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Alienware Area-51 m15x

Katherine Stevenson — Thu, 01 May 2008 16:49:22 -0500

It’s easy to be seduced by Alienware’s m15x notebook. From its handsome silver-gray case to its cool-yet-tasteful LED accents to its comfortable lap weight of less than eight pounds, this 15.4-inch machine had us at hello. Of course, only excellent performance would keep us interested.

Our hopes were high. The m15x came to us sporting Intel’s new 2.8GHz Core 2 Extreme X9000 mobile CPU and Nvidia’s GeForce 8800M GTX videocard. Those are the highest performing mobile parts in their respective categories—a caliber typically reserved for larger, heavier 17-inch models.

For comparison’s sake, we turned to the Asus C90S notebook we reviewed in October 2007, rerunning all of our notebook benchmarks on Vista. The C90S is unique in that it uses Intel’s Core 2 Duo E6700 desktop CPU. Clocked at 2.66GHz on a 1,066MHz front-side bus, the E6700 seemed like a worthy competitor to the X9000 mobile part, which has a modest 140GHz clock-speed advantage but a slower 800MHz front-side bus.

Turns out, however, the fight wasn’t really all that fair. The X9000 part has the benefit of Intel’s 45nm Penryn core, as well as 6MB of L2 cache (compared with the 4MB found in the E6700), and apparently that makes all the difference. In our CPU-dependent benchmarks, the m15x performed 11 percent to 31 percent faster than the C90S.

The two notebooks were divided even further by our gaming benchmarks. The m15x’s 8800M GTX walloped the C90S’s 8600M GT, most dramatically in Quake 4, where it did 178 percent better.

When this type of all-out graphics power isn’t needed, you can reboot and switch from the videocard to the chipset’s integrated graphics to preserve battery power. It’s a nifty idea, but in our own battery rundown test—playing a standard-def DVD until power is depleted—we gained just nine additional minutes using the integrated graphics (for a total of one hour and 35 minutes). The m15x also offers a Stealth mode, which lets you throttle back the CPU and GPU for power savings and quieter operation.

The m15x came to us with a 200GB 7,200rpm hard drive and a Blu-ray burner, but the latter can be easily popped out of its Smart Bay and hot-swapped with an optional 320GB 5,400rpm secondary drive ($300) or secondary battery ($150).

In another nod to customization, a software Command Center lets you change the colors of the m15x’s various LED lights, making the power button glow red, for instance, while the keyboard backlighting glows green and the illuminated piping around the notebook’s lid glows blue. A row of touch-sensitive buttons above the keyboard contributes to the m15x’s light show, but while they look cool, they’re not especially reliable—we sometimes had to press them several times to get a response.

We have no complaints, however, about the m15x’s 1920x1200 screen, which offers a 1920x1080 option for use with high-def content. Available ports consist of three USB ports, a FireWire port, HDMI, Ethernet, and mic. Sadly, no eSATA.

In the end, our infatuation with the m15x remains strong. It’s as powerful as any 17-inch notebook out there and much easier to carry around. And it looks good, to boot. Consider us sold—even if the price does break us.

Hypersonic Sonic Boom OCX

Nathan Edwards — Mon, 14 Jan 2008 16:44:12 -0600

January 2004. DirectX 9 had just shipped. SCO had begun its ultimately futile crusade against IBM. And Hypersonic’s brightly colored Sonic Boom, featuring Intel’s newest processor, was smacking our benchmarks around.

Sure, back in 2004 the new hotness was Intel’s Pentium 4 Extreme Edition and the Sonic Boom’s paint job was bright yellow, but the cherry-red Hypersonic Sonic Boom OXC—the first rig we’ve tested using Intel’s fabled Penryn CPU—still gives us an undeniable sense of déjà vu.

The Enthusiast System Architecture enables the power supply, cooling system, and motherboard to talk to each other.

This Sonic Boom’s got a sweet 3GHz Core 2 Extreme QX9650 CPU overclocked to 3.88GHz on a 1.7GHz FSB. Throw in a pair of XFX GeForce 8800 Ultras and 4GB of OCZ Reaper DDR2 at 1,208MHz, all sitting pretty on Nvidia’s new 780i SLI motherboard, and you’ve got a system as hot—in theory—as the Sonic Boom we awarded a 9 Kick Ass verdict to four years ago. Unfortunately, we don’t traffic in theory. Despite hot parts, a fab paint job, and wicked technology, the Sonic Boom went bust during our stability testing.

