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Monday, 30 May 2011
Linux support: current list of nvidia optimus laptops -- report at Launchpad website
Monday, 23 May 2011
Dell XPS 15z with nvidia optimus @ www.engadget.com
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The company neglected to mention it would look like a MacBook Pro.
This is the Dell XPS 15z, and we're sorry to say it's not a thin-and-light -- it's actually a few hairs thicker than a 15-inch MacBook Pro, wider, and at 5.54 pounds, it weighs practically the same. It is, however, constructed of aluminum and magnesium alloy and carries some pretty peppy silicon inside, and the base model really does ring up at $999. That's a pretty low price to garner comparisons to Apple's flagship, and yet here we are. Has Dell set a new bar for the notebook PC market? Find out after the break.
Design
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It's honestly difficult to find anything on the entire notebook that feels wholly original, though there are a few Dell tweaks -- the speakers and vents have the same pattern as those on the Inspiron Duo, and last year's XPS lineup contributed its distinctive hinged screen, which lies flat on top of the notebook rather than forming a traditional clamshell case. You'll also find plenty of chrome trim, ringing both the chassis and the oversized touchpad.
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Still, it's a very attractive machine...
Display / Speakers / Keyboard / Trackpad
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Did we mention that the entire palmrest is made of magnesium alloy, including those speaker grilles? The whole surface you interact with is smooth, durable, and dirt-resistant too, as the only way we were able to leave a visible fingerprint was by touching the glossy screen itself. We should note, however, that the metallic surface is a double-edged sword here. We noticed that our fingers were getting mighty toasty during a benchmark, as if the computer was venting hot air right right onto our skin, and during an intensive session of Bulletstorm, we found the magnesium spacers between the crucial WASD keys was burning hot to the touch. It seems that Dell may have put some important silicon right underneath those keys, so you may want an external keyboard at your next LAN party.
Performance and battery life
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What can all that do in practice? Well, we're actually not quite sure about those particular specs, since we actually received the 2.7GHz Core i7-2620M version with 2GB of dedicated graphics memory and 8GB of RAM. That kind of rig will run you $1,534, but it'll also do some potent processing.
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The XPS 15z also pulled its weight in a dedicated gaming scenario, playing that same Batman: Arkham Asylum at 1080p with all settings maxed save AA, and managed to deliver 30FPS on average. Similarly, Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare gave us around 40FPS with 4xAA and all settings maxed. Bulletstorm proved pretty taxing, though: we had to drop resolution to 1366 x 768 and reduce details to medium to make that game playable. If you're aching for some more theoretical benchmarks, our XPS 15z pulled scores of E1511, P894 and X282 in 3DMark11, and earned 8023 PCMarks in PCMark Vantage and 7,317 in 3DMark06. By the by, boot times weren't amazing, but they're certainly not bad, as we clocked 40 seconds for the machine to load into Windows, or about a minute for the machine to finish loading startup programs and be completely ready for use.
PCMarkVantage | 3DMark06 | Battery Life | |
Dell XPS M15z (Core i7-2620M, GeForce GT525M 2GB) | 8,023 | 7,317 | 3:41 / 4:26 |
MacBook Pro (Core i7-2720QM, Radeon 6750M) | 8,041 | 10,262 | 7:27 |
Lenovo ThinkPad X1 (Core i5-2410M) | 7,787 | 3,726 | 3:31 / 6:57 |
Samsung Series 9 (Core i5-2537M) | 7,582 | 2,240 | 4:20 |
Lenovo ThinkPad X220 | 7,635 | 3,517 | 7:19 |
ASUS U36Jc (Core i5 / NVIDIA GeForce 310M) | 5,981 | 2,048 / 3,524 | 5:30 |
ASUS U33Jc-A1 (Core i3-370M, GeForce 310M) | 5,574 | 1,860 / 3,403 | 5:10 |
Toshiba Portege R705 (Core i3-350M) | 5,024 | 1,739 / 3,686 | 4:25 |
Notes: the higher the score the better. For 3DMark06, the first number reflects score with GPU off, the second with it on. |
We'd mentioned that Dell's previous attempts at premium systems failed price, power and battery life tests. With the XPS 15z, well... two out of three ain't bad. Despite the fact that the NVIDIA Optimus GPU turns off when not fully taxed (powering the laptop's display with integrated Intel HD 3000 Graphics instead), we weren't able to get much more than three and a half hours of regular use out of our review unit. Turning to our standard battery drain test (where we loop a standard-definition video with the screen at roughly 65 percent brightness, and with WiFi on), we saw much the same thing -- 3 hours, 41 minutes of use from the sealed 8-cell, 2.6Ah battery. It occurred to us that perhaps Optimus wasn't actually switching off the discrete GPU at the most appropriate intervals, and sure enough, we were able to eke out a little more runtime by completely disabling it, but you're still looking at 4 hours, 26 minutes of use. That's not bad, all things considered, but it's a good sight worse than the 8.5 hours of life that Dell's advertising here, and if the company wants to make a dent in the MacBook Pro's armor, it'll have to do better than that.
