Gaming laptop with lowest power consumption ?

[Cd]

I know that the Macbook Pro has a decent graphics card and uses an average of just over 33 Watts while processing, however, it's pricing is just stupid. You pay a premium for ... what ?
I have seen several gaming laptops that have much better graphics, yet cost hundreds of dollars less than the Macs.
However, power consumption is my main concern. What I am after is a laptop that uses no more than 40 watts while processing. ( not to be confused with standby mode )

An EPEAT Gold rating would be 'icing on the cake'.

Any advice ?


BTW, A Playstation uses over 200 watts while you play your game, so one of these is completely out of the question.

[SVOboy]

I was going to suggest the MBP actually. My roommate uses one for gaming and it seems to run very smoothly. As a mac user and a someone planning to purchase the 15" MBP come graduation time, I think it's very worth it and the power consumption is quite nice.

However, it might be more economical to buy a ps3/xbox 360/wii and wind power from the grid for your house

[Cd]

Thanks, on the wind power suggestion, but I've already got that from my utility provider. It's more an offset, since you aren't truly getting wind power at all times . Like buying carbon credits really.

A MBP ? Did you mean Mac Power Book ?
So not to knock Macs and all, what is better about them that commands such a huge increase in price ?
If the operating system is that bad on a Windows machine, you could always just go with Linux.
With a Mac, you get a slower processor, less RAM, and a weaker graphics card - and pay more for it configured this way.

Educate me.

[SVOboy]

MBP = MacBook Pro

Most of the linux builds out there can be quite annoying in my experience. Sure, Ubuntu is nice, but I don't like using it. So yeah, I would consider OSX a plus, especially since it's frequently updated and for not much money and has a very low system footprint. Some systems may come with slower processors and less RAM, but Leopard only requires 170mb of ram for it's kernel, whereas Vista consumes something like 700-800mb.

However, in my experience, the best part of owning a mac has been the service I've gotten. I've broken (through mainly fault of my own) the optical drive, the keyboard twice, the power cord 4 times, and the power input once through dropping and I never had to pay anything to replace those things even though many weren't technically under warranty. Also, they gave me a free battery out of warranty without even asking when my mac was getting the optical drive fixed, which I believe costs over $100.

Also, when I first got it and had a failure with the computer, rather than make me wait for repairs, they just gave me a brand new computer on the spot without waiting.

So, compared to a friend of mine who had her Dell die in the middle of writing a book and then had to wait 2 weeks for a replacement in the mail because she couldn't go to a store for an exchange and ended up getting a broken replacement and had to wait another 3 weeks before actually getting a computer under warranty, I count myself pretty happy.

Plus, they look better and please me to use them. And since I use the computer so much it's important to me to have a computer I can comfortably use and look at and doesn't make my desk look like an industrial waste site.

That's just my personal opinion though. I do see the benefit of things like netbooks and cheap laptops, but after spending most of my life as a rather advanced windows user and then switching over to mac I have no desire to go back to windows just to save some money. Especially since my heavily abused mac is still going strong and fast after almost four years so I can afford to wait and save up for the MBP.

[brucey]

How can you have a gaming computer running Mac OS or even linux? :P

You can get a medium end pc laptop for 600$ as my roommate did recently. 17" screen and plays fallout 3 very nicely. I've measured the power consumption on his while watching a dvd at 20 watts. This was with the brightness of the screen all the way up and the speakers on full. An entire day if it running is around 0.5kwh

Its a toshiba I believe. But any laptop is going to have electricity consumption the first priority over gaming power. So just buy any one you want, I can't imagine a laptop using 200 watts. Even the super high end alienware laptops draw around 160 watts on full load. Which is still, what? A lightbulb and a half?

My desktop is the real culprit drainer in the house. I've been putting it on standby when not in use but its also the network file sharer.

7kwh a day during regular use. :/ Its off about half the time though now, so 3.5 guessing. For the longest time I was just leaving it on 24/7. Dumb me.

[NiHaoMike]

The most efficient general purpose CPUs I'm aware of are the TI OMAP series, but I don't know of any laptop that uses one. There is a SFF motherboard that uses one ( BeagleBoard.org - default ), but it's a little weak for a general purpose PC. (It would work great for many less demanding tasks, however.)

