ATI Mobility X600 / X700

[sosuke]

So I am looking at buying a laptop, just for mobile work use mainly, but I want to be able to play some games as well. The problem I have is that I am looking at two laptops, one has the X600 with 128mb of RAM while the other has the X700 with 64mb of RAM, there are no real benchmarks for the X700 with only 64mb of RAM. Which do you think would perform better?

The other difference in the machines is one has 1024mb of ram (X600) and the other has 512 (X700) also the processor for the X600 is a wait, im just gonna breakdown

Mobile AMD Athlon? 64 Processor 3700+
ATI Mobility X600 128mb
1024mb RAM
15.4" screen

Intel® Pentium® M processor 740
ATI Mobility X700 64mb
512mb RAM
17" screen

 

[Keysplayr]

Out of these two. This one:

Intel® Pentium® M processor 740 (lower power consumption and cooler)

ATI Mobility X700 64mb (you may be able to upgrade this later but should be sufficient.
Its faster than the X600 which only has 4 pipes. X700 has 8 pipes)

512mb RAM (definately can upgrade this)

17" screen (Cant pass up this bigger screen)

 

[Mingon]

X700, I had an mobility 9700 (almsot the same as x600) and I found it too slow for most games unless they were low res

 

[blckgrffn]

Careful, the 64 meg one might have a 64-bit memory interface, the 128 memory interface would be much better...

Nat

 

[Melted Rabbit]

Originally posted by: sosuke
The other difference in the machines is one has 1024mb of ram (X600) and the other has 512 (X700) also the processor for the X600 is a wait, im just gonna breakdown

Keep in mind that the X700 has 8 pipes and a and the X600 is a 4 pipe part. Both probably could be using either a 128-bit path or a 64-bit path. There is probably no way to tell from the specs. Regardless of the data path width, the X700 is always going to be faster than than the X600. The other thing to consider is that the X700 could be using GDDR3 RAM which would also make it faster. As mentioned in the previous comments, the AMD procesor will use more power than the Pentium M.

I'm not sure of how much money you want to spend, but Acer has some decent 15.4" laptops based on both the AMD Turion and the Intel Pentium M with which use an X700 with 128MB of RAM. I own an Acer TravelMate 8104 and I am fairly happy with it. The X700 in the 8104 is clocked at 360/300, according to ATITool, it has a 2.0GHz Pentium M, 1024MB RAM, 1680x1050 15.4" screen, a 4-pin Firewire port, DVD+DL drive, and Windows XP Pro. There is a slightly less expensive version of the 8104 called the 8103 with a slower processor and less ram. There is also an Acer AMD Turion laptop from Acer with an X700 with 128 MB of RAM, however I have no idea how it will perform. There are a few small complaints I have with the 8104 though. The X700 only uses GDDR1 memory, GDD3 would have been faster, but that you would probably only find on DTR laptops. Also the hard drive uses the FAT32 filesystem because the Acer backup software does not understand NTFS partitions. FAT32 is less fault tolerant than NTFS and FAT32 is limited to file sizes of less than 2GB.

 

[currahee]

Uhhh blckgrffn, the X600 has a 256 bit memory interface.
The X600 has a 400MHz clock and it's peak fillrate is 1.6Gpixels/sec. The memory speed is 250MHz and it's memory bandwidth is 12.8GB/s
The X700 has a 350MHz clock and it's peak fillrate is 2.8Gpixels/sec. This is strange, the X700 has a 128-bit memory interface and the memory speed is 350MHz. It's memory bandwidth is 11.2GB/s (taken from Adrian's ROJAKPOT)
I have a compaq nx8220 with a 64MB X600 and it works out fine for me. There's a bit of an issue with Battlefield 2 (button and mouse lag) but other than that it works fine for me.
Personally, i'd get the X600 laptop. It has double the memory. As far as I can tell, with 64MB on a 17" screen won't really do you much good to play games at that res.

 

[Bateluer]

Personally, I would try find a 128MB mobile 6600 or 6800.

However, if you are set on one of those two, the 128MB X600 would probably be a better than a 64MB X700.

 

[Johnmcl7]

The X600, as with its mobility 9600/9700 has 128bit memory not 256 bit.

John