ASUS W90Vp: ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4870... with CrossFire
by Jarred Walton on May 29, 2009 5:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Laptops
Test Setup
We've removed many of the previously tested notebooks, in particular many of the lower end notebooks that aren't designed to compete with a high-end gaming system. We did keep a few midrange systems and some of the charts as a reference point, but even then we have to caution that driver updates may have changed performance. You want to focus more on the Clevo D901C results if you're interested in seeing a comparable notebook.
| ASUS W90Vp-A1 Test System | |
| Processor | Core 2 Quad Q9000 (2.00GHz 1066FSB 2x3MB L2) Overclocking to 2.29GHz (1221FSB) |
| Memory | 3x2048MB Transcend PC2-6400 @ DDR2-667 5-5-5-15 (Hyundai Electronics HYMP125S64CP8-S6) |
| Graphics | 2 x ATI Mobility Radeon 4870 (CrossFire) 512MB GPU/RAM Clocks: 550/1700 MHz (256-bit), 350/400 MHz Low Power Driver version 8.055.1.2 Beta ATI Drivers 8.612 |
| Display | 18.4" Glossy Full HD 1080p (1920x1080) Samsung 184HT01-A01 |
| Hard Drive | 2 x Seagate Momentus 7200.3 320GB 7200RPM 16MB (ST9320421AS) |
| Optical Drive | 8x SATA DVDR/BDROM (Optiarc BC-5500S) |
| Battery | 12-Cell 97.7Whr |
| Operating System | Windows Vista Home Premium SP1 64-bit |
| Price | Starting at ~$2500 online |
As mentioned earlier, we received a beta driver from ATI that affected the results in numerous titles. We will include results from both drivers so that you can see what you're missing if you have to wait for new drivers. Even if ASUS/ATI updates the drivers on their website to offer this beta driver, that's only a short-term solution. What happens in six months when there are many more new titles launching? We shall see shortly that CrossFire support is still MIA in a few titles, and that will be the case with every new release between now and the next driver update.
Since we only have one competitive gaming laptop available for testing right now, we also wanted to look at how performance compares to a desktop 4870X2. There are a few noteworthy differences between the desktop and notebook systems, starting with the CPU. This is my own personal gaming machine, with an overclocked 3.30GHz Q6600 (yup, it's still chugging along nicely). The desktop HD 4870X2 runs at higher clock speeds than the Mobility Radeon HD 4870, and it comes with 2GB of RAM (1GB per GPU). Furthermore, the desktop parts utilize GDDR5, which is quad-pumped so the 900MHz memory results in an effective clock speed of 3600MHz. Here's a quick rundown of the desktop system specifications.
| Desktop Test System | |
| Processor | Core 2 Quad Q6600 Overclocked (3.30GHz 1468FSB 2x4MB L2) |
| Memory | 2x2048MB OCZ PC2-6400 @ DDR2-734 4-4-4-12 |
| Graphics | ATI Radeon 4870X2 2GB GPU/RAM Clocks: 750/3600 MHz (256-bit) 9.5 Catalyst Drivers |
| Hard Drive | Samsung F1 750GB 7200RPM 32MB |
| Operating System | Windows Vista Ultimate SP1 64-bit |
Having a faster CPU means that there's less potential for a CPU bottleneck, so CPU limited benchmarks will be up to 43% faster than the overclocked W90Vp. Some benchmarks will also be limited by GPU memory bandwidth, where the HD 4870X2 is potentially 112% faster than the Mobility 4870 -- please note that very few titles are actually memory bandwidth constrained. Finally, the clock speed of the desktop card is 36% higher than the mobile part. In short, whether we are CPU or GPU limited, we expect the desktop system to be up to 40% faster than the W90Vp, unless there's some other problem (i.e. drivers). In order to help remove the CPU bottleneck as much as possible, we will focus on performance at 1080p and maximum quality settings for comparing the two systems.
Notebook configurations for the other laptops are at the following pages:
Acer 6920G
Alienware m15x
ASUS G50V
ASUS U6V
AVADirect FL-92
Clevo D901C (Note: upgraded to 2x2GB DDR2-667)
Dell Studio XPS 16
Gateway P-7808u FX
Gateway P-7811 FX
HP dv5t
MSI GT627
Toshiba X305-Q725
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nubie - Friday, May 29, 2009 - link
Well. . .If there was a PCI-e standard for mobile, then maybe you could choose your graphics and the laptops would have to work properly with standard drivers?
What if you used DisplayPort for the interface to the display? Then you could plug in any graphics chip and it would work with the standard drivers.
You would of course need "thermal" stages, where you had a cap on the amount of power that it could dissipate, but if you wanted to set your PC on a fan and cut out a vent you could move up.
I think that a standard needs to be set already. There is no excuse for making a handful of extra or different pins, or form factors off by a few millimeters just so that you can't build your own system or upgrade it.
I would hope that as time progresses you could put a faster chip on a smaller more advanced process into an older laptop, or just choose the exact graphics you want (IE less powerful) in a system with the processing power you need.
JarredWalton - Friday, May 29, 2009 - link
Unfortunately, the biggest reason for a lack of unified mobile GPU standards is that OEMs along with ATI and NVIDIA like to compete in a variety of ways. Look at Apple and imagine trying to tell them they their laptops need to conform to a standard layout.It *could* happen, and for higher performance laptops with discrete GPUs like the W90Vp, that would be ideal. In fact, the GPU modules in the W90 look very similar to the GPU modules from NVIDIA. The problem is, no one wants to do the work to make sure upgraded GPUs would work -- plus you need to worry about having not just a standardized form factor, but standardized heatsinks/fans.
Ultimately, a standardized notebook form factor would probably lose more customers than it would gain. Everyone would complain about the "boring design and aesthetics", and the number of new bugs/problems we'd see would probably skyrocket. But hey, maybe someone will prove me wrong on this and make the idea work....
Goty - Friday, May 29, 2009 - link
Wait, NVIDIA managed to release drivers on all platforms simultaneously ONCE and suddenly they have a unified driver model? I'd have to wait and see if that trend continues down the road, but I'm not holding my breath.There's also the issue that a large number of notebooks simply won't accept the drivers directly from NVIDIA.
JarredWalton - Friday, May 29, 2009 - link
NVIDIA previously had a mobile driver program where they committed to quarterly updates, and they delivered on that three times (though the first wasn't quite "quarterly"). The drivers started out several months behind the desktop releases, and now we have drivers released on all platforms twice (185.81 and then the final 185.85) - though granted they're mostly the same thing.As far as laptops where the NVIDIA drivers won't work, are they in the "unsupported" list? They've worked on every laptop I've tried, which ranged from 8600M to 9500M to 8800M SLI to 9800M. What laptops specifically don't work or have problems? Or are these problems caused by old and cluttered Windows installs where malware or something else gets in the way?
If NVIDIA doesn't continue to release unified drivers, we'll certainly point it out, but at the same time they've already strongly committed to minimum quarterly updates. That's more than anyone else has done for mobile graphics.
rbfowler9lfc - Friday, May 29, 2009 - link
Really impressive battery life. You can watch a 1080p movie on the road, as long as it doesn't last longer than 1h. Bah!