Standard Gaming Performance
Starting the benchmarks, we'll cut right to the chase and begin with gaming performance. That's what you buy one of these laptops for, after all. As mentioned in our last article, we have recently updated our laptop gaming benchmarks. We use built-in performance tests on Company of Heroes, Crysis, Devil May Cry 4, Enemy Territory: Quake Wars, and Unreal Tournament 3. For Assassin's Creed, GRID, Mass Effect, and Oblivion we benchmark a specific scene using FRAPS. In all tests, we run each benchmark at least four times, discard the top result, and report the highest remaining score. We will use resolution scaling graphs to compare the different laptop configurations, as that will allow us to examine how the GPU and CPU affect performance. At lower resolutions we should become more CPU limited, while the higher resolutions and detail settings should put more of a bottleneck on the GPU.
The Gateway notebooks obviously offer a lot of bang for the buck, even if they don't top the performance charts. The Alienware m15x is faster overall, but the margin of victory over the P-7811 is only about 7% (around 25% over the P-171XL). As we mentioned in our Gateway P-7811 review, there also appears to be a driver glitch with the P-171XL in Devil May Cry 4 - which incidentally is the only game where we don't see significant performance improvements from SLI at higher resolutions. The Sager NP9262 is clearly in a league of its own when it comes to performance. If you've ever wondered why people would consider purchasing a heavy SLI notebook, gaming performance that's almost twice as fast as the closest single GPU solution is the answer. Unfortunately, that means the CPU becomes more of a bottleneck, which is why we see several games where the Sager laptop has an almost flat line.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
36 Comments
View All Comments
JarredWalton - Monday, September 1, 2008 - link
We reviewed that http://www.anandtech.com/mobile/showdoc.aspx?i=324...">six months ago. Dell hasn't updated it to support the 9800M (yet?), but otherwise it would be very comparable in performance to the Sager unit. The Sager is still a bit faster because of the desktop CPU, and it consumes a bit more power and is a bit heavier. The Dell is also more expensive because of the cost of mobile CPUs, so if you want i.e. an X9000, it's over 3X the cost of an E9500. Since both weigh a lot and cost a lot, you might as well get the fractionally larger Sager/Clevo.cheetah2k - Monday, September 1, 2008 - link
I understand you reviewed the 1730 6+months ago (and I bought one based on that review with the extreme CPU and SLi 8800GTX's) however some of us would like to see how it still stacks up to the competition, and being a "round-up" and all, I think it makes sense to include it, even if its just for old time sake.JarredWalton - Tuesday, September 2, 2008 - link
I did mention the laptop, and there are a few games where we tested on both laptops. However, we don't generally get to hang onto $5000 laptops for a long time, so I can't just go back and retest the M1730. In terms of performance, the Sager is going to be slightly faster on the CPU, but overall gaming performance is a tie. If I were to pick between the two now, I would probably go with the Sager for the high-end, because price is a bit cheaper for the same level of performance. Plus you can run quad-core if you want (though that's not really useful for games). I'd be much more likely to go with the Gateway units for the price, but obviously the Dell and Sager are over twice as fast in most games.SniperWulf - Friday, August 29, 2008 - link
While I agree with you on the astetics of the P series, its price/performance ratio and upgradability are unmatched at the moment. A few months back, I picked up a 6860FX and have been nothing but pleased with it. I've replaced the CPU with a used X7800 ES, and swapped the hard drives for 2x Hitachi 200GBs in a Raid 0 array.I didn't do it all at the same time of course, but thats the beauty of it. Whenever you need a lil bit more horsepower, all you have to do is just shop around for parts
Kardax - Friday, August 29, 2008 - link
I took a chance and got a P-7811 a couple weeks ago. Its stability has been rock-solid, even after hours of intense load.My only complaint would be that the keyboard has a Bluetooth enable/disable option, but there's apparently no Bluetooth hardware inside...
JarredWalton - Friday, August 29, 2008 - link
Hi guys,I'm *sure* there are typos in the article (or errors in speech recognition). I've spent most of the past two days trying to finish all the writing and graphs, so go easy on me while I get some sleep. In the meantime, if you want to point out errors, reply to this post and we'll (eventually) correct them. Hopefully, none of the issues "ruin" the article for you or make it "unreadable". ;-)
Good night,
Jarred Walton
Senior Editor