Gateway AMD and Intel Laptops, a Platform Analysis
by Jarred Walton on August 12, 2009 2:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Laptops
Battery Life Compared
Here we can see the flipside of the performance coin: the higher performance laptops all have worse battery life. In fact, looking at battery life relative to capacity, the NV58 is a lot closer to the MacBook than any other reasonably fast laptop we've tested. Apple uses the NVIDIA GeForce 9400M IGP, which definitely helps with power consumption and battery life. However, Apple also uses lower TDP processors and OS X seems to do a better job at keeping the CPU in low-power C-states than Windows. Hopefully we will see some improvement with Windows 7, but so far Windows is still an order of magnitude behind OS X.
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KidneyBean - Wednesday, August 12, 2009 - link
It's nice to see some humor in these articles. Nice to change it up. Reminds me of reading Mark Minasi tech books, and how much easier occasional humor makes it for me to read tech info.IntelUser2000 - Wednesday, August 12, 2009 - link
Jarred, the 475MHz core clock on the GMA 4500 is wrong. That has been the clock speed for pre-launch platforms. The GM45's GMA 4500MHD runs at 533MHz. Minor mistake but still a mistake.HexiumVII - Wednesday, August 12, 2009 - link
Can anyone comment on the performance of Aero with comparing the G45 with the X3200? I had a tablet with an X3500 that was a bit clunky with Win7 Aero Beta. It got a little better with RC drivers, but still not as snappy as 2D mode or dedicated graphics.JarredWalton - Wednesday, August 12, 2009 - link
I didn't notice any issues with normal applications in Windows Vista, but I don't know about Win7 yet. I will try to find time to do a follow-up looking at Win7 performance, and from what I've heard it's overall better than Vista (Gary for instance has it running on a netbook and he's very happy, whereas he hated Vista on the same netbook). Intel's Win7 drivers are likely still a work in progress as well, but at least you can get regular IGP driver updates from Intel.JarredWalton - Wednesday, August 12, 2009 - link
All I know is that GPU-Z reported the GMA 4500MHD as 475MHz. I would guess that either the utility is wrong (possible), or Intel gives vendors some leeway in the GPU/chipset clocks (also possible). If you have another utility that will be more reliable for determining the Intel IGP clock, let me know.IntelUser2000 - Wednesday, August 12, 2009 - link
Just take a look at the datasheet, its that simple: http://www.intel.com/Assets/PDF/datasheet/320122.p...">http://www.intel.com/Assets/PDF/datasheet/320122.p...The GPU-Z utility is bad. It's nowhere near the CPU counterpart. That aside, Intel doesn't really give out reading the GPU clock easily, and the 475MHz was also what was used in the pre-launch(ie. beta) GM45 platforms.
I heard Everest is more accurate, but in terms of actually measuring, there probably isn't one that measures the Intel IGPs properly.
IntelUser2000 - Wednesday, August 12, 2009 - link
http://www.beareyes.com.cn/2/lib/200810/13/335/gpu...">http://www.beareyes.com.cn/2/lib/200810/13/335/gpu...Please see how G45(desktop version) shows on the GPU-Z. It should show similar thing to above, unless the newer version updated to change that its 800MHz.
In reality, it isn't really measuring the clock.