ASUS W90Vp: ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4870... with CrossFire
by Jarred Walton on May 29, 2009 5:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Laptops
Closing Thoughts
After extensive testing, the ASUS W90Vp leaves us with a lot of mixed emotions. Some aspects of the design we absolutely love, others are fine, and a few things we really dislike. When it comes to the ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4870, it's not too surprising that we have similar emotions. Let's start with a discussion of the laptop.
On the good side, we really like the LCD. If you're going to purchase a large desktop replacement system, getting an LCD that can actually compete with desktop displays is a definite plus. The size and native resolution even compete well with desktop systems; only users of 30" LCDs will have to give up anything in the resolution department. ASUS also includes some nice extras, like the Razer mouse and large backpack. Perhaps most impressive is that you can get all this for "only" $2400 -- or $2200 if you purchase the W90Vp-X2 and skip out on the second hard drive. That's still a lot of money, but we need to put that in perspective. The cheapest quad-core Q9000 notebook we can find comes from HP and starts at around $1400. Needless to say, you don't get anywhere near the same level of graphics performance in that system. On the subject of performance, this W90Vp trades blows with a Clevo D901C using 8800M GTX SLI. A current version of the D901C should surpass the W90Vp in the majority of benchmarks, but such systems start at over $3000 for 9800M GTX SLI, puts them in a different price category. Throw in the free overclocking, and ASUS W90Vp is actually one of the better values when it comes to high-end mobile gaming -- provided you want to lug around a 15 pound "laptop leviathan".
Overall performance is generally good, but the driver situation gives us pause. If ASUS or ATI could provide some guarantee of regular driver updates, we would be far more willing to recommend the W90Vp. As it stands, with the beta drivers ATI sent us performance is about where expected in most titles, but at least two games that we tested (Riddick: Dark Athena and FEAR 2: Project Origin) do not have currently functional CrossFire profiles. Come December, we expect the number of games that lack CrossFire profiles to increase rapidly. This is an area we plan to keep an eye on, and if we hear of any improvements or changes will make sure to keep you updated.
Besides the driver situation, we encountered a few other oddities during testing of the W90Vp. First, the fingerprint scanner tended to be a little schizophrenic, particularly when resuming from hibernation or sleep mode. Sometimes it would take a few minutes before the scanner would start working, sometimes it wouldn't ever start working, and other times it worked fine. Most of the time, we would just type in our password manually, but that sort of defeats the purpose of the fingerprint scanner. The other major gripe we have is with the touch sensitive multimedia buttons. We lost track of the number of times we accidentally brushed the volume control area to the left of the keyboard while playing a game. Having the volume suddenly jump to ear splitting levels is not something we enjoy, and there didn't appear to be any good way to disable this feature short of uninstalling/disabling the ASUS keyboard control utility -- which provides, among other things, the on-screen indicators for brightness, volume, and other functions (not a huge loss, but still...). We also had several occasions where we must have inadvertently bumped one of the keys across the top of the keyboard, resulting in the ASUS media center loading and taking control away from whatever we happen to be doing. In short, while touch sensitive keys might look cool, we actually dislike them. If you want to include extra keys, give us keys that require you to actually press them instead of just brush over them.
Overall, the ASUS W90Vp is a good package, and if you want a high-end gaming notebook without dropping $3000 or more, it's definitely worth a closer look. It's very likely you will encounter driver issues during the life of your system, but that's been the case with most gaming laptops up until NVIDIA's latest mobile driver updates. It's good to see some competition in the mobile GPU sector again, and it looks like ATI is ready to offer good performance at substantially lower prices -- just like they've been doing on the desktop. However, if ATI wants to be taken seriously in the mobile gaming sector, they will need to address the driver shortcomings.
In the meantime, hopefully ASUS will do a good job of providing at least quarterly driver updates for any of their CrossFire notebooks. So far, all of the ATI notebook drivers on the ASUS website failed to support the W90Vp, but then it's only been available for a couple months. Even if worse comes to worst and you don't get updated drivers, the W90Vp can still function as a decent portable workstation or multimedia device. Just don't forget the power brick!
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buzznut - Saturday, May 30, 2009 - link
Looky there, I went and missed "bash AMD day"Damn, they're prolly still reeling.
