What do you do with your Z?

I realize I hold one of the best, lightest, well-rounded and efficient laptops avilible on the market right now.

On the other hand... until my school work really kicks in next term (on a work term right now, engineering coop.), what's there to do with my new laptop? XD

I've written one short essay, and like typing on it more than any keyboard i've owned before, and watch some HD programming on it. Other than that, I've installed WC3... and I'm kinda on the sidelines whether 20-30 FPS is good enough to CS:S/TF2 on it.

Toss up some suggestions or describe some of the stuff you do with your Z, other than use microsoft office apps and watch HD video.

 

you should get at least 60fps on max settings playing CSS on the Z
the 9300M GS and the HD3470 in the SR are very similar, you can go check out the HD3470 thread and see what games can your Z handle

the Z is performance on-the-go, i think a lot of people probably use it for business purposes and stuff

 

...wuh. 60 FPS?

I'm assuming the SR's 3470 does better than 60?
Oh wait... it's not exactly the same though. :S The max res on the SR is 1280x800, whereas the Z's is 1600x900 (mine anyways). The only other resolution settings for me is in 4:3 at something really bad, and also non-native 16:10, 1280x800... which didn't seem to improve performance at all on half low settings. Plus, Valve games are optimized for ATI cards aren't they?

If you can get that much FPS on the SR, I'm not sure why I'm so capped for FPS on the Z... I really need to go in and tweak settings methinks. :S

Anyone fold? How's the 9300M GS for folding, if it accepts the folding GPU client.

 

Yeah, I ran the CSS stress test and got about 90fps on max settings (with aa and af off though).. and when in actually game play i get about 70fps.. get as low as 45fps if there are a lot of people in the map

not sure if they are optimized for ATI cards, but you can go to the video settings in the game, and then set the aspect ratio to 16:9 (you might be able to do that in the game settings in the nvidia panel too, not sure though)

I've heard other Z users getting around 80fps on the CSS stress test also

 

:|

I must be doing something terribly wrong. Either that, or another component is unexpectedly bottlenecking my performance, which seems downright silly.

I did set aspect ratio for both games to be 16:9, but regardless of what settings I had, TF2 felt sluggish, and ran at 20-30 FPS (read from net_graph 1 console command).

I did the exact same thing in CS:S, mostly low settings on max res. (net_graph 3 reported similar FPS) I may go back and reinstall and try tweaking again. If you can get an average 70 FPS in game, there's no way I should only be barely able to break 25 on low settings.

 

25fps on low settings? :/
that sounds a bit too low
are you using the nvidia card?? even the intel card should get higher than 25fps..
did you turn off AA and AF?

 

AA should be off... AF is set to default Trilinear IIRC (probably the problem.)...

I honestly have no clue anymore. I'll reinstall and try again tonight. If I can scrape together some decent FPS on max res, I'll keep em, otherwise, they'll get the boot, and I need to find me a new mobile vice.

 

update drivers?? btw, what school are you attending right now? I'm on my work term too!! Waterloo!!

 

University of Alberta, after this workterm, starting "4th year". XD
Chem E CPC Coop.

Can't update drivers, as confirmed in another topic, the Z's NVIDIA driver is specialized. Changing drivers kills the Stamina/Speed switch.

EDIT:
Retested... no clue what I'm doing wrong anymore. Can't exceed 30 FPS. Ever. Even in tests. fps_max was set to 200.

New Goal:
To learn how to photoshop (crap need more RAM... T_T) so I can take all the awesome Gundam 00 pics I just acquired and turn them into 1600x900 minimum res wallpapers. T_T

 

Photoshop CS3 is what I use my Z for, apart from the usual web browsing, watching vids, etc...

I want to give CS4 a try to test the CUDA acceleration with the 9300gs.

 

I just used it to surf the web and obviously, here

When not doing its purposeful-things - only! - I promise

 

I use my Z for software development, video editing, as well as for my photography needs (offload CF cards, slideshow, photo editing, etc) I already have a lot of heavy camera gear to lug around...the Z is a perfect replacement of my Toshiba laptops. Sleek. Compact. Great performance (Visual Studio, Photoshop, Lightroom, Premiere, Sony Vegas...all run smooth)

 

Pfft, stop lying you lot. You use the portable laptop with a lovely screen to view.... explicit material. Come on... admit it! Hahaha!!!

 

Ohhhhh, atleast now we know what YOU do

 

Tony... I'm going to go out on a limb... and speculate that my CPU/HDD are actually nerfing my gaming ability. (...which doesn't seem to make much sense.)

Your T9400 core clocks in at least 200 mhz faster than mine (which helps a bit for sure, but not THAT much), and possibly the HDD speeds... but I'm not really sure if HDD speeds have to do with anything regarding gaming... >_> (I bet not, but I'm just trying to find answers... this is silly.)

I'm going to be upgrading my HDD soon... and I'll give it a spin again then to see if there were any changes... and then maybe a RAM upgrade next year or so (or sooner if boxing week is nice to me.) and i'll check back.

EDIT:
My CPU is more likely the bottleneck in this system if other Zs are achieving decent FPS. Oh well... HDD swap is still the first priority.

 

Tremjin, what Vram do you have 128 vs 256 - in gaming the cache size is sometimes the 'hidden culprit' along with HDD

 

256... I HOPE.

Now I'm curious if Sony stifled my order and stuck in a 128 MB VRAM 9300M GS instead of the 256MB unit it's supposed to be using. >_<

I just realized that because of the clean install, I skipped my usual check of dxdiag. >_>

 

lol Oops completely overlooked the Z590 in your siggy lol

Hmm, did you do clean install yet?

 

Yea. 63-62 processes idle. Thoug boot time is about as bad as before (this i can fully blame my HDD for, thank god. I was planning on upgrading HDD, but I want to wait until Boxing Week for cheap HDDs... I need to buy 3 after all... 2 x 2.5" for PS3/Notebook, and one 3.5" as a backup for my Desktop.

It's ok that you missed the Z590 in my sig. Gunleon scares many people.

 

That's only a resize of the images. It won't look good if their original size is smaller than 1600x900. You can just set them backgrounds and let Vista stretch them, either keeping original ratio or not.
If the pics are bigger (pics>your screen resolution) then you can easily crop the 1600x900 needed with any cheap/free software (Paint), no need to pay 400$ for CS4/student.

I'm not saying to stay away from CS4, but if you plan to buy it then also plan to use it for much more than resizing some pics

 

So far I've just used mine for the web and burning my backup discs, 12 dvds deep and counting. I got my Z on Sunday but I haven't had much time to play with it (stupid work and school ).

edit, and once my XP pro downgrade disc gets here, vista is gone ASAP!

 

Ehhh... let me be more specific pampas, I have pictures which are like scans. Some of these images have a lot of junk in the rest of the picture which I'd need to clean out to isolate the object. On top of that, I'd need to paste said object onto a much nicer background. None of these images are wallpaper resolution, but are large enough to fill up a good portion of a wallpaper. I need other background effects to go with them... more or less.

 

CPU and the HDD shouldn't matter much
another guy in the HD3470 forum has the 2.26GHz cpu, 2gb of ram and 160gb hdd
But he still get pretty much the same performance that im getting in games
the GPU is what matters the most

 

Yea... something's weird. Sonority asked which GPU I had, and frankly, while I assumed I had the 256MB unit... I didn't really check. lol...

Time to see if Sony screwed anything up. XD

 

since you have the 1600x900 screen
i am pretty sure that you have 256MB