What Laptop Has the Best Video? 29
magarity asks: "Compared to the primarily NVidia vs ATi desktop video market, there seem to be plenty of video chip choices for laptop makers with no clear market leader in installations. It seems no "mobile" variant or original video chip stands out. As a fan of NVidia graphics chips for desktops, I went looking to buy a laptop with the mobile variant of the Geforce2 chip, cleverly named the 'GeForce2go'. To my suprise, these are few and far between and only found two Dells and four Toshibas. HP, Compaq, and IBM laptops use a wide variety of other chips including manufacturers I'd never heard of until now. Does someone have a real-world report on whether the GeForce2go sucks batteries or just plain sucks? And since no one seems to be, who in your opinion should be the leader of the pack for mobile video?"
Hate video settings on my Thinkpad A20m (Score:3, Informative)
The really irritating thing is in the video drivers from IBM. For some reason, when it boots it automatically detects whether there is an external monitor or not and sometimes CHANGES THE GODDAMN BIOS SETTINGS to reflect that state. When the BIOS settings are changed, you can't toggle the screen settings with the function keys anymore. This wouldn't be a problem if I never used my docking station, but I often have problems with restarting my system undocked (after it being docked) and being unable to see anything on the damn LCD screen. This can be remedied if I can plug it into a monitor somewhere, but that kind of defeats the purpose of having a laptop in the first place. A real pain when I take the thing to meetings or try to use it on the bus to/from work.
Only other problem: The screen rubs the keyboard. I've got halo's of about 20 keys and the trackpoint on the screen. It's not that visible YET, but I think it will probably start to restrict my viewing in the next 8 months or so.
- Freed
Key Players (Score:4, Informative)
The ATI's are actually are not to bad, as the Rage Mobility is actually Nearly on par with the Regular Rage cards just Tuned more or less for the laptop screen. What this means from a user perspective is that the laptop screen looks great, and works great and there are like Zero issues and it gives you pretty much what you need for business on the LCD. 3D games even play well...I have not noticed any large battery power hit for playing them either. The other thing I like is that Driver Updates are frequent and easily available. The Rage Mobility's main issue however is that it IS tuned for the laptop screen so when you hook up an external Monitor, or dock the machine you can't get all you want out of the external Monitor. I am currently sitting at a 21 Inch Sony Flast screen Triniton that I can't run higher than 1024(The resolution of the Laptop LCD), the ATI doesn't offer 1152(The matrox in my desktop machine does), and 1280 gets a little fuzzy for my taste(Its not the Monitor I have tried 3 others and 2 other brands they all have this issue).
Neomagic's Chipsets are more of a functionality Balance, they work OK for the intended purpose of giving you Video on a laptop machine. They have struck a balance between the Internal LCD and the Connected Monitor displays. It will Push to a higher resolution and render it fairly well(My old laptop on the same Monitor I talked about earlier would do 1152, and even 1280 decently(although full refreshes are sometimes painful at 1280, but the display is crisp). I can get Half Life to run and look good on that machine. Newer stuff is no deal it simply doesn't have the graphical Horsepower. Neomagics Driver updates are infrequent and hard to obtain. Some chipsets they don't even provide dribers for directly you have to get them from your laptop hardware Vendor. Hope that Helps.
My Dell C810... (Score:4, Informative)
I easily get two to three hours of use (gaming or other) with the battery save mode on, and because of the speed, I rarely (if ever) hear the two (!?) CPU fans come on to cool the CPU. I'm sure that saves quite a bit of power right there. I may be able to squeak 4 hours out of the battery if I try really hard and don't game. For gaming, when I first boot the machine up, I copy (actually decompress, but whatever) the Tribes 2 folder out to a RAM drive. Loading missions is REALLY fast, and the hard drive never spins back up, again saving more power.
The C810 costs a lot, but Dell goes through a round of "specials" every week, and you can pick up one of the following: $$$ off (200 usually), Free DVD or CDRW, Free Double Memory (buy 256, get 512), Free Accessories...
Re:Apple (Score:4, Informative)
Close but not quite. The new TiBook has the Radeon Mobility [google.com]. It's rather more powerful than the old Rage series; the game sites say it stacks up well against GeForce 2Go.
Mmm... dual display LCD and 21" external at 24 bits...