Gateway ID49: Mixing the Bag
by Dustin Sklavos on September 23, 2010 2:46 AM ESTLow and Medium Gaming on the ID49C
The benchmarks we run in our gaming suite should provide some fairly interesting results, especially in placing the NVIDIA GeForce GT 330M's relative performance against the 325M and 335M. The 325M sports 48 "CUDA cores" and a 128-bit memory bus just like the 330M, but at lower clock speeds, while the 335M moves up on the food chain and uses a harvested GeForce GT 240 die, running at slightly lower clocks than the 330M but bumping up to 72 shader cores.
There's a caveat to these results, however: for StarCraft II we had to manually tweak the display drivers to get Optimus to work with it (before we did the game ran at a constant 4fps, which is slow even for Intel's HD Graphics.) Also, there seems to be a bug with Optimus in Left 4 Dead 2 using the latest 260.63 drivers, where setting the game to 4xAA results in a blank screen. Unfortunately, we couldn't get the ID49C to run L4D2 with 4xAA on the 258.96 drivers either, something which wasn't an issue on the ASUS N82Jv. Those test results—for our "High" preset—are mostly academic as the 330M really isn't powerful enough to be pushing anti-aliasing anyhow, but it bears mentioning nonetheless.
Of course, all of this is going to be rendered fairly meaningless soon enough: GeForce 400M series parts should start trickling in soon, and hopefully they'll bring the kind of performance improvements NVIDIA has desperately needed on the mobile front. Optimus is a great technology AMD just doesn't have a counter for right now, but AMD's mobile parts are generally faster in their given classes. Hopefully with the 400Ms NVIDIA will be able to give us everything: better performance, DX11 support, and better battery life thanks to Optimus.
At these minimal settings, the GeForce GT 330M in the ID49C is able to post playable framerates on every game in our suite with room to spare. In most cases the testing units seem to be CPU limited, though the GeForce G 310M and Mobility Radeon HD 5470 are so anemic to begin with that even at minimal settings they threaten to bog down gaming performance. The exception is StarCraft II, where for whatever reason the Radeons seem to take it to the GeForces. The only Radeon not posting framerates over 80 is the HD 5650 in the Toshiba A660D, hamstrung by a slow Phenom II in a game traditionally CPU limited at even the highest settings. Also somewhat interesting is that the ID49C manages to best the GT 335M in the N82Jv in several games, despite sharing the same CPU. We'll see that once we up the quality settings, the GT 335M is able to take the lead.
Once we start to ratchet up graphics settings, our testing suite starts to separate the men from the boys, and it's here that the GeForce GT 330M unfortunately exposes the weak link in Nvidia's current (and thankfully soon to be retired) mobile lineup. The GT 330M is extremely common, but it consistently loses to the Mobility Radeon HD 4650. The 4650 is an old chip; when it dropped it was an absolute powerhouse for the market segment, but it's been around for nearly two years, and Nvidia is only just now getting around to answering it with the 400M series. Even the GT 335M has problems with it.
Taken in a vacuum, the 330M is able to produce playable framerates in every game we tested it in, but it doesn't have much headroom. Its bigger brother, the 335M, and AMD's newer Radeon HD 5650 both come out looking pretty bad too. The 5650 proves itself as an incremental at best upgrade over the 4650, although it's important to keep in mind that the A660D is CPU-limiting it and worse, the 5650 itself is clocked 100MHz below spec in that unit. But the 335M, despite having a 100MHz slower clock speed has 72 shaders instead of the 330M's 48, and it still barely holds a lead, likely because both parts have the same memory bandwidth.
