new technologies by August?

Hello everyone,

I'm going to be buying a laptop for the coming Fall semester for college (for portable CAD work and office apps), and I want to get an Athlon 64 laptop. Does anyone know of any particular technologies that should be infiltrating the laptop market by August that would be worth waiting a bit to have? I'm currently looking at the eMachines selection, and I like the 6809 (mainly for the larger HD and the DVD burner), but I'm curious if anyone knows if there are any Athlon 64 notebook options in the works that will sport things like 128MB dedicated video memory, ATI 9700, SATA, or a native 7200 RPM HD option (I don't want to have to buy a new laptop just to immediately swap out the HD, but I will if I must).

How often does eMachines come out with a new laptop notebook version? I know that the 6809 just came out, but should I expect a new iteration before August?

Also, does anyone know if there's going to be an nForce3 chipset for laptops soon?

I've heard that some 15+" laptop screens tend to not be as durable as the smaller screens. Is this true with the 680x series?

I've built several desktop systems, but I'm a complete newbie to laptops. Any advice anyone could give on how buying a laptop differs from buying a desktop would be welcome.

Thanks a bunch for your help everyone.

Patric

 

what kind of cad work?
if it's 3d rendering you'd get buy with the 9600 but
a 9700 128m would be better.
also upgrading to 1 gig of ram and a 7200 rpm drive would help.
for general drafting and modeling just a ram upgrade would do.

 

It is not a 3-D rendering situation (although I wouldn't totally rule that out in the not too distant future), but I do like to play games as well. ;-)

I was already planning on seeing if I could get a laptop with one 512 MB stick so I could do an easy RAM upgrade, and I was considering the 7200 RPM drive rather essential (I'm used to a tweaked desktop).

I was asking about the SATA because I was told that it didn't exist in laptops, but I swear I can remember seeing SATA in the specs for a Centrino based notebook.

 

the emachines does have 128 dedicated memory, not shared. It was misprint on their website.

 

I play ut2004 on mine and it works great.
that's all I bought it for was to bring to lan parties.
the screen isn't as nice as my samsung 21.3 but it's nice.
ut2004 works fine at the screens native res also 1280x800.
I haven't done any level design or modeling on it yet,
even my desktop computers needed 1g for those tasks.
so far it's a great addition to the herd.

 

You can add a 1gig stick to the M series and that would give you 1.2gig and you wouldn't have to mess with the internal memory. There are laptops that have what you want (- the SATA) but they come at a premium. SAGAR and Alienware make some pretty high end laptops and are in the 3-4 thousand dollar range.

As for the Emachines, I am pretty happy with the build quality. I am constanly opening and closing the screen and it is on 24/7 doing Distributive computing.

 

By then I would think the new AMD FX53 and FX51 chips may be in notebooks. These are the latest and fastest 64-bit processors, but at the moment they are only in desktops and the FX53 costs ~800

zx5000 :: 2.4M :: 512 DDR :: 40gb 4200 RPM HD :: 15.4" :: Radeon 9600 Mobilty M10 :: Aquamark3 21,862

 

Thanks for the info!

Is it just the 6809 that has the 128 MB of video memory, or does the 6805 have that too?

I can live without the SATA as long as I can get my hands on a 7200 RPM HD, but is there a way to get the 6809 to come with 1 stick of 512 MB (in the hard to reach slot) instead of 2 x 256 MB?

Will the 7200 RPM HD degrade my battery life more than a 4200 or 5400 RPM HD?

Is the ATI 9700 a higher priced item like SATA? or do you think it will permeate the middle market rather quickly?

I think the FX chips will be out of my price range. I'm trying to keep the price ~$1500. I'm just trying to figure out if I should buy now in case Gateway might discontinue the emachines line, or if there are neat things that might be in this price range before August.

 

The 6809 comes with the ATI Radeon 9600 w/64meg of memory. It is more than enough for a laptop and I can play the newest games without any problems (Far Cry, BF Vietnam).
You are not going to find the 9700 in this price range. The 9600 in our machines is capable of running PRO speeds with a simple utility. Default the 9600 is at 300mhz Core and 200mhz memory but most people can run 400mhz+ core and around 230mhz for the memory.
Adding a 7200RPM drive is not going to hurt the battery that much. Theoretically using the faster drive would mean that it is not used as much do to the faster speed and should actually save power but I have never campared the two.
As for the memory, these are pre-built machines and come with the standard 2X256. Only option is to add a 512 or 1gig stick, this is unless you want to open it up. It is really not that hard to get to the internal memory and if you kept the 256meg stick you could always put it back if you had any warranty issues.

Another nice thing that has not been brought up is that this laptop uses a ZIF (Zero Insertion Force) socket, just like a desktop, and the CPU can easilly be upgraded.

 

actually there's a shootout on tom's hardware and
it shows 4200, 5400 and 7200 and the 7200 doesn't
pull as much current as the 4200 because of the better
bearings and driveline.
the stock 6805 works for everything i do
I just wish they would have put 1 stick of 512 in it instead of
2 256's i would have payed the exstra $50 for sure.

 

I'm going to write an e-mail to emachines about the video ram because kvkv6 says its 128 MB, and Orion7144 says that it's 64 MB (like the website). I'll let you know what they say.

Does anyone remember how long it took Best Buy and Circuit City to adopt their respective emachines Athlon 64 laptops after they were introduced? I'm trying to estimate how long it will take for the 6809 to find its way on the shelves at a place where I can find good sales. ;-)

Roadkill, thanks for the article about HD speeds and power usage/performance. That was very informative, and answered my HD questions.

Does OCing the video card generate much extra heat? Or is the extra heat not that significant?

 

Yes OCing a vid card will generate more heat and is a pretty risky idea for laptops. Since you dont have the airflow of a desktop nor can you add new cooling to it very easily so you are a lot more likely to fry your card for not too much gain.

zx5000 :: 2.4M :: 512 DDR :: 40gb 4200 RPM HD :: 15.4" :: Radeon 9600 Mobilty M10 :: Aquamark3 21,862

 

<blockquote id='quote'> quote:<hr height='1' noshade id='quote'>Originally posted by Quikster

 

Since emachines' website was acting flaky, I called their tech support and customer service line and here is what I discovered:

The video ram is 64 MB
They didn't have a determinant HD speed to give me, but the guy was assuming 4200 RPM. He said they were still gathering info on HD speed since the 6809 was a new product.
They only sell the stock laptop, and no customizing through them is possible (so no 512 MB of RAM in 1 stick).
He said that the 6809 should be appearing in stores like BB and CC anytime now. He directed me to www.jandr.com as a retail outlet. They have a few extra snippits of info on the laptop there, but I think they're wrong about the video card sharing memory with the main memory supply.
He also said that they have new laptops coming out every quarter. When elaborating he said there should be a new version of Athlon 64 laptop around July.
Also, as far as he knew, Gateway was going to leave emachines as a separate subsidiary, and that there were no planned changes to the emachines line up as a result of the Gateway acquisition.

I guess I'm going to wait until the July time frame before buying a laptop to see if the customer service representative was correct.

Thank you for your help everyone!

Patric