It’s a shame because one of the neatest things about this Hypersonic system is its use of Nvidia’s new open Enthusiast System Architecture (ESA), which enables unprecedented monitoring of system temperatures, voltages, and stats via the Nvidia Monitor app. The 1,200-watt PC Power and Cooling Turbo Cool power supply is ESA-compliant, as is the custom CoolIt CPU/GPU cooler. You can read more about the ESA in our In The Lab segment, but let’s just say we like it.

Before we get to the nitty-gritty of benchmarking, let’s marvel for a minute at Hypersonic’s fully kitted flight simulator rig. The Lian-Li PC-A10 chassis is beautifully decked out with a cherry-red Colorware paint job, and looks sleek but still classy, especially compared to the over-the-top cases we’ve seen recently from HP, Dell, and AVADirect.

Hypersonic doesn’t mess around when it comes to crafting a flight-sim deck. Instead of one measly monitor, we got three 19-inch LG L1933 Flatron displays hooked up to a Matrox TripleHead2Go Digital Edition, which runs the three digital monitors from one DVI port for a combined 3840x1024 resolution. You’ll find our impressions of the flight-sim aspects of this setup, which also include a Saitek Pro Flight yoke, rudder pedals, and throttle, in this month’s In the Lab (page 60).

But what if flight simulation’s not your thing? What if you’re only interested in the rig itself and not the optional flight-sim package and all its accoutrements? It is for you, Earth-bound reader, that we ended our dreamy sky tours and commenced our standard Vista benchmark suite.

This is the second rig we’ve tested using our new benchmarks and for the most part it performed admirably. The rig’s best scores came in Photoshop CS3, which at 102 seconds was nearly 50 percent faster than our zero-point, and Quake 4, where we saw our fastest frame rates ever: 239 fps, which not only devastated the zero-point (135 fps) but also bested the Falcon Northwest rig (226 fps) that has held the record since June. Vista gaming is finally catching up to XP!

We found decent gains in our ProShow Producer, Premiere Pro CS3, and Fear 1.07 benchmarks as well. In fact, the only benchmark in which the Sonic Boom OCX had any trouble at all was our MainConcept encoder test, where it had plenty. It locked up in two out of three runs. When it finally completed a test, its score was a disappointing 1,451 seconds—slower than our zero-point system.

The system didn’t fare well in our Prime95 stress testing, either. One core usually failed less than an hour into the tests, and it wasn’t until we set all clock speeds back to stock that we saw any real long-term stability. Granted, a stress test is the ultimate machine punisher, especially on a machine as overclocked as this one, but like many other vendors recently, Hypersonic went a few megahertz too far.

Hypersonic sent us a system that looked great and performed pretty damn well on our benchmarks. We appreciated the massive overclocks, forward-thinking Penryn, ESA architecture, and flight-simulator setup, as well as the overall build quality. But stability issues hurt this machine, as does its volume—the fans are simply too loud. We understand that Hypersonic, freshly acquired by OCZ, may still be adjusting to its new environment; hopefully, this is simply an aberration, and the next rig we see from the company will be firmly back in 9 Kick Ass territory. But nearly $8,000 for a loud machine that crashes occasionally just doesn’t meet our expectations.

EVGA e-GeForce 8800 GT SSC

Michael Brown — Tue, 11 Dec 2007 13:12:41 -0600

Previous generations of Nvidia GPUs (AMD’s, too) presented buyers with a difficult choice: You could get great 3D performance for gaming or you could offload high-definition video decoding from the host CPU, but you couldn’t have both. Nvidia’s 8800 GT not only changes that situation, it does so at a competitive price.

The 8800 GT delivers stronger 3D performance than the industry’s previous sweet spot (the 8800 GTS with a 320MB frame buffer), it delivers more memory than that board, and it clubs AMD’s far-more expensive Radeon HD 2900 XT over the head for good measure (although AMD has responded with the Radeon HD 3870, see page 80). Nvidia managed to cram 754 million transistors into this beast thanks to a die shrink and a 65nm fabrication process (previous 8800-series GPUs were manufactured using a 90nm process).

The new part packs 112 stream processors, 512MB of GDDR3 memory, and a 256-bit memory interface into a GPU that requires a single-slot cooler (the fan howls like a banshee on startup but goes whisper-quiet as soon as Windows launches). Reference-design boards will run their cores at 600MHz and their memory at 900MHz; EVGA pumps these numbers to 700MHz and a cool 1GHz, respectively. The company also commands a premium price for the speed boost: While the average price for more typical boards was running around $270, this SSC Edition was fetching $330 at press time.

