Original Link: https://www.anandtech.com/show/4139/cougar-point-xps-l401x-i7-2630qm



Why Sandy Bridge Matters for Notebooks

To say that we were caught off guard by Intel’s announcement last Monday of a flaw in their 6-series chipsets would be an understatement. Bad as that was, it’s the OEMs and system builders that are really feeling the pain—not to mention all the money Intel is losing on this “not a recall”. We’ve seen plenty of manufacturer statements about what they’re doing to address the problem, and we’ve also been talking with our notebook contacts trying to find out how the problem will impact availability.

We’ve also had more than a few delayed/canceled reviews while we wait for a fix. While we’ve looked at a generic Sandy Bridge notebook and a few motherboards, there was still plenty more we wanted to discuss. One such notebook came with a “low-end” i7-2630QM processor and a GTX 460M GPU, packed into a 15.6” chassis and sporting a 1080p LCD and RAID 0 hard drives. The manufacturer asked us to hold off on the full review, and we’ve returned the notebook, but not before we ran it through our suite of mobile benchmarks. Rather than complete a full review of a notebook that may or may not be available, we thought it would be interesting to look at what another SNB notebook would do in comparison to the previous generation parts.

Update: We just got word back, and MSI has given the okay to reveal that the notebook in question is the MSI GT680R; we should hopefully see it return to market in a couple months.

In terms of specs, the notebook in question was very similar to the ASUS G73Jw we reviewed last year. Change the CPU to an i7-2630QM in place of the old i7-740QM, use a different battery and chassis, and you’re set. So exactly what can the 2630QM do relative to the 740QM? We’ve added the complete benchmark results to our Mobile Bench area, so you can quickly see how the two stack up.

If you’re only interested in gaming performance, it’s no surprise that we’re mostly GPU limited with the GTX 460M. The majority of titles are 2-8% faster with the Sandy Bridge setup, but we’re also dealing with updated drivers so the performance increase may come at least in part from NVIDIA. That said, there are a couple of outliers: 900p STALKER: Call of Pripyat shows a massive performance increase, as does 900p StarCraft II. How much of that comes from drivers and how much from the CPU? Since we don’t have the G73Jw around to retest, it’s impossible to say for certain, but we can look at the CPU tests to see how much faster Sandy Bridge can be compared to Clarksfield.

PCMark as usual is heavily influenced by the storage subsystem, so RAID 0 versus a single HDD gives the unnamed system an inherent advantage. The use of Western Digital’s Scorpio Black drives versus a Seagate Momentus 7200.4 is another benefit in the storage area—WD has generally come out on the top of the HDD heap with their Black series (though SSD’s are still much faster). Ignoring PCMark, though, we still see a large advantage for the 2630QM. Single-threaded performance is 21% faster in Cinebench 10/11.5, which in our experience correlates well with general Windows use. In the heavily multithreaded tests, the gap increases to 47-58% in Cinebench and x264 encoding.

It’s not just about performance either. While the 2630QM notebook has a larger 87Wh battery, factoring that into the equation we still see relative battery life improved over the G73Jw by 17% at idle, 40% in H.264 playback, and 42% in Internet surfing. Looking at the comparison with 2820QM with HD Graphics 3000, the GTX 460M still clearly takes a toll on battery life (less than half the relative battery life), but it’s good to see more than three hours of mobility from a gaming laptop.

We’re curious to see if anyone is willing to do Optimus with a 460M (or higher) GPU and a quad-core SNB processor, as that will only serve to further increase battery life. Of course, we still see occasional glitches with Optimus that might make OEMs slow to use it on high-end gaming systems. For instance, Empire: Total War won’t let you select higher than “Medium” detail defaults (because it queries the IGP capabilities rather than the dGPU). Left 4 Dead 2 also had some oddities with the latest driver update—you can’t max out the graphics settings and have it run properly with a GT 420M Optimus in our experience; you have to drop the “Paged Pool Memory Available” setting to Low instead of High/Medium or it will exit to the desktop. The result is lower performance/compatibility relative to discrete GPUs, but I’d be willing to deal with the occasional bug for dramatically improved battery life.

So far the Sandy Bridge discussion has been quad-core SNB vs. quad-core Clarksfield, and that’s the other looming question: just how good will the dual-core SNB chips be? We expect better than Arrandale performance and better than Arrandale and Core 2 Duo battery life, but we haven’t been able to test any dual-core SNB systems yet. Unfortunately, the chipset bug/recall/whatever-you-want-to-call-it means we won’t be able to categorize dual-core SNB performance for at least another month, probably two. It appears the revised chipset allocation is going to go first towards big OEMs (i.e. Dell, HP, etc.), and it would seem Intel is focusing first on getting the mobile chipset fixed over the desktop chipset. Several manufacturers have indicated they expect laptops with the revised chipset to hit the market in the late-March to early-April time frame.