Software and Stage UI
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Wrap-up
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It's no lighter, thinner or particularly better armed than the competition, and when it tried to borrow the MacBook Pro's flair it picked up some of Apple's failings along the way. We're not just talking about the inability to having chunky USB peripherals plugged in at the same time, but rather the ability to configure and upgrade the machine at will. While that dual-core Core i7 processor, NVIDIA GT525M GPU, 8-cell battery and DVD drive are nice to have, that's the best you'll get here -- even though Dell's slightly chunkier XPS 15 is configurable with quad-core processors, faster video options and a Blu-ray drive to deliver extra value to that 1080p screen.
When Dell tells you that the XPS 15z has no compromises, that's not quite the case -- it's a solid choice at this price point, but corners were cut to get there.
Sunday, 22 May 2011
Bumblebee @ liliputing.com
Liliputing's article about Bumblebee:
Bumbleebee brings NVIDIA Optimus graphics switching to Linux
More Bumblebee updates -- automatic switching with acpi_call
Martin Juhl has been relentlessly working on bumblebee and he just started working on automatic switching support for Ubuntu, while work is also being done to support other distributions.
The idea is to have the nvidia card always switched off and automatically switch it on when a program is executed using optirun. Once the program finishes, the card will automatically switch off again. The current implementation uses acpi_call, so only laptop models supported in acpi_call will have this feature working, at least for a while.
For more information:
http://github.com/MrMEEE/bumblebee
http://twitter.com/#!/martinjuhl
PD: Martin's Bumblebee Project open source efforts are being fuelled by RedBull, find his donations account below if you want to buy him more:
Wednesday, 11 May 2011
Optimus Fun Merged For Linux 2.6.40 Kernel @ www.phoronix.com
[Phoronix] Optimus Fun Merged For Linux 2.6.40 Kernel
MXM is a laptop graphics card form-factor + interface specification, and David Airlie added an initial stub driver to talk to the MXM WMI interface.
Testers needed: intel/nvidia: bumblebee now with 32bit and 64bit support
Try bumblebee for simultaneously using the intel and nvidia cards:
sudo apt-get install git
# type password
git clone http://
cd bumblebee/
sudo ./install.sh
optirun glxgears
optirun glxspheres
# check the speed and compare to running:
glxgears
glxspheres
# If you have google-chrome installed, you can try it with/without optirun and report the FPS values on the mailing list:
optirun google-chrome http://
If you get stuck at any point, generate a bug report with:
sudo sh ./install-files/bumblebee-bugreport
Create a bugreport on github (URL below) and email mj@casalogic.dk the
bug report file in attachment along with the issue number:
http://github.com/MrMEEE/bumblebee/issues
Samsung SF310 with nvidia optimus @ www.pcmag.com
Samsung SF310 Review & Rating | PCMag.com
product 0.3
- Pros
Intel Core i5-480M processor. Nvidia GeForce 310M graphics with automatic switching. Lots of extra features, like Bluetooth 3.0, Sleep-and-Charge, and quick restarts. Good battery life.
- Cons
Covered ports are less accessible. Wimpy speakers. Middling performance. Internal battery can't be accessed or replaced by buyer. Small hard drive.
- Bottom Line
Some buyers will be intrigued by features like Bluetooth 3.0, Sleep-and-Charge funcationality, and quick restarts, but more discerning buyers may shun the Samsung SF310 for its underutilized components and small hard drive.
Monday, 2 May 2011
Updates in github.com/awilliam code
The code in github.com/awilliam repository has been updated:
Before the update, when only using asus-switcheroo to power off the
discrete graphics card, it wasn't uncommon for the system to
eventually lock up. This seems to be the result of the nouveau driver
getting a -1 interrupt back and killing the system. The jprobes and
kretprobes code re-request it appropriately.
Updated list of laptops with MXMX:MXDS:_DSM ACPI combination
People in the team have been providing details on the ACPI tables for more laptop models.
