DiRT 3 has a history of being more easily bottlenecked on platforms backed by AMD graphics solutions. That's why we thought nothing of it when we saw low performance numbers from this title in Xotic PC NP9150: Striking Back At Kepler With Radeon HD 7970M. It turned out, however, that DiRT 3 was suffering from AMD's Enduro graphics bug.
We installed AMD's Catalyst 12.11 Beta 3 build and immediately saw significantly higher average frame rates, giving us a good indication of just how driver-limited the original driver from Clevo really was.


When we really tax the graphics subsystem with DiRT's Ultra quality preset and 8x MSAA, the Radeon HD 7970M stomps Nvidia's GeForce GTX 675M.
But then we stumble across another problem. We're in the process of updating our testing suite from an old set of games, which included DiRT, to a new set, which includes F1 2012. For some reason, Enduro doesn't work with Digital Storm's configuration and F1 2012 using the original Clevo driver, Catalyst 12.11 Beta 3, or even Beta 4. We know it worked on a different notebook using the same driver from Clevo, so the problem appears specific to this platform. In essence, when we configure the game to run on AMD's graphics module, the game tries to launch, is visible as a running process consuming resources, but never shows up.
For now, the solution in F1 2012 is to run the game from Intel's HD Graphics 4000 engine. That's good enough to get us through 1280x720 using the High quality preset. But of course, anything more demanding is simply unplayable.
Also, you'll notice that we mentioned the Beta 4 build of AMD's Catalyst 12.11 driver, but tested using Beta 3. The newer version was unstable on this hardware, and became increasingly unstable over time. Fortunately, the latest Beta 8 release gets us back to Beta 3 performance levels without the stability issues of Beta 4.
- Portable Gaming On A 17.3" Screen
- Getting To Know The x17
- Inside Digital Storm's x17
- Hardware And Test Setup
- Benchmark Results: DiRT 3 And F1 2012 Problems
- Benchmark Results: Battlefield 3 And Metro 2033
- Benchmark Results: Skyrim And StarCraft II
- Benchmark Results: Audio and Video Encoding
- Benchmark Results: Productivity
- Power Consumption, Battery Life, And Efficiency
- Does A Fixed Radeon HD 7970M Help Digital Storm?
The only differences were that mine has a Blu-Ray drive, 1TB Hard drive, HDMI In, all USB ports were USB 3.0 and the CPU was a 3630QM..
My M17X set me back $2500 ON SALE from $3000 AUSD. I don't even know why since the Australian dollar is a lot bloody stronger than the U.S dollar.
probably the difference between laws, importing cost. market size and such. as a smaller non relevant analogy, its similar to the situation between the U.S and Canada when it comes to oil. Canada has more oil(and i believe has a stronger form of currency) but oil none the less is cheaper in the U.S due to it having the processing and purification plants that Canada does not have as much of, so canada's oil goes across the border, and back again causing a higher price.
Here ya go.
http://www.notebookcheck.net/NVIDIA-GeForce-GTX-675MX.82580.0.html
This might sound funny, but is there still thermal paste between the CPU and GPU and their heatsinks? I'm just wondering if they're lapped to a point that they don't need it (and maybe because they're copper heatsinks). I know that the Atom CPU of this netbook I use didn't have any, though that might just be because it's such a low power CPU.
Pretty neat that 2 drives are allowed. For a moment, I thought that you'd have to get rid of the ODD to add an additional HDD or SSD, but it was just "under" it. Is the mo-bo RAID capable with these two ports?
Do you use geometric means (instead of plain arithmetic averages) with your performance and efficiency charts, just like how Adam Overa does the Web Browser Grand Prix? I have approached Chris about this and also posted it in the feedback forums. In the feedback forums, the moderator told me that he/she would relay it to you editors.
Also, what are the base (100%) numbers for your charts on the last page? That 100% performance number that comes up for the Xotic laptop?
but why do I have to buy an Apple to get a decent display? Enough with TN panels! If Apple can put an IPS Retina Display in a 15" and sell it for $2200, surely someone like Digital Storm could at least offer the option.
Well, you can comfort yourself with the fact that the m17x looks meaner and premium.
Also, contrast, black levels, garmut color cover, viewing angle... Just check a review at notebookcheck.net and try to do them like that
The only differences were that mine has a Blu-Ray drive, 1TB Hard drive, HDMI In, all USB ports were USB 3.0 and the CPU was a 3630QM..
My M17X set me back $2500 ON SALE from $3000 AUSD. I don't even know why since the Australian dollar is a lot bloody stronger than the U.S dollar.
Core i7 3630QM, GTX675M, 2x500GB 7200RPM HDD. I got it with just 8GB DDR3 1600 instead of 16, but that's not worth a USD$300 difference =/
Cheers!
They probably can't to be honest. A resolution that high is unheard of in the laptop industry, and most displays are TFT/TN. Digital Storm doesn't have enough money to invest.
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