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Akv - Thursday, September 23, 2010 - link
Thank you for adding the page about noise and heat.aguilpa1 - Thursday, September 23, 2010 - link
$800 dollars is not a bad price for the hardware but not if is going to pain you to use it. Keep letting those manufactures know we care about the screen and keyboard layouts. Thanks again.HHCosmin - Thursday, September 23, 2010 - link
i use a acer 3820tg, featuring i5 430m, 4gb ram, 640gb of hdd, bluetooth etc. this is the little brother having a 13,3" screen. it lacks the optical drive... and this a good thing. the keyboard is aceptable for me as i'm not too picky, the runtime is ok. i care very little about the ati graphics... they lappie would be at least 200grams lighter without it. the screen is ok and it does not really mater how precise it is since i mostly code and surf on it. it has performance, it's light enough (1,8kilos), has enough runtime (up to 6,5hours).i'd like to have the install disk, more control to undervolt the cpu (but this is not possible with nehalem), maybe an integrated sim slot, windows 7 pro instead of home premium, less crapware installed.
i really boils down to want you from a laptop. some could be really ok with some configs, others would not. i apreciate your review... but you could be less radical as some don't care too much about some things even if they know what makes their pc tick.
rwei - Thursday, September 23, 2010 - link
Something about the seething, over-the-top anger towards helpless gadgets that permeates this review tells me that you must be a Penny-Arcade reader.Also second the point on HP Envys. Given your penchant for quality/backlit keyboards, nice high resolution screens with good colors and black levels, solid build quality, non-glossy aluminum materials and USB 3.0/eSATA, a 14/17 review would be a rare and blessed opportunity for you to write a happy review full of rainbows and unicorns.
Is the 14 STILL on its way?
JarredWalton - Friday, September 24, 2010 - link
Honestly, who knows? It was supposed to be coming about six weeks back, so I'm not counting on anything now. Maybe they're doing a Fall revision and we'll get that. Here's hoping!blackrook - Saturday, September 25, 2010 - link
LOL...silly HP.fabarati - Thursday, September 23, 2010 - link
I would like to point out that the first generation of 500 GB 7200 RPM (ST9500420AS) drives from Seagate weren't all that good. The WD 500 GB 5400 RPM (WD5000BEVT) that came out at the same time was often as fast or faster. Which Is why I bought one of those. Granted, this was about a year ago, so the market has changed. Knowing Seagate, they probably have had 2 or 3 new generations of HDDs released. Just because.tspin46 - Friday, September 24, 2010 - link
We get it you hate the keyboard. You could have said that in four words, why use four fairly long paragraphs? You then make fun of anyone who may actually like the keyboard. What possible reason to insult an interested participant in anandtech who bothered to read your review.I must be that idiot since I actually like the keyboard considerably more than I like several other laptop keyboards. I also learned to touch type and find no need to pound the keyboard so no flex problems, if in fact there is a problem.
The entire tone of your review reminds me of a movie criticism found in a school newspaper. You have a bully pulpit and by god you are going to pound your personal opinion into every reader.
Chill, say what you like and don't like but don't pound the pulpit with four paragraphs of keyboard hate with very little data other than YOU HATE IT.
JarredWalton - Friday, September 24, 2010 - link
It's not that we're making fun of the people that like the keyboard, it's that we're curious if anyone actually does like it. Maybe you like the glowing touchpad as well, which we feel is a complete waste. But even if you're okay with the keyboard, you can't tell me there aren't better designs out there. The reason I let Dustin go off on this one is because this has been a problem with Acer/Gateway laptops for so long, and they just don't seem to care. Well, fine, if you're selling a $500-$600 budget system I get that. But when you upgrade the chassis to aluminum, add in a decent mobile GPU, and have enough budget left over for a glowing touchpad... yeah, the keyboard absolutely needs to be fixed.AnnonymousCoward - Saturday, September 25, 2010 - link
I for one enjoyed reading the bit about combusting keyboards due to hating it that badly. The keyboard is one of the most important aspects of a laptop, and 4 paragraphs of informal writing is absolutely deserved. If you want 4 words on the keyboard, go read a Cnet review.You would think, here in 2010, good keyboards would have been mastered long ago. Just looking at the picture of it I can tell it probably sucks; the keys lack depth and it looks like there's not enough spacing.