3. What Did We Get To Test?

Explaining what we were able to test is a bit of a challenge; perhaps the best way to explain is to say that it was an existing notebook from a tier one vendor that was fitted with a Mobility Radeon 9600 for testing purposes.

Why all of this "cloak and dagger" about the notebook? Well, while ATI owns the graphics technology developed for this notebook, it does not own the notebook design itself. As you can imagine, this presents quite a quandary for ATI. While they are able to show us the notebook with the technology in it, they can't talk about the specifics of the notebook, because it is an unannounced, unreleased product. In fact, although ATI has developed a version of this notebook that uses the Mobility Radeon 9600, they were not able to confirm if they have a positive design win for this notebook at this time.

This all we can show you of our test notebook. It is better than nothing, but still you can't see much.

What we can tell you about the notebook is that it was in the following configuration: Intel Pentium 4m 2.4 GHz, Intel 845MP Chipset, 512 MB of PC-2100 DDR SODIMM, 15.4 wide-aspect display WSXGA+ (with a max resolution of 1680 x 1050 supported with the installed driver), nine-cell Lithium Ion battery/ 72WHr, 40 GB, 5400-RPM hard drive, CDRW/ DVD combo drive, integrated 10/100 NIC and modem, and we estimated the unit weight at about 8.5 lbs. Beyond the configuration information included here and the picture of the test unit that you see in the picture, we are prohibited from saying anything additional about the notebook.

One very curious thing about our test notebook was the fact that it used the WSXGA+ display. It limited our testing somewhat, as normally, we prefer to focus on testing notebook graphics at the non-scaled, native max resolution of the display.

In this case, however, the benchmarks that we used, which were primarily games, do not support the native 1680 x 1050 wide-aspect resolution. This presented some issues, because all of the tests could only be run at 1024 x 768 and 1280 x 1024. Certainly, this opens the door for a potential unknown, because we were unable to get any idea of what the performance would be at 1600 x 1200. Although we can draw some conclusions from our testing at 1024 x 768 and 1280 x 1024, we would have preferred that ATI had supplied us with a testing unit that was able to handle 1600 x 1200, rather than the wide-aspect display.

With all of this information on the table, we can say that the scaling at the 1024 x 768 and 1280 x 1024 resolutions was pretty good, and much better than we expected. We suspect that much of this was due to the high-quality panel that was in our test unit. When examining the image quality at the native 1680 x 1050 using DisplayMate for Windows, it was obvious that the quality of the panel was quite good and that it offered a very wide viewing angle. The panel is ideal for widescreen DVD playback.

The Mobility Radeon 9600 in our test unit was clocked at 351 MHz core and 284 MHz memory using the new GDDR-2M memory technology that ATI announced. While the initial specs indicated that the memory could be clocked as high as 300 MHz, the test unit proved to be unstable when the memory was clocked this high. This version of the Mobility Radeon 9600 had the GDDR-2M memory outside of the core. Future versions will have the ability incorporate the memory within the core