A Farewell to the Dell XPS 14

Sandy Bridge isn’t the only game in town, of course, so we’ve got a few other items to cover. After the discussion of Sandy Bridge on the previous page, we also want to take this chance to talk about what will likely be our last Arrandale laptops. First up we have the Dell XPS 14 L401x, the “little brother” of the XPS trio announced last October. In terms of specs, the L401x is virtually identical to the L501x, only in a smaller chassis.

Our test unit came with the same i5-460M CPU, GT 420M graphics, and 56Wh battery. Visually, the three XPS laptops are all the same: rounded corners with a silver matte finish, and aluminum palm rests. The design works well enough, though we tend to prefer cleaner lines. However, some of the extra features offered in the XPS 15 were enough that it garnered our Gold Editors’ Choice award—specifically, we liked the combination of a high quality 1080p LCD upgrade, Optimus Technology graphics, and excellent audio. We mentioned in December that the 1080p upgrade had disappeared from the Dell website, but we’re happy to report that the display upgrade is once more back in stock. (You can find it under the “Colors” configuration area—it’s now priced at $195 instead of $130, but the base price has dropped to $799 as opposed to $899 so the final cost with the 1080p display is now under $1000.)

We mention the things we liked about the XPS 15 as a jumping off point for the XPS 14, because unfortunately it loses most of the best features. The L401x still comes (rather, came) with JBL speakers and WAVES Maxx Audio, but without the subwoofer it lacks the bass punch of the larger models. There’s no LCD upgrade available either, and the standard 1366x768 display is just as poor as the other LCDs we’ve lambasted during the previous couple of years. Finally, the smaller chassis apparently doesn’t have enough space for USB3.0 support, so that feature goes missing as well. Smaller isn’t always better, and putting the same components into a more cramped space also resulted in generally higher temperatures and noise levels—we’d certainly be concerned about upgrading the L401x to the quad-core Clarksfield processors!

There were some good aspects to the design, though. For instance, idle battery life improved 16% and Internet battery life went up 35%. (We noted in the L501x review that our Internet test did quite poorly, and it appears the L401x doesn’t suffer the same fate.) H.264 playback remains nearly the same at just under three hours. For gaming, the 768p resolution is also a better fit for the GT 420M GPU—1080p is simply too much for anything but low detail settings on most games without a faster GPU. The final benefit of course is the size and weight. Personally, 14” laptops are one of my favorite form factors in terms of combining a smaller size with a comfortable keyboard, reasonable display size, and battery life/portability. If the XPS 14 had offered a 1440x900 quality LCD upgrade, it would have been nearly “perfect” for mainstream use.

Ultimately, I’m not surprised to see the XPS 14 disappear. It wasn’t a bad laptop design, but there was very little on tap that you couldn’t already find in the Inspiron 14R. The main change is that you got NVIDIA Optimus in place of either Intel IGP or ATI HD 550v (a lower clocked and renamed HD 4650). The XPS keyboard also offered backlighting and the palm rest is aluminum rather than plastic. If you configure similar performance, the XPS price premium is fairly reasonable: $899 for the XPS 14 we have compared to $809 for the Inspiron 14R with an i5-460M, 4GB RAM, HD 550v, and 500GB HDD. That’s worth $90, certainly, but it still feels like it waters down the XPS (“Xtreme Performance System” back in the day) brand.

Anyway, we’ve added results from the XPS L401x to Mobile Bench as well. Combined with the updated NVIDIA 266.58 drivers, graphics performance is actually up relative to the L501x in most games, and you can see how the two models compare. Like the notebook on the previous page, the L401x came with a Western Digital Black HDD instead of the ubiquitous Seagate 7200.4 that was in the L501x we tested, so PCMark scores are up as well. However, CPU performance was down slightly in Cinebench and x264 encoding, and temperatures were up. It looks as though the smaller chassis couldn’t cope with the heat as well, and the result is that Intel’s Turbo Boost isn’t able to run quite as fast in CPU intensive benchmarks.

