Notebook Trio: ASUS A8JS and G2P and ABS Mayhem Z5
by Jarred Walton on December 29, 2006 12:15 PM EST- Posted in
- Laptops
Battery Life
Having easily swept the gaming benchmarks, the ABS Mayhem Z5 now faces its most difficult task: battery life. First, let's take a look at the MobileMark 2005 results. Note that in this case, the power saving features were left enabled and we will not be retesting as few people are willing to sacrifice battery life for a bit more performance on the road.
As expected, the ABS laptop - with its smaller battery compared to the G2P - provides rather abysmal battery life. Even if you turn down every performance setting possible, you're not likely to break two hours of battery life. For whatever reason, the default power profile on the ABS laptop results in much lower performance than that of the ASUS laptops. Not only does it provide less battery life, but the performance in the MobileMark 2002 productivity test is 40% lower than the other Core 2 Duo T7200 equipped laptops. It's interesting that even the XPS M1710 with a Core Duo processor is able to post significantly better results, so perhaps ABS and their partners can do some additional performance tuning to help improve performance without sacrificing battery life.
Moving beyond the ABS results, the ASUS G2P and A8JS provide similar performance, but the A8JS clearly provides better battery life. The larger and brighter display definitely takes a toll here, though the ATI X1700 does appear to do quite a bit better when it comes to DVD playback. We have noticed in the past that NVIDIA chipsets appear to consume more power during DVD decoding than roughly equivalent ATI chipsets, so if you are purely interested in a laptop that will be used for watching movies on the road, picking up something with a Radeon Mobility X1300-X1700 chipset is probably the best way to go. Unfortunately, good performance results in DVD playback do not translate to better 3D performance, and at present the fastest ATI Radeon Mobility product is a rather outdated X1800.
Kicking things up to the next level, we tested how long the laptops could manage to run a reasonably complex 3D gaming title in battery mode with the display set to maximum brightness. (It's really not practical to play games without cranking up the brightness levels on most laptops.) For this test, we looped the three 3DMark05 gaming benchmarks continually until the battery ran out. Informal testing with a few other actual games - Company of Heroes in particular - shows that battery life for a complex 3D game will actually be lower than what we show here, as the CPU and audio subsystems will typically be more involved. We chose to use 3DMark05 because it is easiest to set up a repeatable test that will last more than an hour. As you can see, the ABS system lasted one hour and the other two laptops lasted close to 90 minutes. Keep in mind the performance offered by the various graphics solutions, however, as lasting a bit longer on battery life may not mean much if the overall gaming experience isn't acceptable.
The worst part about the battery life results is that they basically highlight a fundamental issue with laptops: you can't get high-performance and long battery life in the same package, for the most part. That goes doubly when it comes to 3D/gaming performance, as NVIDIA and ATI have been in an arms race where power use has been a secondary or even tertiary concern next to winning the performance crown. ATI's current desktop parts consume so much power that it is basically impractical to consider putting an X1950 type GPU into a laptop (though the X1950 Pro might be able to work with some modifications). GeForce 8800 doesn't do much better these days, and it might be awhile before we see a GeForce Go product based off the G80 chipsets. For now, the fastest laptop GPUs are the GeForce Go 7900/7950 GTX products, although if you want even more performance there are also some SLI laptops available.
Having easily swept the gaming benchmarks, the ABS Mayhem Z5 now faces its most difficult task: battery life. First, let's take a look at the MobileMark 2005 results. Note that in this case, the power saving features were left enabled and we will not be retesting as few people are willing to sacrifice battery life for a bit more performance on the road.
As expected, the ABS laptop - with its smaller battery compared to the G2P - provides rather abysmal battery life. Even if you turn down every performance setting possible, you're not likely to break two hours of battery life. For whatever reason, the default power profile on the ABS laptop results in much lower performance than that of the ASUS laptops. Not only does it provide less battery life, but the performance in the MobileMark 2002 productivity test is 40% lower than the other Core 2 Duo T7200 equipped laptops. It's interesting that even the XPS M1710 with a Core Duo processor is able to post significantly better results, so perhaps ABS and their partners can do some additional performance tuning to help improve performance without sacrificing battery life.
Moving beyond the ABS results, the ASUS G2P and A8JS provide similar performance, but the A8JS clearly provides better battery life. The larger and brighter display definitely takes a toll here, though the ATI X1700 does appear to do quite a bit better when it comes to DVD playback. We have noticed in the past that NVIDIA chipsets appear to consume more power during DVD decoding than roughly equivalent ATI chipsets, so if you are purely interested in a laptop that will be used for watching movies on the road, picking up something with a Radeon Mobility X1300-X1700 chipset is probably the best way to go. Unfortunately, good performance results in DVD playback do not translate to better 3D performance, and at present the fastest ATI Radeon Mobility product is a rather outdated X1800.
Kicking things up to the next level, we tested how long the laptops could manage to run a reasonably complex 3D gaming title in battery mode with the display set to maximum brightness. (It's really not practical to play games without cranking up the brightness levels on most laptops.) For this test, we looped the three 3DMark05 gaming benchmarks continually until the battery ran out. Informal testing with a few other actual games - Company of Heroes in particular - shows that battery life for a complex 3D game will actually be lower than what we show here, as the CPU and audio subsystems will typically be more involved. We chose to use 3DMark05 because it is easiest to set up a repeatable test that will last more than an hour. As you can see, the ABS system lasted one hour and the other two laptops lasted close to 90 minutes. Keep in mind the performance offered by the various graphics solutions, however, as lasting a bit longer on battery life may not mean much if the overall gaming experience isn't acceptable.