Johnmcl7 - Friday, May 29, 2009 - link
In the specs for this machine it lists an 8x DVDR drive initially, then refers to it as a blu-ray drive just further down - I assume the first entry should read bd-rom/dvd-r combo.I have to say the pictures are extremely disappointing as the main shots of the laptop are badly underexposed concealing most of the details. I do realise these machines are not easy to get a picture of but normally the pictures in reviews are pretty decent. It would be good to see some pictures with some standard items (DVD cases or something) when the laptop is open to get a better idea of the scale, I think the sleek look makes it look smaller than it is especially given it makes the D901C look small which I didn't think possible.
As for the laptop itself I did consider one of these mainly because the price was good but decided against it due to the size/weight. I had a Dell XPS 2 then M1710 and I think that's really the upper limit to carry around with me. I have an XPS M1730 at the moment and it never leaves the house as combined with its huge powerpack makes it quite a bit bigger and heavier than the M1710, there's no way I would go bigger again.
It's a shame to see the driver situation is so poor when the performance is clearly there, it's not very encouraging for other companies to pick up mobile ATI parts either.
mrbios - Friday, May 29, 2009 - link
Jarred (or anyone who may purchase this notebook), I have a different Asus laptop that has the same multimedia touchpad, and I did find a way to disable it. Go into the Mouse control panel, go to Device Settings, expand tapping, click on tap zones, and uncheck "enable tap zones".garydale - Friday, May 29, 2009 - link
Why is it so difficult to get good display drivers for games? The OpenGL interface is well defined so what's the problem with writing a driver for it that game developers can have confidence it will work according to spec.?Is this a case of the hardware manufacturers screwing up with the driver or the game developers trying to get around the API to work directly with the hardware or a bit of both? Frankly, I don't care. If I want to play a game on a computer, it should install and work just like any other piece of software or hardware.
Hopefully AMD/ATI's release of details of their API will help bring stability and performance, at least for Linux games. Now will NVidia follow suit and allow the open source community to build their own drivers to end this proprietary "buggy driver" lunacy?
JarredWalton - Friday, May 29, 2009 - link
I believe most of the driver updates are to optimize the way the GPU executes certain code. In theory, the drivers should run all code properly but not optimally. The reality, sadly, is that the "properly" part is only correct about 80% of the time with new titles. Add CrossFire into the mix and that seems to drop down to 50%. If you have a regular dual card CrossFire setup, disabling CrossFire in the CCC often solves compatibility issues, but that's not an option on the drivers I've received for the W90Vp.In the case of Empire: Total War it looked like the drivers were rendering properly on one card but not on the other. If I grabbed a screenshot via the PrintScreen button, everything looked correct, but looking at the screen only the landscaping and sky were always visible and correct. The units, trees, buildings, etc. were only visible about 10% of the frames, which pretty much means you can't play the game.
mbaroud - Friday, May 29, 2009 - link
I own one the W90VP-A1.I have been dyingto update the drivers, it sucks running on OUTDATED drivers :(
nubie - Friday, May 29, 2009 - link
If these are simply mobile desktop replacements why doesn't somebody get on making a desktop built into the screen already?And I don't mean the hideous monstrosity that is the Dell XP1.
I am all for laptops, but this form factor is silly above 15.4" in my opinion.
(that said, I love the tech, it is very cool.)
Jackattak - Friday, May 29, 2009 - link
Dunno if you've been asleep for the past two years but just about every major PC manufacturer offers a desktop built-in to the screen nowadays, none of which are "hideous" (strictly my opinion, but I find it hard to find a screen "hideous", and that's essentially all these offerings are is a screen).garydale - Friday, May 29, 2009 - link
It's generally cheaper and faster to run multiple desktops in the locations you need than to lug a "desktop replacement" around. Just keep your documents (and other settings) on a USB key or implement an Internet synchronization scheme.The simple fact is that you cannot get anything that can be reasonably called a laptop to match the performance of a desktop. Laptops don't have the space for multiple drives, they can't dissipate heat as well, and they certainly can't accommodate expansion.
To get the same performance of a desktop in a mobile platform, you have to wait for the technology to become available then pay a premium for the privilege. People have been saying laptops are getting near desktop performance for decades. What is actually happening however is the price of admission for an application platform has been decreasing.
You can get a resonable desktop today for what a hard drive would have cost you twenty years ago. However, if you want cutting edge power, you need a desktop or larger.
frozentundra123456 - Friday, May 29, 2009 - link
The charts are technically labelled incorrectly. I believe for instance the first chart, black bar, means the ratio of nVidia performance to ATI, not percent improvement as it is labelled. Saying "102 percent improvement" actually means that the nVidia solution is twice as fast as the ATI, which from reading the rest of the article appears not to be what the author meant. The rest of the charts are labelled in this way also.