We expect Dell to come out with Sandy Bridge XPS laptops sometime in the next two or three months, but we’ve been told not to expect an XPS 14 update. That’s a shame, as we still think it could be a great form factor. Imagine a high quality 14” LCD with better performance and thermals—sort of like the Dell XPS equivalent of the MacBook Pro 13. That’s what we’d really like to see Dell do with the XPS brand: look at the Apple MacBook line here. The MacBook has basic features and performance at a reduced price; move up to the MacBook Pro 13 and you get essentially the same performance, but you add the unibody chassis and a much nicer LCD. In fact, every laptop in the MacBook Pro lineup has a good contrast LCD with reasonable color accuracy and a nearly ideal (for sRGB work) color gamut. So ditch the rounded corners, improve the build quality even more, and make every XPS laptop come with a quality LCD; then we’d have a brand that we could point to and say, “Sure, it costs more, but at least you get quality for your dollar.” Reusing the base Inspiron chassis just doesn’t seem like a great idea for a “performance” brand.

Which brings up another laptop: HP’s Envy 14. Long heralded as a great combination of price, performance, build quality, and features, users were asking for a review of the Envy 14 for a long time. HP never did manage to get us one, but one of our readers was kind enough to let us borrow his Envy 14—complete with the 1600x900 Radiance display upgrade!—to run it through our tests. At this stage, it’s too late in the game for a full review of the Envy 14, and like the XPS 14, the Radiance LCD is no longer available. However, with this mobile update already in the works we have a perfect chance for a rundown of the Envy 14. I’ll turn this over to Vivek, since he was the one to actually lay hands on the fabled laptop.



HP’s Envy 14: An LCD That Was Too Good to Last?

I’d like to put a huge, huge shout out to Khoa Tran (theguynextdoor on the AT forums), who sent us his personal Envy 14 system for a couple of weeks just so that we could review it. HP never managed to get one to us for review, so Khoa coming through for us was an awesome move. It just goes to show how great our readership is—seriously, we love you guys.

So, on to the Envy. The Envy 14 is part of the second generation of Envy notebooks. It slots in nicely between the first gen 13” and 15” Envys, replacing both in one go and creating space for the range-topping Envy 17 we reviewed recently. And as we’ve mentioned previously, it’s a decently powerful notebook. Inside, we find Intel’s first generation Core i5 and i7 processors, ATI’s HD 5650 graphics card, a minimum of 4GB RAM, and the best screen of any notebook on the market. Unfortunately, that screen isn’t available anymore, but we’ll get to that in a bit.

So here's the part we all know—the styling is pretty derivative of Apple’s MacBook Pro line. But while the lines are similar from afar, up close the Envy isn’t actually as close to the ever-popular Apple portable as it first seems. The textured aluminum on the lid has an interesting, swirled pattern, and the slightly convex palm rest is rendered in the same material. Overall, the industrial design is quite good, and the build quality is just as good as one could expect from an aluminum-bodied notebook. It’s not quite on the level that Apple has reached with the MacBook Pro line, but it’s getting there.

That’s a pretty common theme with the Envy 14—it’s like HP’s take on the Apple formula. The backlit chiclet-style keyboard looks and feels nearly identical to the MacBook Pro’s keyboard. If you’ve used a unibody MacBook Pro, you know that’s a good thing. Unfortunately, HP still hasn’t figured out how to make a buttonless trackpad work. Far too often, you move the cursor to where you want it, and when you go to click in the designated part of the touchpad, the cursor ends up on the other side of the screen. You get used to the touchpad in the Envy, but it can be aggravating. But the best part of the entire package is the screen.

Gallery: HP Envy 14


HP’s 1600x900 Radiance display is a revelation, no way around it. The max brightness is 331 nits, with a black level of 0.325 nits. That works out to a contrast ratio of 1018:1. The first time I saw that, I ran the numbers through the calculator a second time to make sure that was actually right. If I’m not mistaken, it’s the highest contrast ratio we’ve seen on any notebook screen to date. [Ed: ASUS' G73J series managed about the same, but with a max brightness of 184 nits the Radiance display definitely gets the win.] Take that, Apple. Unfortunately, that screen is no longer available.

Back in September, we heard whispers that the screen was sold out, and HP removed the option from the Envy 14 ordering system. The option came back briefly in January, and we were then told that the Radiance display was sold out for good. So, if you want an Envy 14, you’re going to be stuck with the standard, mediocre 1366x768 panel.

Performance-wise, it’s around the same as other notebooks that have the Clarksfield/HD 5650 combo underhood. It’s not an uncommon combination, but for a 14” system it’s definitely on the higher side of the performance scale. It’s about on par with the XPS 14, as you can see in Mobile Bench. Battery life is basically identical across the board, but the comparison really shows what you give up with the standard LCD over the upgraded panel.