The worst part about the battery life results is that they basically highlight a fundamental issue with laptops: you can't get high-performance and long battery life in the same package, for the most part. That goes doubly when it comes to 3D/gaming performance, as NVIDIA and ATI have been in an arms race where power use has been a secondary or even tertiary concern next to winning the performance crown. ATI's current desktop parts consume so much power that it is basically impractical to consider putting an X1950 type GPU into a laptop (though the X1950 Pro might be able to work with some modifications). GeForce 8800 doesn't do much better these days, and it might be awhile before we see a GeForce Go product based off the G80 chipsets. For now, the fastest laptop GPUs are the GeForce Go 7900/7950 GTX products, although if you want even more performance there are also some SLI laptops available.
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unclebud - Saturday, December 30, 2006 - link
"Seems all the usual suspects are on a holiday"more than likely they were just thrown speechless by such extreme bias in this "review"...
newsflash - it can have a sorry gma 900 in it that can barely play rollercoaster tycoon and call it a "gaming laptop" if they want...
ugh. i tried skipping around to get something valuable out of this "article", but there aren't any pictures of the models even...
going to reread mr anand's review of his laptop to cheer myself up -- now that's a thorough review!
JarredWalton - Saturday, December 30, 2006 - link
"but there aren't any pictures of the models even"Umm... what? There are 36 images (with enlarged shots) in the article, plus another 30 or so graphs/charts. If you're not seeing them, either your browser is incorrectly configured and is blocking the images, or else the servers are having issues. And if someone called a GMA900 a "gaming notebook" they would be lying; calling an X1700 laptop a gaming laptop is more of an exaggeration, but it's clearly not the fastest mobile GPU.
I honestly have no idea what you mean by bias, so I'd be happy if you would point out areas that are "biased" rather than just giving a blanket label to the article.
mino - Friday, December 29, 2006 - link
Overall a nice review, those ASU are getting some serious popularity here in Europe while the reviews are nowhere to find..However, ranting for half a page about 14inch not having numeric keypad? I would have thought it was under you level of knowledge...
While the KB is NOT perfect in any sense - small enter, small keys.. - the absence of numeric keypad is natural.
Maybe you should spend a few weeks on road with some 17inch baby of yours to see how "important" numeric keypad really is...
One thing I hate about A8J is that transreflective (CrystalSomething) screen. It is pretty much unusable the moment the sun shines, and it does shine a bit too much in the summer.
JarredWalton - Friday, December 29, 2006 - link
I wasn't really complaining about the lack of a numpad on the 14" A8Js, merely pointing out that it's not there and you really can't fit one into such a chassis. My "rant" for half a paragraph was dedicated to the Fn key - and mostly I was just talking about the uses and making a minor complaint about it not being switched with the Ctrl key location. Unless you're looking somewhere else?I tried to discuss my feelings about the keyboards on each laptop, as that's pretty important with long-term use. Given what I do for a living (writing), I would actually avoid purchasing the G2P (as tested) and the Mayhem Z5 purely on the basis of the keyboard alone. The US G2P might actually be fine, as the primary issue I had was with the mixed up locations (relative to most keyboards) of the \ and " keys.
As for the G2P, that's where I complained about the missing numpad, and it's a 17" model notebook. I complained about this same issue on the Dell XPS M1710 and E1705, as I use numpads on a regular basis and find them to be important. Ironically, the ABS includes a numpad, which I liked, but the other missing keys (Home - PgDn) were at least as irritating to me as the lack of a numpad. Obviously, my taste in keyboards isn't the same as every other person's, which I why I started the article talking about the importance of trying out laptops in person where possible - or try a similar laptop if that's all you can do.
Ideally, I'd like a 17" notebook to have a numpad and a layout very much like the ABS, only shrink the width of the Backspace, \, Enter, and Shift keys and put in a column with Home, End, PgUp, and PgDn similar to how the two ASUS laptops do it. There's plenty of room there for those keys... or just extend the keyboard area down a bit and put the keys right above the cursors like on a regular keyboard.
As for the two ASUS laptop LCDs, I didn't find the LCD on the G2P to have problems in bright light (sunlight is a stretch but possible). Hopefully all newer ASUS laptops have LCDs more like the G2P. The A8J on the other hand is definitely the worst LCD of the bunch and really suitable for indoor use only (or on overcast days). When I first used it I didn't think too much about the LCD quality, as most laptop LCDs can't compete with desktop LCDs in terms of brightness and color quality. After playing with the other notebooks, however, I became quite unhappy with the A8J LCD. Sure, it helps battery life, but all you need to do is have more brightness levels to allow for lowered battery use on LCDs like the G2P.
mino - Saturday, December 30, 2006 - link
Seems all the usuall suspect are on a holiday :)Maybe I should read a bit more thoroughy, and sllep more too :). Point taken.
As for the display, the are two things. I am yet to see an glossy surface LCD to be usable on sunlight. They are nice and sharp for movies and indoors. But my observation is that the moment sun shines (also through an unprotected window) the display changes to a mirror - well, it called an "mirror effect" dispaly sometimes :). At the same conditionas even a poor-quality anti-glare one retains usability.
That said I will have to pass the A8J, otherwise it is pretty solid bundle(I like the BT+DVI+14"WXGA+ combo).
Should the time come when the notebook are regularly of built-to-order variety such is it with cars now. That way most of these "issues" with manufacturer isung bad display, VGA, CPU and so on would be a thing of the past.
It would not even increase the price too much provided good automation is employed. Actually this would greatly simplify the abundance of notebook based of the same chassis with a bit different internals only.
Hell, just ASUS has 5+ series with the same 15.4inch chassis...
mino - Saturday, December 30, 2006 - link
spelling, here you come :(francisco54 - Friday, May 16, 2014 - link
hola mepodeia mamdar los draivers de este ordenador