2 Episode Two at a higher resolution than 800x600, but my poor -S119 with a 5600 just can't do it. I'd like to go back and play Far Cry with all the eye candy, and Crysis is just around the corner. But I'm stuck in neutral trying to decide which way I want to go.

I'll probably end up mortgaging my house to buy an m1730 since it has good DX9 performance compared to anything but SLI'd 7950s, and nothing can beat it in DX10 performance and it should be easily upgradeable. But it's so ugly and the sound system (listening at a kiosk) is deplorable after listening to the X205-S9359. Design and sound took a step backwards from the m1710.

One last note to an already overly long post...the dual function touchpad of the X205 is an alright idea, but did anybody ever see the cPad's on the Satellite 5205s? Little monochromatic LCD screen behind the touchpad...I have it cycling through a slideshow of personal pics, and then I push the middle button and up comes the backlight with 30 or so icons arranged in rows of five...super easy to launch Word, PowerPoint, mame, WinDVD, MediaPlayer, 20 or so games without cluttering my taskbar or desktop. I don't know why cPad's didn't become more popular...it makes the dual function touchpad look prehistoric, and the cPad came out almost five years ago.

Almost forgot...why did modular bays fall out of favor with laptop manufacturers? I love being able to pull my extra HDD and replace it with a battery if I want to watch a long DVD on a flight or replace the modular HDD with a modular optical drive for making copies...I guess plug-n-play HDDs are out because of external HDDs but the extra battery has always been nice...IMO...

 

Personally, I'd say wait on DX10 in a notebook unless you need to upgrade right away. My X205's 8700 GT is nice and all, but DX10 is just not there yet. It doesn't handle Bioshock, Oblivion or Call of Heroes well at all. Give it until the next revision, then make your move. The performance and support will be there.

My X205 is a solid notebook overall, but gaming wise I don't see it aging well long term, which is why I'm selling mine as soon as my new Alienware m9750 comes in. Don't get me wrong, the X205 is a good system, but after using it for two months, I have serious buyer's remorse. After extended use, I just don't feel the X205 is a gamer's system; it's a multimedia powerhouse with gaming capabilities. That, and it has too many quirks that really annoy me.

That, and DX10 gaming on a laptop isn't strong enough. The previous generation's winner, the 7950 GTX mobile, still holds the performance crown. Yes, DX10 in the M8600/M8700 will somewhat future proof you, but in my personal opinion, the performance and support are just not there yet. And if you're gamer... that's what matters most.

 

I only play a few RTS games. Don't get me wrong, I love gaming, but I don't often get the chance to. How do you think it would run AOE III and Star Wars Empire at War?

 

It should be able to handle both of those rather nicely. Mine ate the Dawn of War series alive, and with anti-aliasing and all features enabled. So they do have a good bit of oomph, don't get me wrong.

 

Sweet. Thanks! That is what I want to hear.

 

I am happy with my X205-9349 I upgraded to the T7700 cpu and it handles FEAR and Boshock just fine I have Oblivion but don't really like the game so I will not even try installing it on my laptop, also I did not expect it to perform like my home gaming rig with a Q6600, 4Gigs of ram, and dual 8800GTX's in sli but for causual gaming while I travel from time to time at work if fits the need perfectly.

 

Humm I think that the problem of the 8700M GT is the freshy drivers... they need more work, more compability and optimizing... the Vista needs more work too, maybe with the SP1 we can see the same performance on Vista vs XP.

Another problem is the 128bits bus, if the 8700M GT had an 256bits bus, poor 7950GTX...

The extremely low stock frequencies are a problem too... I think that the 8700M GT can support a higher core freq easly, and that can help a lot on
FPS. If the 8700M GT had 1000mhz memories, maybe the problem of the 128Bits bus could be reduced a litle more.

I think that an T7100 can be a limiting factor on the 8700M GTs performance... On some high CPU dependent games, the T7100 will not help, and will limit the graphics subsystem.

