Voodoo Envy M:860 - AMD 64-bit at Widescreen
by Andrew Ku on August 13, 2004 12:05 AM EST- Posted in
- Laptops
After it taking some time to get some MP3 players down the hatch, we can bring more notebooks reviews to you on a timely basis. Since our last mobile article, a few things have made their way to the mobile industry press, namely Dothan. The cliff note version in a few words: Dothan is good. It should make things a bit more interesting for the ultraportable and thin and light market, and we should have some notebooks with Dothan up for review soon.
And while Pentium-M continues its life in the notebook market with which we are traditionally familiar, AMD and Intel desktop processors continue to make their way into desktop replacement systems. While the processors in DTR systems may never be exactly up to the same speeds as the fastest of those in actual desktops, they are still marking their spot as mobile workstations.
Recently, we have been really seeing some DTR systems hit high notes in terms of performance compared to their desktop counterparts. A lot of the more performance-light DTRs in the past have been using Pentium-Ms, but there has been a lot of scaling up to the beefier DTR notebooks that use Athlon 64 processors, Intel Pentium 4 Extreme Edition, or Prescotts. This type of notebook, though not really mobile, seem to be more popular than ever these days, which brings us to Voodoo's Envy M:860, an Athlon 64 notebook with a nice widescreen display.
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gibhunter - Friday, August 13, 2004 - link
In my case my notebook is a desktop replacement that I sometimes play games on. I didn't buy it specifically for gaming.Still, to have that capability, notebook manufacturers force you to buy the biggest, heaviest and most expensive notebooks.
Like I said, 14 or 15" 4/3 ratio screen, 6 pounds max weight is plenty enough for me. Unfortunately if I want that, I have to get an old generation video card with it. Kind of sad.
tfranzese - Friday, August 13, 2004 - link
Buying a notebook for gaming is a waste of money. The size of notebooks too is pathetic in many cases and I wouldn't call them mobile. But people keep buying them because they have no perspective of what is best.Lonyo - Friday, August 13, 2004 - link
Misread the benchmarks, I was looking at the top graph, not the bottom one, but the typo is still there.Lonyo - Friday, August 13, 2004 - link
To #3, why a 4:3 screen and a 5:4 ratio of resulution? That would look messed up and out of scale.On page 7, the comment below the first graph is:
Battery life for the M:860 is about what we expected: a little over 2 hours, which makes it fairly comparable to other desktop replacement systems of its nature. We still have high praise for the M:855's 3-hour score, since it is really out of character in DTR notebooks.
Yes the graph shows a Voodoo M:8855 (typo) having a lower score than the M:860
The R50, T41 and 8600 are all higher than both Voodoo notebooks, and have >3hours, if the numbers are in minutes, while the M855 has a score of 131, vs 137 for the M:860.
gibhunter - Friday, August 13, 2004 - link
These notebooks are getting larger by the minute. I have the Dell Inspiron 8200 at at just over 7 pounds it's just about too heavy and is definitely too large for a notebook.Personally, I'd like to see a notebook with a 14.1 4/3 ratio screen, with a 1280/1024 resolution, with Athlon 64 or Pentium M and Mobility 9800 with 256MB of ram and 1Gig of PC2700 DDR SDRAM with just one combo CD/DVD drive. At 14.1" screen size, it should weigh less than 6 pounds and be much smaller than the 8200 while having twice the gaming performance.
These new gaming notebooks just don't do anything to me on aesthetic levels.
animekenji - Friday, August 13, 2004 - link
These machines are made by Arima who also supplies the emachines notebooks. The M6811, though not quite as powerful in some areas, is a heckuva lot cheaper and should be considered by anyone looking at one of these. In fact, if you put the photos of the M6811 side by side with this machine you will see nearly everything is identical.MAME - Friday, August 13, 2004 - link
that's really cool