Nowdays ATI (we just couldn’t say AMD) has the leadership crown in desktop graphics, but there aren’t many people to tell you they also have some of the best mainstream notebook graphics too. Mobility Radeon HD4570 is to be considered the best entry-level laptop video card ever, as no matter how low is its price tag of the notebook, it still manages to give good performance.Mobility Radeon HD4650 and HD4670 are to be found in some of the mid-range notebooks from major manufacturers, and it is more expensive, but faster than NVIDIA GeForce GT240M. HD4670 is as good as the desktop Radeon HD4670 and you can play pretty much every game on it. …read on
Nowdays both ATI and NVIDIA have techniques for lowering the GPU power consumption in notebooks based on lower core and memory speeds in 2D modes or while running the notebook in battery mode. While NVIDIA uses their Powermizer integration in Windows Power schemes (2D mode in Power saver, Low power 3D in Balanced and High performance 3D in High performance), ATI have their PowerPlay running in any of the Windows power modes as user directs it. For us Power Play always seemed the smarter and more controllable function, yet it doesn’t always do what it has to. For example, if your notebook has Mobility Radeon HD4570, it may suffer from a bug in PowerPlay that can lead to lowered memory speed in both power saver and performance modes. There is a fix, though. …read on
Flash 10.1 is finally knocking on our door and we have great expectations for this new version. A bit of beta testing we did revealed that either Adobe didn’t do that much, or they’ve just spent too many words on a huge PR campaign without obvious impact on the end user. Adobe Flash 10.1 is developed in tight collaboration of NVIDIA (means NVIDIA got their fingers everywhere, nice for them) and promises DXVA hardware acceleration of HD flash video content which is now huge problem for mobile devices and netbooks. Well, it actually promises DXVA on NVIDIA cards in one of the NVIDIA reviewer’s guides, but it also mentions Intel GMA 4500M, and not a word about ATI/AMD (which is expected). …read on
After watching some advertisement of Lenovo’s ThinkPad W700ds, we just couldn’t resist the urge to mock them a bit. You know, W700ds is really (and we mean it) the nerd’s dream – anyone who wants powerfull laptop that doesn’t come from space (read: Alienware) but is more suited for work, rugged and all that, has to know that ThinkPad W700ds has it all. It’s a kind of beast performance-wise, but what’s hot in it is that it has all the things and gadgets and stuff that makes you feel proud of it… …read on
As we recently mentioned here, Acer had plans on releasing at least two notebooks based on Intel Core i7 and ATI’s newest Mobility Radeon HD5650. Few days later it became clear that there is heavy shortage of HD5xxx chips and videocards, which would apply also to the mobile graphic cards by ATI. Our guy at Acer commented that we can expect a delay of the new HD5650-based models, although he couldn’t say how much we’ll have to wait. …read on