My 8700M GT, stock 625/800, with an T7700 can andle CM DiRT at 1680x1050 at max, and with decent framerates... Bioshock at DX10 runs smooth, no breaks or low FPS.

In the future I hope to upgrade to an 8800M GTX or something, because of M570RU´s MXM-IV module... but for now, the 8700M GT satisfies me.

 

I always wonder... how long do you wait?
If you are looking at a laptop, you could theoretically wait forever.
By the time the 8800m ships, the 9x00 series will be around the corner and then everyone will say to wait for that...

had my x205 for more than 2 months and having a great time with it...
Sure, if I were buying now, I'd be considering the SLI1 x205... but I feel no remorse and I have no trouble playing anything.

Honestly, I think people are expecting too much from these mobile GPUs.
You want to game at 1920x1200 at 120fps in the latest games on a LAPTOP?

The x205 8700s are GREAT bargains right now...
The SLI setups are interesting solutions...

I still don't think the power of the 8700 has been properly explored.
OC + 163.xx drivers + 8700GT should be impressive...

Also woudl love to see the 8600 SLI setup OC'd... now that would be interesting indeed!

 

I think a good rule of thumb when making a computer purchase is the "rule of three". What new technology is on the horizon for the next three months out? Anything major, new?

Looking at things right now, the 8800m is rumored, not confirmed. There are no really major chipset refreshes, no major monitor revisions. Sure, something may come out, but nothing is really confirmed.

Any more than three months out, one quarter, and you're going to spend now and forever waiting for the next thing -- when sometimes, the next thing isn't necessarily a better thing. 8700m is not a huge improvement over the 7950 GTX, Santa Rosa is just slightly better than the previous generation, etc.

 

I primarily use my laptop for multimedia...mp3s and DVDs...

Next up is gaming...my 5205-S119 (w/ a 5600) cannot due DX9.0c, but handles everything else quite nicely despite being almost 5 years old...I play Far Cry, Half-Life 2, UT2004 and Call of Duty 2 on it just fine, but have to use lower resolutions and go about medium settings to get playable framerates...

And then finally I use the laptop for video editing, office type software and internet browsing, and my four year old laptop handles all those fairly easily (video editing is a bit slow...but if you've never seen 18000 frames compiled in five minutes you don't feel too bad about your machine)...

Only thing new on the multimedia front is hi-def DVDs and .h264 decoding and the X205 works great there (though I'm still confused about an HD-DVD whose resolution is 1920x1080 stuck in a laptop with a native res of 1680x1050)...

And I typically agree with you about just taking the plunge...you could wait forever...but the situation is a little different this time...

I buy a new laptop every four to five years...and Microsoft with DX10 has thrown a monkey wrench into my buying plans...why does DX10 only work on Vista? Not being a software engineer I don't know if that was a marketing choice by MS or if DX10 had features that XP just couldn't implement...To run DX10, you need new hardware and a new OS...to make matters worse, the new DX10.1 spec will require different hardware...though game developers probably will have DX10 paths right along side 10.1 paths or they may not even use DX10.1 paths for a while...

If it wasn't for DX10, I would go buy an m1710 today...but in three years, will companies still be making games with DX9 paths? If not, then I'll be wanting a new laptop on a shorter cycle which is expensive for me...

This time out, it's not really a hardware decision...as was mentioned, Santa Rosa is incremental, mobile 8-series cards are a step back performance wise...but a 7950 can't run a DX10 game...nor can XP...

This time out I'm stuck because of a graphics API transition that Microsoft is forcing on us (and sometimes you have to force better things on us)...it's a tough time trying to reconcile performance with DX10 capability on the laptop market...

 

10.1 is just a finer specification.

If you support 10.0, you will see everythign 10.1 can offer, you just don't get the 10.1 checkmark for compatibility. (who cares...)

the 8700GT is a fine choice right now and so are the 8600 and 8700 SLI options as long as they actually enable SLI in games.