I’d assume that HP is updating the Envy 14 to Sandy Bridge in the near future (the 17 has already been upgraded), around the same 2-3 month time frame as the Dell XPS line. Unlike the XPS 14, the Envy 14 is a lock to be around for a long time to come—it’s been a huge seller for HP and it’s easy to see why. I enjoyed my time with it as much as I enjoyed the MacBook Pro last year, though a large part of that was due to the amazing display. But as much as I loved the Radiance display, I must acknowledge that the rest of the notebook is quite good. The industrial design and build quality are among the best for mainstream PC portables, and the price-to-performance ratio is quite good as well. For a starting price of just under a grand, you get a solid amount of stuff—2.66GHz Core i5, the HD 5650, 4GB memory, and a 750GB hard drive. If only the Radiance display was still an option.



And in the AMD Corner…

All the talk so far has been of Intel laptops: Sandy Bridge delayed, Arrandale on the way out, etc. But what about the other big player, AMD? They’re probably the only company that actually benefited from Intel’s chipset snafu. Sure, the new laptops with Intel CPUs and Radeon 6000M GPUs are on hold, but if nothing else this gets AMD two months closer to the launch of Bulldozer and Llano. And what about Bobcat (aka, Brazos/Ontario/Zacate)?

AMD’s Brazos APU

We saw dozens of Brazos systems at CES 2011, and we expected them to go on sale right after, but they’re only now starting to hit the shelves. Anyway, constraining our view to the mobile world, HP has the dm1z available, with an E-350 APU and a starting price of $449 (with the current $100 instant rebate). That’s still $150 more than basic Atom netbooks, but you have to look at what you’re getting: a full Windows 7 install (not Starter), 3GB DDR3, 320GB HDD, an 11.6” 768p display, and a much faster processor thrown in for good measure. Let’s not forget the significantly improved video playback capabilities either! Battery life with the E-350 might not quite make it to the level of Atom netbooks, but HP claims up to 9.5 hours, which is more than respectable. These systems look to be far more interesting than Atom as an overall package, and we already have a good idea of how they’ll perform from our mini-ITX Brazos review.

A couple other E-350 based laptops are showing up at retail, but we have one concern: both the laptops we can find are 15.6” units. One system comes from Acer, the Acer Aspire 5253-BZ684/ LX.RD502.015 starting at $450. Like the HP dm1z, it comes with Win7 Home Premium, 3GB RAM, and a 320GB HDD. The other system is the MSI CR650-016US, with the same features and specs and a starting price of $500 online. Zacate seems like a fine idea as an ultraportable, but move up to 15.6” and we start to wonder if it makes sense. Battery life should still be decent, but performance relative to other larger laptops is going to be lacking. We’d suggest these types of systems more for multimedia use (think portable HTPC) rather than a “do everything” laptop; otherwise, you’d probably be better off with something like a Turion P540 laptop—much faster CPU, but lower battery life and GPU performance.

The Brazos laptops using Ontario C-series APUs aren't so prevalent. The only one we can find right now is the Acer Aspire One AO522-BZ897, but it comes priced like a netbook starting at $330. Of course, with the netbook price comes netbook features: 1GB RAM, 250GB HDD, and Win7 Starter (yuck)—though apparently the LCD is one step up from 1024x600 and goes with 1280x720. With lower CPU and GPU clocks, we expect the C-50 won’t do quite as well as the E-350 in terms of multimedia support. However, if you’re just interested in typical 720p or 1080p H.264 encodes it should work well. We hope to have one of these systems in for testing in the near future, at which point we’ll try to provide a better rundown of what to expect in terms of performance and usefulness. Can C-50 beat Atom as an overall platform, or are you better off going the E-350 route? We’ll find out soon enough.

Looking Forward to Llano

As we mentioned above, if there’s one beneficiary of the Sandy Bridge delay, it’s AMD. The SNB launch just moved back a couple months, which puts it two months closer to the Llano APU launch. Actually, that’s not even entirely accurate; we initially expected quad-core SNB notebooks in January (and we had one in hand and a couple more scheduled to arrive this week), with dual-core SNB showing up at the end of this month. Now, we’re looking at late March or early April in all likelihood, with the potential for some vendors to slip as far as May or June. What remains to be seen is how Llano actually performs.

What we know of Llano is that it will combine a K10.5 type CPU architecture with a midrange DX11 GPU (something like the HD 5650), integrated into a single chip. That may sound rather mundane, but the truly interesting part is that it will be manufactured on GlobalFoundries’ 32nm node. This is a major deal as it’s the first time we’ve ever seen a modern GPU built on a state-of-the-art CPU process node. There’s actually a lot more work involved in moving a Redwood GPU architecture to 32nm, as most of the Intellectual Property (IP) related to GPUs targets the so-called half-nodes (55nm, 40m, and in the future 28nm). It’s one reason we expect AMD to eventually move all of their CPU and GPU production to such nodes, but that's a ways off and Llano will use the same process size as Intel’s current CPUs.

