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3D on the Laptop Computers Added on: Tue Jun 04 2002 |
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Beware, however, of heating issues with the Toshiba and reports of crashes with the Dell. All machines crash from time to time, so dont feel that laptops are inferior to PCs. They are not. The 3DMark2001 scores with the new Toshiba are in the 5000s. All of the good laptops for Max are going to be over 6 pounds. The slim Vaio notebooks from Sony are smaller and weigh a lot less but they don�t sport the power that these other, heavier laptops offer.
Beware of p3s!!!
I have seen a lot of p3s advertised in laptops and these are just desktop CPUs altered and placed in laptops. They have a heat issue. Case in point: I recently bought a Toshiba 5005-s507. It was a p3 1.1g, 512 pc133, 40gig HD and GeForce4 440 with 32 meg of ram. It ran Max smoothly and was a great multitasking/rendering machine. However, if you ran the machine for more than 10 minutes, the CPU would overheat and the bios would clock the cpu down to around 600mhz.
I called Toshiba and they said it was an issue with not enough thermal grease on the CPU. I talked to others who had purchased an s507 and they told me that even with the new grease applied to the CPU, the problem persisted. The issue was with the heatsink. The Toshiba model cannot adequately cool the machine.
 I recommend no one to buy this model. I put the laptop in the freezer (sealed in a plastic bag) for 10 minutes and then took it out and ran 3D Mark 2001. I got scores of 3500 and above. After running the benchmark 3 times further, the scores I got were 2800, 2200, 1800...respectively.
Any laptop, or computer for that matter, whose marks differ to that degree are defective in nature. You have the option with the Toshiba s507 to disable the bios and prevent the computer from clocking down, but as anyone who is knowledgeable about computers knows, heat will eventually destroy anything electrical. That is why I recommend staying away from the p3s. They are being phased out in favor of the new p4s.
The new p4s are smaller and thus draw less heat. Most of the p3s are cheaper, but I recommend opting for the p4s. I took the 5005 back and ordered my 5105.
The Toshiba 5105 S607 is a $2400 purchase, $500 more than the p3 1.1g 5005, but it is well worth it. Other aspects of the 5105 are its 40gig 5200rpm hard drive, its 512mg pc2100 ddr memory, and its UXGA TFT screen. Great quality all around. I recommend everyone buying a laptop opt for either an SXGA or a UXGA screen. They are both good, with the UXGA being able to rival a lot of professional graphics monitors.
The best procs
Athlons are coming into their own. They are not as powerful as the p4s and so I say unless you are on a budget, get the p4. Athlons, like the desktop CPUs, are less expensive, but unlike the desktop versions, they do not perform as well compared to the p4s. Laptops are a relatively new arena for AMD and so it might take a year or two to get their quality to the level of their desktop models. If you are looking to buy a laptop next year, maybe you should reevaluate AMD.
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