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General discussion

athlon 64 laptop

Mar 4, 2004 8:37AM PST

i am not too familiar with athlon because i have been a intel person myself but i am going to purchase a new laptop soon and i cant make up my mind. i was looking at my options and it came down to a Toshiba Satellite M30 Series or a Dell. I was in Best Buy and I happened to notice a Emachines Athlon 64. I am not that familiar with Athlon 64 but from what I have researched it seems to be pretty good for what I want to do, the only problem is that its in an e-machine laptop and they are the only ones offering it at this time. Does anyone know of e-machine's reliability?

Discussion is locked

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Re:athlon 64 laptop = What a solution...
Mar 4, 2004 9:28AM PST

Thank you for posting that. My 64-bit plan is in late April to maybe the next month and this news is news to me. I've been not looking at the laptop possibility, but with your post I googled and see there are a few 64-bit offerings now.

E-Machine was snapped up by Gateway so hang in there for the consolidation.

And you will see me write many times that this is a great idea to stave off obsoletion of a major purchase.

Bob

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Re:athlon 64 laptop, MORE out there.
Mar 4, 2004 9:59AM PST

HP and others rolled theirs out March 3, 2004.

Prices look very sharp. Keep shopping.

Bob

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My company buys HP & Compaq Athlon64 laptops
Apr 4, 2005 9:58AM PDT

We have purchased several of the HP zv5000z laptops with the 3700+ processor. They are amazing for their speed and features, and a bit heavy at nearly 8 pounds. Still, the widescreen is awesome for business travelers who play DVDs, and the GeForce 440 video card can run CAD applications for our engineers. Last week they replaced this model with the 6000, which uses the 939-pin chip and maxes at 3500+. It has an ATI video card so you can forget about CAD - gaming would be okay. There is a model in the Compaq Presario line, the R3000Z, which still has the 3700+ and GeForce, so that is what we will go to. Way more affordable than Intel's solutions for the power you get! Whichever one, make sure you get the 5,400RPM drive option instead of 4,200RPM. (They don't offer a 7,200 option, but overall these things kick butt!)

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I would stick with the R3000Z
Apr 4, 2005 1:18PM PDT

I think compaqs great, owned 2 of them. The HP notebook has a junk graphics card and has junker processors, amd sempron and low end athlon 64s.
Roger

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damasta55r
Apr 4, 2005 1:26PM PDT

Why did you buy these models?

Bob

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Major brand Athlon64 laptops
Apr 5, 2005 12:07AM PDT

The HP and Compaq models noted are the only AMD64 laptops that fit my company's business needs. Also, when WindowsXP 64-bit is released in a few months the AMD64s will not end up in a dumpster like all the Pentium laptops! There are other AMD64 laptop companies out there like CybertronPC, available from TigerDirect, but I stick with the major players.
I don't get the earlier post about HP using low-end graphics and CPUs as opposed to Compaq. The HP zv5000z and the Compaq R3000Z are identical except for the case - GeForce 440 and 754-pin 3700+. It's the same company, after all. (The 939-pin chip in HP's z6000 line uses single-channel memory so no real advantage there.)

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Acer?
Apr 6, 2005 9:50AM PDT

I am currently looking for a laptop to replace my IBM ThinkPad T20 (P3 700mhz) and i have also seen some AMD64 laptops that i like.

I am very interested in the Acer Aspire 1522WLMI, which has an AMD Athlon64 3000+ processor for under

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Acer Ferrari
Apr 6, 2005 3:01PM PDT

There's an Acer Ferrari (2400 i think) that has the rare low-power A64 chip. It weighs 6.0lb, and the battery lasts 3 hours. However, it's very tough to get in the USA. http://www.newegg.com had some but they're out of stock now.

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Avoid shared graphics if doing presentations
Apr 7, 2005 2:41PM PDT

For video cards it really depends what you are doing with the laptop. If you are going to do presentations running both the LCD and a projector, you may find the shared graphics option creates pauses when changing slides. I have also seen problems with WMP and Quicktime plugins with dual-view. It goes witout saying that your DVD playback will benefit from dedicated VRAM instead of shared.
The nVidia FX5200, 5500 and 5700 are all good cards - I have built about 50 custom AMD64 computers with these. I have also purhased laptops with the FX5200GO for our company. Very respectable card, including gaming, and has hardware OpenGL for CAD. The new ATI mobile platforms X.200, .300 and .600 are very good for gaming but no hardware OpenGL support.
I started building AMD64 computers for my employer in May 2004 because the new P4 775 chips with DDR-II memory were too expensive. I may switch back to P4 someday now that EMT64 is out and some chipsets support standard DDR, but for now AMD64 is the clear price-to-performance winner.

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HP - Junk parts?
Apr 18, 2005 4:27AM PDT

I've been very critical about all brands of laptops and never been a fan of consumer model PC's from HP, Compaq or Dell, but I should correct you about the HP AMD 64 cpu laptops. I have a self-built AMD 64 3500+ system at home. The HP zv6000 series can be purchased with a AMD 64 cpu (or sempron if you really want it) Its the same as what I have at home. Hardly junk at all, and performs as good as a Intel P4 3.4 GHZ. The ATI 128mb Radeon xpress video with Hypermemory is hardly anything to sneeze at. Plus the Nic and Wireless are Broadcom, which has pretty much replaced all Intel Nics that used to be standard on HP and Compaq. Plus just to kick more sand in Intel's face, the FSB is 1600mhz vs. thier mere "533 and trying to break 800 FSB".