As mentioned above, the new GPU is capable of offloading the entire HD decode process from the host CPU, and it also provides HDCP decryption on both DVI links. This latter feature renders the chip capable of displaying Blu-ray and HD DVD movies at the native resolution of a 30-inch LCD. It’s also compliant with PCI Express 2.0 (see the White Paper on page 72 for more details). We didn’t test this card in that type of motherboard—no one’s shipping one in an SLI configuration just yet—but the new architecture offers double the bandwidth of PCI Express 1.1 (8GB/s in each direction).

AMD moved to GDDR4 memory several iterations back, but Nvidia continues to stick with GDDR3—and the decision doesn’t seem to be costing its cards anything in terms of performance. Interestingly, AMD has retreated from its 512-bit memory interface, building a 256-bit interface into the 3870 (same as the 8800 GT). But there are still two other features that could hold the 8800 GT back when it comes to competing with AMD’s Radeon 3870: First, these cards have only one SLI connector. Nvidia’s other cards, from the 8800 GTS on up, have two SLI connectors, even though only one of them is used in dual-card mode. Why worry about it? Nvidia will inevitably debut an SLI version that enables you to run more than two GPUs on one motherboard (remember quad SLI?), and that’s why the other cards have two SLI connectors. You’ll never be able to run more than two 8800 GTs in one box.

The other advantage AMD will soon offer is the ability to run more than one monitor in CrossFire mode, although that will likely require AMD’s new RD790 chipset (which hasn’t been released). Nvidia’s SLI system shuts off the second monitor when running in SLI mode (as does the current version of CrossFire).

While we’re looking at the future, we should also consider the fact that, unlike the Radeon HD 3870, the 8800 GT does not support Microsoft’s Direct3D 10.1 and Shader Model 4.1. Given the tepid response that most developers have given Windows Vista, and Microsoft’s continued insistence on tying DX10’s fortunes to its new OS, we don’t think this shortcoming matters much at all.

It’s been a long time since we’ve been able to unabashedly recommend a videocard priced this low. We just couldn’t get excited about the anemic 8800 GTS; and until now, AMD has had nothing meaty to offer. But the 8800 GT is an absolutely fantastic value, delivering great gaming performance and features that can’t be found in Nvidia’s higher-end boards. If you can swing the price, you’ll get a better gaming experience from a GeForce 8800 GTX or an Ultra (although we don’t think the latter is worth its premium); but if you’re rolling with a lower budget, the 8800 GT is a slam-dunk winner.

Nvidia Announces the GeForce 8800 GT

Michael Brown — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 19:42:04 -0500

AMD made no apologies when it announced the ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT last May: Their new GPU wouldn’t compete with Nvidia’s best, and that was fine with them. “Nvidia can have the high end,” they seemed to say. “We want to build the most powerful videocard that the masses can afford.” The 2900 XT was indeed faster than the Nvidia’s 8800 GTS, but it was leagues behind the 8800 GTX and even farther behind the 8800 Ultra.

Nvidia, meanwhile, gave their engineers new marching orders: Come up with a GPU that’s faster than AMD’s best—one that we can sell for less than the 8800 GTS. The chip that emerged is the result of a die shrink and a 65nm manufacturing process (previous GPUs in 8800-series are 90nm parts), and it’s a major breakthrough in terms of price/performance ratio.

This 754-million transistor monster not only delivers better performance than the 2900 XT, it also offloads the entire HD-video decode process from the host CPU (you must step down to AMD’s 2600 XT to get that feature). It also provides HDCP decryption on both DVI links, so it’s capable of displaying Blu-ray and HD DVD movies at the native resolution of a 30-inch panel. The GPU is compliant with PCI Express 2.0, but it doesn’t offer support for DirectX 10.1 and Shader Model 4.1 (although I don’t think any of those three facts amount to a pile of dead pixels right now).

Nvidia’s 8800 GT reference design packs 112 stream processors, 512MB of GDDR3 memory, and a 256-bit memory interface into a GPU that requires a single-slot cooler. The core runs at 600MHz while the shader processors hum along at 1.5GHz; memory is clocked at 900MHz. Third-party vendors such as Asus, BFG, EVGA, and XFX quickly announced products with retail prices starting at $250. Nvidia expects third-party vendors to also offer 256MB versions cards that will sell in the $200 range.