A few weeks ago, a new module was written that enables login/logout switching via this module:
https://github.com/awilliam/asus-switcheroo
If your laptop is in the list below and you want to try the new module, you can execute the following
commands in a terminal:
sudo apt-get install git
# enter your password
git clone git://github.com/awilliam/asus-switcheroo.git
cd asus-switcheroo
make
modprobe -r nouveau
insmod ./asus-switcheroo.ko
modprobe nouveau
Here is an updated list of the laptops with the MXMX:MXDS:_DSM ACPI combination:
03 Acer.5742G.DSDT.dsl { MXDS => 18 MXMX => 8 _DSM => 19 }
03 Acer.5935g.DSDT.dsl { MXDS => 18 MXMX => 8 _DSM => 5 }
03 Acer.Aspire.5935.DSDT.dsl { MXDS => 18 MXMX => 8 _DSM => 5 }
03 Asus.K42Jc.DSDT.dsl { MXDS => 2 MXMX => 2 _DSM => 4 }
03 Asus.K52Jc.DSDT.dsl { MXDS => 2 MXMX => 2 _DSM => 4 }
03 Asus.K53SV.DSDT.dsl { MXDS => 2 MXMX => 2 _DSM => 8 }
03 Asus.N53Jf.DSDT.2.dsl { MXDS => 2 MXMX => 2 _DSM => 4 }
03 Asus.N53Jf.DSDT.dsl { MXDS => 2 MXMX => 2 _DSM => 4 }
03 Asus.N53Jg.DSDT.dsl { MXDS => 2 MXMX => 2 _DSM => 4 }
03 Asus.N53SN.DSDT.dsl { MXDS => 2 MXMX => 2 _DSM => 6 }
03 Asus.N53SV.DSDT.dsl { MXDS => 2 MXMX => 2 _DSM => 6 }
03 Asus.N61JV.DSDT.dsl { MXDS => 2 MXMX => 2 _DSM => 8 }
03 Asus.N71JV.DSDT.dsl { MXDS => 2 MXMX => 2 _DSM => 4 }
03 Asus.N73JF.DSDT.dsl { MXDS => 2 MXMX => 2 _DSM => 5 }
03 Asus.N73SV.DSDT.dsl { MXDS => 2 MXMX => 2 _DSM => 8 }
03 Asus.P52JC.DSDT.dsl { MXDS => 2 MXMX => 2 _DSM => 4 }
03 Asus.U30JC.DSDT.dsl { MXDS => 2 MXMX => 2 _DSM => 4 }
03 Asus.U33JC.DSDT.dsl { MXDS => 1 MXMX => 1 _DSM => 1 }
03 Asus.U35JC.DSDT.2.dsl { MXDS => 2 MXMX => 2 _DSM => 4 }
03 Asus.U35JC.DSDT.dsl { MXDS => 2 MXMX => 2 _DSM => 4 }
03 Asus.U36JC.DSDT.dsl { MXDS => 2 MXMX => 2 _DSM => 4 }
03 Asus.UL30VT.DSDT.dsl { MXDS => 2 MXMX => 2 _DSM => 5 }
03 Asus.UL50VT.DSDT.dsl { MXDS => 2 MXMX => 2 _DSM => 5 }
03 Asus.UL80VT.1.0.DSDT.dsl { MXDS => 2 MXMX => 2 _DSM => 5 }
03 HP.dm3.DSDT.dsl { MXDS => 18 MXMX => 10 _DSM => 6 }
03 HP.SLIC-MPC.DSDT.dsl { MXDS => 18 MXMX => 10 _DSM => 6 }
03 Lenovo.T410.2516CTO.DSDT.dsl { MXDS => 5 MXMX => 2 _DSM => 5 }
03 Lenovo.T410s.DSDT.2.dsl { MXDS => 5 MXMX => 2 _DSM => 5 }
03 Lenovo.T410s.DSDT.dsl { MXDS => 5 MXMX => 2 _DSM => 5 }
03 Lenovo.T510.DSDT.dsl { MXDS => 5 MXMX => 2 _DSM => 5 }
03 Sony.Vaio.VPCZ136GG.DSDT.dsl { MXDS => 14 MXMX => 10 _DSM => 19 }
03 Sony.Vaio.VPCZ13V9E.DSDT.dsl { MXDS => 14 MXMX => 10 _DSM => 19 }
03 Sony.VGN-Z12GN_B.DSDT.dsl { MXDS => 14 MXMX => 10 _DSM => 5 }
03 Sony.VGN-Z51XG.DSDT.dsl { MXDS => 14 MXMX => 10 _DSM => 5 }
03 Sony.VPCZ12C5E.DSDT.dsl { MXDS => 14 MXMX => 10 _DSM => 19 }
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May
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- Linux support: current list of nvidia optimus lapt...
- Dell XPS 15z with nvidia optimus @ www.engadget.com
- NVIDIA announces Optimus for Desktops @ www.anandt...
- Bumblebee @ liliputing.com
- More Bumblebee updates -- automatic switching with...
- Optimus Fun Merged For Linux 2.6.40 Kernel @ www.p...
- Testers needed: intel/nvidia: bumblebee now with 3...
- Samsung SF310 with nvidia optimus @ www.pcmag.com
- Updates in github.com/awilliam code
- Updated list of laptops with MXMX:MXDS:_DSM ACPI c...
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