Gaming Performance
...And after only a few moments of attempting to run games on the X3100, we were left very disappointed. So disappointed, in fact, that there will be no charts on this page -- and you know how much we love charts! Driver support is definitely lacking right now, and Intel is apparently only now reaching the beta level with their drivers, at least in terms of gaming support. The latest nonpublic drivers apparently support Battlefield 2 among other things, but with the public drivers on pretty much every game we loaded we had to reduce the detail levels to the absolute minimum in order to get acceptable performance. Once that was done, though, quite a few games became playable.
Company of Heroes was one of the surprises, as we could enable all of the graphics options and the game still worked. It averaged about 3 FPS at 1280x800 (and as much as 7 FPS at 800x600) but with many of the more recent titles refusing to run at all we were surprised we got that far. Dropping Company of Heroes to minimum details allowed barely acceptable performance at 1024x768 (24 FPS).
We also managed to run Quake 4, even at high detail settings... but with average frame rates hovering around 2 FPS. Setting all detail levels to the minimum and running at 640x480 resulted in the game almost being playable -- frame rates reached 15 FPS! The same goes for Far Cry: we could run it at all of the various detail settings, but performance was terrible unless we used minimum detail levels. At minimum details, however, frame rates reached almost 25 FPS (even at 1280x800) and you could at least struggle through the game that way if you were desperate.
The list of titles that didn't work properly is quite a bit longer. Oblivion, Supreme Commander, Battlefield 2, Battlefield 2142, F.E.A.R. all failed to run at all. S.T.A.L.K.E.R. actually worked, and at minimum details it could choke out frame rates in the low teens, but it didn't appear to be fully stable and it certainly wasn't what we would consider playable. The Half-Life 2 engine games had some strange behavior where they defaulted to software-based DX9 rendering and they wouldn't let us change the rendering mode.
Long story short, the drivers definitely need more work to even run many games at very low detail settings. Titles that don't leverage any pixel/vertex shaders generally fared better, and of course Windows Vista did manage to run the Aero Glass theme without any difficulties. The bottom line, however, is that the graphics are more suited to business work than anything else. And, honestly, there's nothing wrong with that; as long as people don't go into the purchase expecting GMA X3100 graphics to provide a great DirectX 9 experience, they should be okay. If you want even basic gaming support, you really should spend the extra money for the GeForce 8400M upgrade.
...And after only a few moments of attempting to run games on the X3100, we were left very disappointed. So disappointed, in fact, that there will be no charts on this page -- and you know how much we love charts! Driver support is definitely lacking right now, and Intel is apparently only now reaching the beta level with their drivers, at least in terms of gaming support. The latest nonpublic drivers apparently support Battlefield 2 among other things, but with the public drivers on pretty much every game we loaded we had to reduce the detail levels to the absolute minimum in order to get acceptable performance. Once that was done, though, quite a few games became playable.
Company of Heroes was one of the surprises, as we could enable all of the graphics options and the game still worked. It averaged about 3 FPS at 1280x800 (and as much as 7 FPS at 800x600) but with many of the more recent titles refusing to run at all we were surprised we got that far. Dropping Company of Heroes to minimum details allowed barely acceptable performance at 1024x768 (24 FPS).
We also managed to run Quake 4, even at high detail settings... but with average frame rates hovering around 2 FPS. Setting all detail levels to the minimum and running at 640x480 resulted in the game almost being playable -- frame rates reached 15 FPS! The same goes for Far Cry: we could run it at all of the various detail settings, but performance was terrible unless we used minimum detail levels. At minimum details, however, frame rates reached almost 25 FPS (even at 1280x800) and you could at least struggle through the game that way if you were desperate.
The list of titles that didn't work properly is quite a bit longer. Oblivion, Supreme Commander, Battlefield 2, Battlefield 2142, F.E.A.R. all failed to run at all. S.T.A.L.K.E.R. actually worked, and at minimum details it could choke out frame rates in the low teens, but it didn't appear to be fully stable and it certainly wasn't what we would consider playable. The Half-Life 2 engine games had some strange behavior where they defaulted to software-based DX9 rendering and they wouldn't let us change the rendering mode.