[Cd]

Originally Posted by brucey

How can you have a gaming computer running Mac OS or even linux? :P

You can get a medium end pc laptop for 600$ as my roommate did recently. 17" screen and plays fallout 3 very nicely. I've measured the power consumption on his while watching a dvd at 20 watts. This was with the brightness of the screen all the way up and the speakers on full. An entire day if it running is around 0.5kwh

.

" How can you have a gaming computer running Mac OS or even linux? :P "

I know ... it would really suck because you would still have to buy Windows so you could play your game on your non Windows system.

( What's the point ? )

Can you find out what the model of your friends laptop is ? What are his sytem specs ?

20 watts is fantastic ! My tiny 12" Toshiba M200 is using 23 watts + 7 watts for the modem just to type this out.

[NiHaoMike]

I play games on Linux. Some of my favorites are D2X-XL, Nethack, and Rocks'n'Diamonds.

My 17" laptop uses 15w at idle (down to about 10w or less with the screen off), 20w in typical use, and it maxes out at about 50w with a heavy load. Not bad considering it has a 1.6GHz Core 2 Duo and a 8600m GT.

Recently, Gentoo got support for offloading video decoding to Hannah Montana (the DSP onboard Nvidia 8 and above video cards, including the 8600m GT in my laptop), but I have to actually measure the power usage to determine if it is more efficient than using the CPU. It is really made for improving system performance when multitasking while viewing videos.

[Cd]

Originally Posted by NiHaoMike

Recently, Gentoo got support for offloading video decoding to Hannah Montana (.

Huh ?

[NiHaoMike]

Every PC with a Nvidia 8 or above video card is a x86/Hannah Montana hybrid. While regular CPUs are designed with general computing in mind, Hannah Montana (which is really more of a DSP core than a CPU) is optimized for vector operations, as are often present in multimedia. In addition, Hannah Montana performs calculations in a way that simplifies logic for multimedia processing.
http://www.mobilitysite.com/boards/w...ach-other.html

For instance, the Hannah Montana processor core, often used for DSP, can process "real world" (vector) data far faster than any conventional CPU despite low clock speeds. The reason has to do with SIMD - one instruction can manipulate as many as thousands of data elements in one cycle. Indeed, Hannah Montana has been described as a very fast and very efficient, but very limited supercomputer that can be integrated into a single chip. (Note that Hannah Montana is only 32 bit and does not handle 32 bit floating point variables according to IEEE 754. That's most likely to allow the design to be simplified. Hannah Montana also handles integer overflows differently - computed values beyond the range of an integer are clipped at the maximum or minimum values and a "flag" set.)
...
As for integer overflows, Hannah Montana simply handles them differently than most processors. If a calculation is such that its result is too large to store in a given number of bits, most processors will simply truncate the overflow, causing the number to "wrap around". Obviously, that is not very acceptable for DSP. Hannah Montana, however, simply sets the result to the largest (or smallest for a negative overflow) number that can be stored and sets a boolean flag to notify the application that an overflow has occurred.

As an example, let's consider an 8 bit processor. The largest number that can be stored in 8 bits is 255 and the minimum is 0. (That's true for "unsigned" integers, as is often used in video.) Let's suppose a calculation returns a result of 257. Since that is beyond the range of 8 bits, a normal processor would truncate it to 1. A processor that handled overflows like Hannah Montana, however, would set the result to 255, which is more acceptable in DSP. Just think about it: if a calculation on a video pixel is "brighter than brightest", wouldn't it be better to just set it to "brightest" as opposed to "very dim"?

So basically, if you write Hannah Montana code for processing video, you don't have to check for and handle integer overflows as the ALUs would automatically handle the limits, but some oddball code that expects calculations to overflow will not work. (Such "clock arithmetic" is common in encryption and data encoding.) So in the right application, the saved clock cycles would mean a much higher code execution efficiency. Since it would traditionally take one clock cycle to actually perform the calculation, then several more to check for overflow and handle it accordingly, a large number of clock cycles can be saved.

Now, I'm not sure about the energy efficiency. I'm sure the particular implementation in the 8600m GT is energy efficient, but so is the Core 2 Duo. I'll actually have to make some measurements to compare efficiencies.