General Usage Performance

AMD has usually fared better in business applications of late, and it was a bit of surprise to see the Voodoo Envy M:855 land just shy of the highest end Pentium-M 1.7GHz processor. It is likely that the M:855 will slightly surpass the Pentium-M 1.7GHz with the new PowerNow drivers, but this will depend on how Voodoo modifies their PowerNow drivers.

To be honest, we have some reservations over the scores for the Voodoo Envy M:855 - Athlon 64 DTR 3200+ (2.0GHz) in these benchmarks. We expected the scores to be slated above the Pentium-M scores and lower than the desktop Athlon 64 3200+ (2.0GHz). In our talks with Voodoo, the culprit may be the premature PowerNow drivers. Similar to the SpeedStep issues, PowerNow sometimes causes benchmarks to report scores incorrectly, because the benchmark derives the wrong timing from the CPU, which is changing in response to the simultaneous operations. It is possible that these scores are correct, but we have our suspicious. The new PowerNow drivers should clear things up.

The Test Content Creation Performance
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  • Shalmanese - Wednesday, November 5, 2003 - link

    Well, seeing as this is the first 9600 based production notebook they have in the lab in the moment, its kinda hard to bench it against any others. WHEN they review the Sager, I'm sure they will have the Voodoo benchie in there.
  • ssamurai26 - Wednesday, November 5, 2003 - link

    Ok, who makes the closest notebook to the Voodoo then?
  • Locutus4657 - Wednesday, November 5, 2003 - link

    No offence.... But why didn't you compare the preformance of this notebook v. several other notebooks when it came to game preformance... I'm more than a little dissapointed to see yet another ATI/nVidia comparison in what should be a comparison of finished notebook products.
  • KristopherKubicki - Wednesday, November 5, 2003 - link

    #7: AnandTech doesnt get paid to do reviews. What a troll. Did you even notice Andrew wrote this review and not Anand? I'm writing this on a Sager by the way.

    Kristopher
  • petz - Wednesday, November 5, 2003 - link

    "Up to par" with DELL's best? Is that what you call 50 to 100% higiher FPS on every benchmark?
  • Madcat207 - Wednesday, November 5, 2003 - link

    In NO way is AW the closest.

    Unless your taking about the deepest pockets......
  • ssamurai26 - Wednesday, November 5, 2003 - link

    Yes, would have been nice to see some competition in there. It was interesting none the less, but it even says in the review that the closest competitor is Alienware. And Alienware has both fx5600go and M10 in their machines.
  • Madcat207 - Wednesday, November 5, 2003 - link

    Andrew, that is fine, but it still doesnt explain why there was no comparable model tested. Was Anand not paid enough to test a Sager along with it?
  • Boonesmi - Tuesday, November 4, 2003 - link

    unlike some of the folks above, i liked the review... and im looking forward to part 2 (part 2 will have the info im more interested in)
  • Andrew Ku - Tuesday, November 4, 2003 - link

    There is a reason that this can still be called a 9600 Pro. First of all, the revelation of the requirements for the Pro name only came to light in the last 48 hours. Sager themselves wouldn't have known about this until recently.

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