We’ve only just started to probe the 8800 GT’s capabilities, but we’re very impressed with what we’ve seen so far. There’s no other way to say it: Nvidia’s new GPU poops all over AMD’s current best effort, delivering more performance and crucially important features at a price point that’s hundreds of dollars lower. The 8800 GT is faster than both models of the 8800 GTS, too, despite having a narrower memory interface than both it and the 2900 XT (the 2900 XT has a 512-bit interface to either 512MB or 1GB of memory; the 8800 GTS has a 320-bit interface to either 320- or 640MB of RAM).

Now the big question is can AMD’s upcoming RV670 manage to outdo the 8800 GT? I’ll be able to provide the answer in the next couple of weeks; in the meantime, I think Nvidia is going to sell a boatload of 8800 GTs.

SINGLE-CARD BENCHMARKS

	RADEON 2900 XT (512MB)	GEFORCE 8800 GT (512MB)
3DMARK06 GAME 1 (FPS)	22.6	26.4
3DMARK06 GAME 2 (FPS)	21.0	20.3
QUAKE (FPS)	85.6	83.7
FEAR (FPS)	66.0	71.0
SUPREME COMMANDER (FPS)	27.9	29.1

DUAL-CARD BENCHMARKS

	RADEON 2900 XT (512MB)	GEFORCE 8800 GT (512MB)
3DMARK06 GAME 1 (FPS)	44.1	47.0
3DMARK06 GAME 2 (FPS)	42.3	37.2
QUAKE (FPS)	145.7	101.3
FEAR (FPS)	113.0	120.0
SUPREME COMMANDER (FPS)	44.7	33.4

Best scores are bolded. AMD-based cards tested with an Intel D975BX2 motherboard; Nvidia-based cards tested with an EVGA 680i SLI motherboard. Intel 2.93GHz Core 2 Extreme X6800 CPUs and 2GB of Corsair DD2 RAM used in both scenarios.

Nvidia Ships the GeForce 8600 GTS

Michael Brown — Tue, 17 Apr 2007 08:15:16 -0500

As Nvidia continues its long-rumored expansion of its DirectX 10 GPU lineup into the budget videocard territory, the most significant feature of these new parts is the one detail that Nvidia managed to keep secret: a new video-processing engine that renders these parts more powerful in terms of HD-video decoding than even the mighty 8800 GTX.

Nvidia claims this next-generation PureVideo HD engine renders the GPU capable of offloading all H.264 video-decode chores from the CPU, enabling even entry-level PCs to play Blu-ray and HD DVD content without chugging. The new GeForce 8600 GTS is also the first GPU to support dual-link HDCP decryption, solving a big problem with displaying high-definition video on 30-inch panels; this feature is optional on the 8600 GT (it's left up to the OEM to implement). HDMI support is optional on both cards. (here again, it's up to the OEM to implement).

In order to bring DX 10 capabilities down to the $200 to $250 price range, Nvidia has drastically reduced the number of stream processors in the 8600 GTS (available now) and the even less-expensive 8600 GT (which will sell for $140 to $160 when it arrives at retail May 1): These chips each have just 32 floating-point units, compared to the 8800 GTS's 96 and the 8800 GTX's 128. Both new GPUs are manufactured using an 80nm fabrication process, and each has 289 million transistors. Clock speeds differentiate the 8600 GT from the 8600 GTS, with stock core clock speeds of 540- and 675MHz, respectively. Both cards have 256MB of GDDR3 memory running at 700MHz and 1GHz, respectively. These GPUs have rather narrow 128-bit memory interfaces compared to the 256-bit interfaces on the 8800-series.

Of course, you can expect the third-party OEMs who actually build retail product based on these GPUs to push the envelope in terms of clock speeds, as Asus has done with the EN8600 GTS Top reviewed here. The GPU on this card is clocked at 745MHz and its memory runs at 1.145GHz.

Asus' card delivered very respectable performance for the price, with a single card serving up the punishing Shader Model 3.0 tests 3DMark06 Game 1 and Game 2 at 7.3 and 8.7fps, respectively. More importantly, the card proved able to render Quake 4 playable at 1920x1200 widescreen resolution, delivering the game at 41.2fps. It had a tougher time with FEAR at that high resolution, scoring an average frame rate of just 25fps. We're thinking of adding Chris Taylor's new RTS Supreme Commander to our benchmark lineup, but you probably won't want to play it on an 8600 GTS—at least not at 1920x1200—because it was only able to play that resource-intensive game at 18.7fps.

