9. Conclusion

ATI has, without a doubt, created an incredible mobile computing experience with its ATI Mobility Radeon 7500. Currently, there is no mobile graphics GPU that can hold a candle to the performance of the ATI Mobility Radeon 7500.

As with all good things, enhanced performance usually comes with a price. In the case of the ATI Mobility Radeon 7500, it will add approximately $100.00 to the cost of the Dell Inspiron 8100 that we tested. We feel that an additional $100 isn't too much to tack on to the price of the laptop in exchange for performance of this caliber.

During our testing, we found the drivers for the Mobility Radeon 7500 to be stable and the power management performance to be beyond what we could have reasonably expected. The drivers for the NVIDIA GeForce2 Go, on the other hand, were sometimes challenging. We experienced some issues with some of the older versions of the GeForce2 Go driver. Version 16.40 of the GeForce2 Go does seem to address the majority of these issues, and is more stable than many previous versions of the driver under Windows XP. However, we still didn't like the somewhat annoying warning dialog box that constantly popped up when we were playing games on the 8100. (The warning box informs you that you are not running the notebook at the optimum resolution.) We found that it was possible to disable this warning using REGEDIT and changing the following registry key:

KEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\NVIDIACorporation\Global\NVTweak "QtwkEnableModeChangeWarning"=dword:00000000

Of course, we don't know if this is recommended, but we found that without the warning box disabled, some software crashed.

Our biggest gripe with the ATI Mobility Radeon 7500 is that currently there is only one notebook shipping that features it. Due to the longer design cycle of mobile products, this is understandable, but it would be nice for the consumer to have choices. We have no complaints with the Dell Inspiron 8100 and found it to be one of the best desktop replacement notebooks that we have tested.

If you want the current "best in class" graphics performance that money can buy in the mobile product arena, there is no question that the ATI Mobility Radeon 7500 can provide it.