Mobility Radeon X700: The Graphics of the Travelmate 8100

The Acer Travelmate 8100 And The Test

As we mentioned, this test will pit the Mobility Radeon X700 against its desktop partners. And again, we unfortunately do not have an Alviso based desktop system in which to test our desktop parts.

Thus, we are resigned to testing against a high end Intel PCI Express platform. This comparison, as in our last mobile graphics article, will be used as a yardstick by which to measure the closeness of the notebook platform to a high end desktop. This time, the mobile processor is a little slower, but it's also matched to an Intel desktop platform.

The display on the Travelmate 8100 consists of a 1680x1050 panel. The 16:10 panel is quite nice for watching widescreen movies or working with multiple documents at a time. This does stretch most other normal resolutions, but this generally isn't a problem. The only issue we run into on tests like this is that the notebook can't run resolutions above the native vertical resolution. In order to perform these tests, we could hook up CRT and run the display to that. Of course, we will see that the MRX700 has plenty of work to do without looking beyond its native screen size.

Based on the panel resolution and the type of notebook and graphics solution we are dealing with, we decided to employ a resolution of 1280x1024 for our tests.

Our Acer Travelmate 8100 is configured as follows:

Intel Pentium M 2.0GHz
Intel Alviso based motherboard
1GB DDR2 533 4:4: 4:11
ATI Mobility Radeon X700 (clocked at 350/600)
Windows XP Service Pack 2 with DirectX 9.0c
ATI Catalyst Driver 8.083-041297a-020061C

And the desktop platform looks like this:

Intel Pentium 4 3.4GHz EE
Intel D925XECV2 motherboard
1GB DDR2 533 4:4: 4:12
ATI Radeon X700 Pro 128/256
Windows XP Service Pack 2 with DirectX 9.0c
ATI Catalyst Driver 4.11