The situation improved when we dropped an identical Asus card in for SLI benchmarking. Quake 4 jumped up to a very playable 75.6fps, while our FEAR and Supreme Commander scores also nearly doubled, to 43 and 32.4fps, respectively.

Nvidia also announced an even less-expensive DX 10 GPU, the GeForce 8500 GT, which will sell for between $80 and $100. When you step down this low, however, you'll get just 16 stream processors and even lower clock speeds than the 8600 GT, with a core running at just 450MHz. Oddly enough, Nvidia's partners will be able to offer the board with either 256- or 512MB of DDR2 memory running at 900MHz (with the same 128-bit memory interface). But if you're looking for a powerful HD video decoder, this part will have the same engine as its more costly cousins.

Asus EN8800 GTX

Michael Brown — Tue, 06 Feb 2007 15:45:01 -0600

Being an early adopter means taking chances. And since the Nvidia GeForce 8800 GTX GPU at the heart of Asus’ EN8800 GTX hits the market well in advance of DirectX 10, Vista, and DirectX 10 games, early adopters buying this pricey slab of technology will give the wheel of fortune a mighty spin because no one has a clue how it will perform with DirectX 10 software.

We covered the 8800 GTX’s speeds and feeds in some detail in the DirectX 10 feature story also in this issue (page 26), so we won’t spend a lot of time covering the same ground here. But after thoroughly benchmarking this beast with DirectX 9 titles, we can tell you this: The EN8800 GTX is one powerful videocard.

We’re not talking marginally faster than the best cards preceding it. We’re talking 50- to 100-percent faster than the fastest GeForce 7900 GTX card we’ve ever tested. We’re talking as much as 25-percent faster than two of those cards running in SLI. We’re talking fast enough to get impressive frame rates playing FEAR at 2560x1600 on a 30-inch panel—with 4x antialiasing, 16x aniso, and soft shadows enabled.

This card is not only faster, it’s also more capable than Nvidia’s previous best. The high end of Nvidia’s 7-series cards were quick for their day, typically hitting high-water marks ahead of ATI’s best, but they weren’t capable of rendering AA and high dynamic-range lighting at the same time. The 8800 GTX has no such limitation. Nvidia is so proud of this development that it coined a goofy marketing name to describe it: the Lumenex Engine.

Nvidia claims its new processors can deliver 16x full-screen multisampled AA for nearly the same performance hit as older boards took to perform 4x multisampled AA. This advance is the result of a newly developed algorithm called Coverage Sampling Anti-Aliasing (CSAA). The new GPU also supports transparency antialiasing to eliminate jagged edges on alpha (transparent) textures commonly used in the rendering of foliage, chain-link fence, and similar objects. When we put Nvidia’s claims to the test, we found that enabling the feature in the driver while dialing the application’s AA setting to 4x resulted in much-improved image quality with no more than a 5-percent performance hit. Impressive. Nvidia delivers dramatically better anisotropic texture filtering than previous generations, too.

The 8800 GTX (and the 8800 GTS reviewed on page 70) supports high dynamic-range (HDR) lighting with 128-bits of precision (32 bits for each color component: red, green, blue, and alpha). Another significant improvement to the GeForce 8800 is its 10-bit display pipeline, which allows the GPU to display more than a billion colors, compared to the 16.7-million color palette that an 8-bit pipeline can deliver. Nvidia is catching up to ATI on this last score, although the price of 10-bit displays keeps them out of reach for most consumers.

The new GPU scores significantly higher on the punishing HQV video playback test, too. Nvidia finally decided to give its PureVideo software away with the card, unlike with early versions of the product. Enable hardware acceleration in your video-player software and turn on noise reduction in the Nvidia control panel, and you’ll be treated to great video playback. But ATI hasn’t been idle on the video front, either. After a series of driver tweaks in its latest versions of the Avivo software, we now score ATI’s high-end cards just a wee bit higher than the 8800.

Circling back to the opening of this review, perhaps Dirty Harry said it best: “You’ve got to ask yourself one question: ‘Do I feel lucky?’ Well, do ya?” This is the best DX9 part we’ve ever seen; will we be able to say the same about its DX10 capabilities? Right now, we’re feeling pretty lucky.

Month Reviewed: January 2007
+ DIRTY HARRY: Compatible with DX10; bitchin’-fast with DX9 software; loads of memory; quiet.
- HARRY & THE HENDERSONS: DX10 performance is unknown (and for now, unknowable); pricey.
Verdict: 9
kickass=yes
URL: www.asus.com