 

Just found this (article is from October 3)...it says what I'm trying to say a lot better...and the article is using high end desktop hardware so you can drop framerates when talking about the mobile counterparts...(hope it's ok to post links to external websites here...I didn't actually read the rules yet...please don't ban me...)

http://www.hothardware.com/articles/The_State_of_DirectX_10__Image_Quality__Performance/?page=13

And directly from Mr. Michael Lin's excellent, excellent article if you don't want to click there:

"Another issue is the need for backwards compatibility with DX9, for both hardware and software. It will take some time for DX10 hardware to become the norm and until then developers will be unwilling to alienate the section of the market that still uses DX9 hardware by releasing a DX10 exclusive game. This forces a compromise between DX9 and DX10 when it comes to image quality and performance optimizations. Currently the logical choice is to lean towards DX9 since much of the hardware out there today is still DX9 from the previous generation and current generation hardware is backwards compatible in DX9 mode. It's for these reasons that it will be unlikely for us to see a game that lists DirectX 10 as a minimum requirement, at least on the near-term horizon.

While the new DX10 image quality enhancements are nice, when we finally pulled our noses off the monitor, sat back and considered the overall gameplay experience, DirectX 10 enhancements just didn't amount to enough of an image quality improvement to justify the associated performance hit. However, we aren't saying you should avoid DX10 hardware or wait to upgrade. On the contrary, the current generation of graphics cards from both ATI and NVIDIA offer many tangible improvements over the previous generation, especially in the high-end of the product lines. With the possible exception of some mid-range offerings, which actually perform below last generation’s similarly priced cards, the current generation of graphics hardware has a nice leg-up in performance and features that is worth the upgrade. But if your only reason for upgrading is to get hardware support for DX10, then you might want to hold out for as long as possible to see how things play out."

 

I would suggest inserting 'may' here vs 'will'...it depends on what game developers do...I have no idea what the difference will be between Shader Model 4.0 and 4.1, and if developers will even bother...

And from the fount of all knowledge (they haven't misled me yet)...wikipedia...

"DirectX 10.1 is an incremental update to DirectX 10.0 which will be shipped with, and require, Windows Vista Service Pack 1 in January 2008. DirectX 10.1 will be backwards compatible with DirectX 10.0 hardware, but the new features will not be available until 10.1 compliant hardware is released. The release mainly sets a few more image quality standards for graphics vendors, while giving developers more control over image quality. Features scheduled for DirectX 10.1 include:

Mandatory 32-bit floating point filtering
Mandatory 4x anti-aliasing
Shader model 4.1"

 

I think there is a very important distinction you are missing.

"The release mainly sets a few more image quality standards for graphics vendors, while giving developers more control over image quality."

In other words, they will make mandatory what once was optional.
There is nothing being added, they are only changing the methods.

This is the equivalent of making TPS reports with italicized titles mandatory.

yes, yes... I am theorizing... but I've been doing this for a long time and my "microsoftish" is getting pretty good.

 

I have the sticker as well, but not the Gears of WAr one. I have it covered so long that I don't remember what it was.
Anyway don't take it off. Just cover the offending part of the sticker (the character with the BFG) with a square cut to size piece of white (or whatever color you fancy) paper and then cover with lamination adhesive. In my case I decided not to spend any money since the $1500 on the X205 was enough, I just used several careful placed pieces of transparent tape over the piece of paper so it looks and feels laminated.

The sticker makes for an excellent and super durable palm rest protection taking it off would be a mistake down the road.

Ed G

 

I keep mine on just for protection of the paint on the palm rest, but your lamination idea is a good one, I know someone that may give me some of the transparent tape and adhesive at work (one of my customers) I may get some to make sure it really lasts.

 

here's a pretty good shot of the gear of war sticker. It's a stitched photo, so it's not perfect.

Too bad the game won't be here to actually play on my new computer.


sorry, too large, just take a look if you'd like

http://www.davidfarmerstuff.com/pano.jpg