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M10 - Rise of the Silicon

The Radeon Mobility 9600 will shortly be turned loose on the gaming world. We decided to put the Mobility 9600 head to head with a mainstream desktop 3D accelerator to see how powerful it really is.

Introduction

Over the course of the last six months, we have witnessed a number of new features make their way into the mobile platform. These new additions have allowed laptops to become faster, smaller, and lighter while improving battery life significantly. Although some companies have been quick to call some of these new mobile systems "Desktop Replacements", there has been one key ingredient missing for the true gaming enthusiast. As we reported in our Radeon 9600 Mobility preview, a new graphics chipset from ATI looks to be addressing this issue.

 

Looking at ATI’s Radeon Mobility 9600, code named "M10", we see that there are two main features which should provide for some exceptional performance. Looking at the core, we see that ATI has opted to use a .13u process to allow for higher frequencies while maintaining reasonable temperatures and dramatically lower power consumption. As a result, mobile gamers will have a viable option which should provide incredible speed without having to endure third-degree burns on their thighs or the aggravation of abysmal battery life. Perhaps the most surprising feature found on the Mobility 9600 is seen within the memory modules. Here, ATI has decided to use GDDR-2 memory which allows for an impressive peak memory bandwidth which is roughly 11GB/s. The combination of the .13u core and the advanced memory modules looks to be a winning recipe for a potent mobile powerhouse. With nearly all the performance features of its desktop counterpart, the Mobility 9600 could very well be the key component in the first legitimate desktop replacement laptops to reach the market.

 

In order to gauge the overall performance of the mobile testbed we were shown, a similarly equipped desktop was configured around a Radeon 9600 Pro AGP graphics card. Since the Radeon 9600 Pro’s core and memory frequencies were significantly ahead of the Mobility chipset’s, the card was downclocked to default clock speeds for the standard Radeon 9600. As a result, the .13u RV350 core was now running at 325MHz, whereas the BGA DDR memory modules were now running a modest 200MHz frequency. Despite our efforts to level the playing field between the two platforms, the Radeon 9600 still maintains a significant advantage over the mobile chipset as it has 128MB of memory allocated versus the Mobility 9600's 64MB of onboard memory.

Test Setup

Comparing laptops and desktops can be a little tricky. We have outlined the things we did below to bring the two systems as close to "apples-to-apples" as we could. Overall, I would still have to say that our desktop system has the horsepower advantage, but not by much.

Timings were relaxed and a single memory module was used to force single-channel memory operation. Given the fact that the processor's multiplier is locked, the CPU remained at a FSB of 200MHz. Fortunately, a 5:4 divider allowed the memory to drop towards the desired DDR333 levels with a FSB of 160MHz. Overall, the systems were very comparable and the performance benchmarks should be an accurate portrayal of how the two platforms compare.

Mobile Platform: Undisclosed Vendor (i845 Chipset ), P4 2.4GHz, 512MB PC2700 (166MHz FSB - Single Channel ), Windows XP Professional SP1 with DirectX 9.0a.

64MB ATI Mobility 9600 - Operating at default clock speeds (350/283) using Catalyst 3.5 drivers.

Desktop Platform: ABIT IS7-E ( i865 Chipset), P4 2.4C (800Mhz FSB), 1 X 512MB Corsair XMS PC3200 (160MHz FSB - Single Channel - 2-6-3-2 ), 36GB Western Digital Raptor SATA 150, Windows XP Professional SP1 with DirectX 9.0a.

128MB ATI Radeon 9600 Pro Retail Card - Operating at "vanilla" 9600 clock speeds (325/200) using Catalyst 3.5 drivers. "Quality" settings selected within drivers for all options.