HP 8510p available!

[odin243]

64bit Vista has driver issues just like 64bit XP. Some people will be fine, while others might not...it largely depends on hardware. But I'd recommend 32bit to play it safe.

This is not quite a fair comparison. XP Pro 64-bit is horrible, I mean really god awful in it's driver support. 64-bit Vista has the same sort of driver issues that 32-bit Vista did a few months ago. but it's nowhere near as bad as 64-bit XP is. If you're a fairly competent computer user, and are comfortable hunting around for drivers to get some stuff to work, then you'll be fine with 64-bit Vista. However, I agree that unless you have a specific need for 64-bit support or 4GB of RAM, it's probably safer to stick to 32-bit Vista for now.

[b_costa]

64bit Vista has driver issues just like 64bit XP. Some people will be fine, while others might not...it largely depends on hardware. But I'd recommend 32bit to play it safe.

Tip: Drop the T7700 down to a T7300 (the performance boost is not worth the price premium), and get the minimum amount of RAM as HP overcharges for it (and also visit the RAM deals thread to get better deals for about $210). Drop BR unless you know you need it (overpriced right now IMHO and I think you could upgrade for cheaper in the future...say a year or so from now). Other than that, your configuration looks good.

If you want an extra 8-cell battery, I might be posting one for sale online in my "Greg's Stuff for Sale" thread this weekend. Let me think about it tomorrow.

My department will be paying for the notebook. I guess this makes your suggestions invalid But thanks for the tip, anyway

[ArthurofChicago]

There is a nice article discussing the performance of the Radeon 2600. Bottom line, it seems to be a better forward looking card then the 8600GT but does not do as well with older and some current games. Unfortunately the article does not address dx10, otherwise it covers most questions.
http://www.firingsquad.com/hardware/...ew/default.asp
A quote from the article follows below:
"Another interesting, yet untapped feature present inside the Radeon HD 2600 series is AMD’s tessellation unit. This is the same unit found in the Radeon HD 2900 XT and Xbox 360. The idea here is that game developers can use the tessellation unit to create highly detailed scenes/game characters with much fewer triangles than would otherwise be necessary. This in turn frees up memory bandwidth, resulting in improved performance.
Looking over the specs, you can see that the key design principles found in the Radeon HD 2900 XT carry over into the 2600 line. In other words, the GPU is a very forward-looking design that’s heavy on stream processors (120 in the case of the Radeon cards, versus just 32 in the GeForce 8600s), but light on more traditional aspects of the rendering pipeline like texturing and ROPs"
Another cool site that rates the card highly is:
http://www.notebookcheck.net/ATI-Mob...00.3771.0.html
I think this concludes my due diligence on the 8510p, I plan to buy Tuesday.

[Ackeron]

There is a nice article discussing the performance of the Radeon 2600. Bottom line, it seems to be a better forward looking card then the 8600GT but does not do as well with older and some current games. Unfortunately the article does not address dx10, otherwise it covers most questions.
http://www.firingsquad.com/hardware/...ew/default.asp
A quote from the article follows below:
"Another interesting, yet untapped feature present inside the Radeon HD 2600 series is AMD’s tessellation unit. This is the same unit found in the Radeon HD 2900 XT and Xbox 360. The idea here is that game developers can use the tessellation unit to create highly detailed scenes/game characters with much fewer triangles than would otherwise be necessary. This in turn frees up memory bandwidth, resulting in improved performance.
Looking over the specs, you can see that the key design principles found in the Radeon HD 2900 XT carry over into the 2600 line. In other words, the GPU is a very forward-looking design that’s heavy on stream processors (120 in the case of the Radeon cards, versus just 32 in the GeForce 8600s), but light on more traditional aspects of the rendering pipeline like texturing and ROPs"
Another cool site that rates the card highly is:
http://www.notebookcheck.net/ATI-Mob...00.3771.0.html
I think this concludes my due diligence on the 8510p, I plan to buy Tuesday.

I think the first link is for the desktop version Supposedly the mobile chips are better but not enough info yet.

I'm actually trying to get 3dmark06 to work right now...keeps blanking my screen and I have to reboot :\

The temps are very good on this comp btw. I've been installing junk/apps/games all day and doing random high end stuff...HDD and the cores have all stayed in the low 40s.

[odin243]

There is a nice article discussing the performance of the Radeon 2600. Bottom line, it seems to be a better forward looking card then the 8600GT but does not do as well with older and some current games. Unfortunately the article does not address dx10, otherwise it covers most questions.
http://www.firingsquad.com/hardware/...ew/default.asp
A quote from the article follows below:
"Another interesting, yet untapped feature present inside the Radeon HD 2600 series is AMD’s tessellation unit. This is the same unit found in the Radeon HD 2900 XT and Xbox 360. The idea here is that game developers can use the tessellation unit to create highly detailed scenes/game characters with much fewer triangles than would otherwise be necessary. This in turn frees up memory bandwidth, resulting in improved performance.
Looking over the specs, you can see that the key design principles found in the Radeon HD 2900 XT carry over into the 2600 line. In other words, the GPU is a very forward-looking design that’s heavy on stream processors (120 in the case of the Radeon cards, versus just 32 in the GeForce 8600s), but light on more traditional aspects of the rendering pipeline like texturing and ROPs"
Another cool site that rates the card highly is:
http://www.notebookcheck.net/ATI-Mob...00.3771.0.html
I think this concludes my due diligence on the 8510p, I plan to buy Tuesday.

As mentioned that article is for the desktop HD 2600, and is therefore not relevant to the Mobility HD2600. And notebookcheck is notoriously unreliable.

Also, as for the stream processors, the HD2600 probably in reality does not have any more than the 8600M-GT, however, ATI counts their processors differently, they include lower level processing units and such, giving them a seemingly higher processor count.

[ls6]

Does the 8510p HDMI connection have audio output?

[wickeddeus]

Does the 8510p HDMI connection have audio output?

Like extra audio output? I don't think so since HDMI does video and audio.

[goofball22]

Like extra audio output? I don't think so since HDMI does video and audio.

i think u answered his question with that last one

however, u might want to check with the manufacturer just to make sure it outputs video and audio, as in the past some only output video.

[wilsonywx]

hmm kinda surprised that no one has posted a review of the 8510p yet.

[jin07]

Well the only real difference between the 8510w and p is the graphics card and it seems people are having problems getting benchmark programs to work. So there's nothing new to really post. Once some benchmark programs are able to run, I think we might just see those and that's about it.