Besides the shrink in process, AMD has certainly had opportunity to better tune the K10.5 architecture for power efficiency. If Llano gets a healthy dose of clock and power gating, even though K10.5 may not be an all-new architecture like Bulldozer or Bobcat, it could be highly compelling. We expect Llano will be a reasonably small chip that offers plenty of performance—particularly for graphics programs and games, along with the potential for GPGPU programs—and the price should be attractive as well. We thought the Acer 5551G had a lot of potential at the $600 price point, and Llano should enable better performance at a lower price. We expect Llano to hit the market round about June, give or take, and if AMD can push it out as early as May they could really steal some of the Sandy Bridge thunder, at least as far as moderately priced gaming laptops go.

What About Bulldozer?

Of course, there’s still Bulldozer to discuss. We really don’t have much to go on as far as performance information goes, but let’s look at the architectural design for a moment. AMD is putting two full Integer cores inside each Bulldozer core, which means the design should excel at heavily threaded integer workloads. The concern is that heavily threaded integer work may not be that useful for most users. We already have difficulty taxing four integer cores without resorting to heavy multitasking scenarios, and multithreaded tasks like video encoding and 3D rendering generally need more floating-point performance. Bulldozer is the successor to the Opteron legacy, which gives a clue as to where it should really shine: servers.

So what does that mean for Bulldozer derived chips for notebooks? Performance is a huge unknown right now—there are just too many factors involved (i.e. issue width, cache size, branch prediction, and other architectural elements) to do anything more than guess at performance right now. It could be an amazingly fast architecture—we certainly hope that’s the case—or it could be only moderately faster than the current stuff. I’ve heard rumblings of performance targets 50% faster clock for clock than K10.5, though, so let’s take that as the goal.

If Bulldozer can provide a 50% performance increase relative to the current K10.5 designs (or even 25%), it will certainly compete in the server and high performance desktop arenas. From there, it should eventually find its way into mainstream desktops and eventually notebooks; however, mobility isn’t a major focus in the initial rollout. My bet is this will play out similar to how the Hammer architecture launched.

The first CPUs were for socket 940 servers and workstations in June 2003 (i.e. Sledgehammer Opteron CPUs), and then we saw Athlon FX “enthusiast” systems in September 2003 (still SledgeHammer on socket 940). It wasn’t until the Athlon chips on socket 754 in December 2003 that we finally got mainstream K8 processors (ClawHammer and Newcastle), and then in June 2004 we got socket 939 (still ClawHammer and Newcastle, only with dual-channel unbuffered memory support). From there, mobile variants of the ClawHammer and Newcastle still took time to appear, and while the performance was good there’s still the question of scaling that down to a reasonable power envelope.

Bulldozer (Orochi) is now slated to show up first on high perforamnce desktops, followed by servers, but it appears these will both be eight-core (four Bulldozer module) designs, and the six-core and four-core variants will come later. As for notebooks, to be competitive with Sandy Bridge, we’d need maximum power draw of 35-45W for the CPU, idle power draw down in the 3-5W range, and “typical” power draw under a light load (i.e. surfing the Internet) well below 10W. Given the apparent server and workstation target of Bulldozer, that’s asking a lot, but it could still happen.

There haven’t been any roadmaps for mobile CPU-only designs, as AMD looks set to move all of their mobile products to Fusion APUs. That means CPU-only mobile Bulldozer offerings might be limited to DTR notebooks packing desktop CPUs (e.g. the AMD equivalent of the Clevo X7200). Whatever performance Bulldozer brings to the table, it's likely that notebooks won’t see such processors for at least a quarter after the desktop launch. Anand guessed at a Q2/Q3'2011 launch for desktop Bulldozer, which means Bulldozer might not join the mobile party until Q4’11 or perhaps even 2012.

The official mobile Bulldozer product is an APU dubbed Trinity, combining a DX11 GPU with 2-4 Bulldozer cores, and that's slated for sometime in 2012. So AMD looks set to concede the highest performance laptops and notebooks to Intel, choosing to focus instead on the (much!) higher volume entry and midrange parts. Let’s hope Llano and Bobcat can hold down the fort for AMD’s mobile division, because we'd really like to see more competition for Intel in the mobile space.

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