Long story short, the drivers definitely need more work to even run many games at very low detail settings. Titles that don't leverage any pixel/vertex shaders generally fared better, and of course Windows Vista did manage to run the Aero Glass theme without any difficulties. The bottom line, however, is that the graphics are more suited to business work than anything else. And, honestly, there's nothing wrong with that; as long as people don't go into the purchase expecting GMA X3100 graphics to provide a great DirectX 9 experience, they should be okay. If you want even basic gaming support, you really should spend the extra money for the GeForce 8400M upgrade.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
26 Comments
View All Comments
JarredWalton - Tuesday, June 26, 2007 - link
Funny you should mention the E-155-C.... :DFant - Friday, June 22, 2007 - link
Seems HP shipped you a badly specced machine. They should have used a 5400rpm drive and the nvidia graphics chip as well as the extended 6-cell. All three would have improved your benchmarks. Out of curiousity, did you use a clean vista build or the out of the box vista build that hp supplies with loads of extras installed?JarredWalton - Saturday, June 23, 2007 - link
HP's install, minus a bunch of software that I didn't want running. Although, when I ran SYSmark 2007, I ahd to do a clean install first. (Now you know why the lack of GbE was annoying - image a HDD over 100 Mbit and I averaged 3 MB/s instead of 12 MB/s with GbE. Not sure why, but Acronis only manages to use about 25% of the Ethernet bandwidth.) Anyway, I like to make the testing close to "real world", and most people don't buy an HP, Dell, Gateway, etc. notebook only to install their own operating system. (Businesses are different story, but let's not go there.)I actually don't think that the configuration they sent was all that bad. It may not perform as well in benchmarks, but the fact of the matter is that a lot of people get way too hung up on benchmark results. Do you want a faster hard drive, or do you prefer having a bit more storage? There is no right answer, although personally I would generally go with one of the 120-160GB 7200 RPM laptop drives if possible. As for the battery, they did send me the 12-cell for testing, and the only thing I really would like to know is the capacity of the extended 6-cell. The basic 6-cell is a 47 WHr, so if they extended capacity is 65 WHr it would increase battery life by about 35-40%. I'm trying to get an answer from HP about the capacity of the other 6-cell offering.
Fant - Saturday, June 23, 2007 - link
I have a dv6500t with the extended 6-cell. I havent done any formal testing but I probably get just under 3 hours with the HP Recommended / Balanced Power Plan in Vista and a bit over 3 hours when using the Power Saver Plan. I did notice that the cpu seems to stay at the lower speed with the Power Saver Plan but seems to stay at the higher speeds with the HP Recommended / Balanced Power Plan even when I am not doing much cpu intensive tasks.JarredWalton - Saturday, June 23, 2007 - link
Can you check the battery and see what the rating is? Usually it will say something like "10.8V ~= xx WHr". I want to know the Watt-Hour rating. I'm not sure why, but the notebook I have almost never runs at minimum CPU speed. Weird.hubajube - Friday, June 22, 2007 - link
I was waiting to read on how this laptop performed when watching HD DVD's. I'm interested in buying this for my wife for her to use as a work laptop but at the same time I'd like to use it as a HTPC. Oh well guess I'll have to spend the money to find out. :(JarredWalton - Friday, June 22, 2007 - link
Yeah, they didn't send the HD-DVD version. I'm not sure if the 8400M GS is required for that or not - maybe X3100 can do enough to handle it (but I doubt it). Anyway, we've tested 8600 cards with HD-DVD, and I don't see why the 8400M wouldn't handle it fine. Problem is, the display is still pretty poor, especially when you consider that video overlay can have a color correction profile applied.shady3005 - Friday, June 22, 2007 - link
I was gonna consider this laptop but was turned off by the lack of gigabit ethernet. Dint know about the horrible display at that time. So i was waiting for an upgrade to this laptop but sadly none came.Then I set my eyes on the new Macbook pro. Just 500$ higher that top dv6500t config but worth every extra penny. Amazing display , much lighter , thinner , sexier and CPU (2.2Ghz) and Graphics (8600GT M) upgrade with much better battery life.
Please review the new MacBooks with Santa Rosa ..... I would like to hear how awesome they are ..
crimson117 - Friday, June 22, 2007 - link
I lol'd pretty good at this one :)
BPB - Friday, June 22, 2007 - link
Maybe I missed it, if so please excuse me, but I think you simply used the ABG wireless setup. I was wondering how well the N wireless works, and how well it talks to other N devices such as my Belkin N1. My wife's HP works quite well with the Belkin N PCMCIA and router, but for our next notebook I'd like to have the N built-in.