lowlymarine's Notebook FAQ

[Dissatisfied]

Thanks lowlymarine!!
This post is really useful.

On a side note: I think we know a little bit more on WinVista, but the substance of your post is unchanged

[Dissatisfied]

In my opinion, there is very little future-proofing reason to purchase a 64bit processor today, unless you believe you'll be running processes that must access more than 2gigs at a time within the lifetime of your laptop.

I appreciate your post. The problem is that laptop users are a heterogenous bunch; there are the gamers, there are the people who want ultraportable, there are the graduate students and others.
I expect that graduate students in some sciences and some social sciences will want to have 64bit quite soon.
I can easily see some of my ex-colleagues wanting to load 2GB datasets, if it were easily doable. Recently I had to load 1.2GB and my computer was not able to do that so I had to write a long and complicated script to do something that on smaller dataset is done instantaneously without any effort.

On a different note, how do we find out if a programmer has a lot of these pointers you are talking about? What is a pointer? Do statistical programs have a lot of them?

[Eliwood]

I've done a bit of research and the unanimous opinion so far is that the ATI MR X800 XT is noticeably faster than the 6800 Ultra, besting it easily in HL2 (by almost 25%) and actually being on par in Doom III (a feat in itself). Not that matters now that the 7800's out, but you should adjust your CPU chart nonetheless and add on the 7800 while you're at it.

Here are 2 of several sources.
- Hexus.net - "Put quite simply and without adding hyperbole on top, it's the fastest mobile 3D solution to date, and it's almost as fast as a desktop ATI RADEON X850 XT 256MB. That's serious food for thought, isn't it? "

- Anandtech - "Here, we are testing the latest mobile graphics card from ATI, which keeps up with the fastest desktop part that they have to offer."

[dforion]

Thanks for the highly informative article!

[xAMDvsIntelx]

I also found this article about P-M vs. Turion very insightful:

http://www.laptoplogic.com/resources/articles/42/1/1/

Laptop Logic claims that the Turion is superior to the Dothan P-M.

[red_chief]

I was thinking... perhaps in the reviews of laptops ... we can put a LABEL for those criterias mentioned in lowmarine's discussion:
"Tested: Future Proof":base:

for laptops which can adapt to the new trends in laptop software and hardware e.g. power and resource hungry computers...

[asdf]

do you recommend then AMD over INTEL?

[portaturtle]

Is the performance difference between a 740 (1.73 GHz) and a 750 (1.86 GHz) worth worth the extra heat? What is the heat difference between the two? Is it significant?

[Charles P. Jefferies]

The 750 offers the best performance/dollar ratio in my opinion. What applications are you going to run? We need more info.

[portaturtle]

Thanks for your response Chaz. The price difference is negligible to me right now. Just heat difference. Putting it another way,... if I run the same app on both systems, would the 750 generate so much heat (and thus run the fan more... lowering battery life) that it's better to just stick with the 740? If the difference in heat is very small, then I'll take the 750. I only ask this because I know the difference between the Dothan and Sonoma's (yes, I know, different processor lines... just an example) in regards to power and heat is significant enough to warrant a suggestion to stick with Dothan if possible (http://www.notebookreview.com/defaul...entrino+Guide). Therefore, I was wondering if the same logic should be applied to the difference between the 740 and 750.