New Asus W90 with ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4870

Asus came up with this 18.4-inch behemoth for the most demanding game lovers.

Asus W90

ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4870 X2 card

Is Asus trying to break record for manufacturing most number of models? The rate at which it is shelling out models is nothing short of breathtaking. More than 20 models of Eee PC in a year! Along with that they have been equally releasing conventional-sized notebooks. They have brought out some really big multimedia systems, but this one seems to take the cake. Asus announced the new W90 multi-media notebook with…er.. 18.4-inch display panel and the first lot of ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4870 X2 graphics card.

Asus starts with "Take to the streets in high gear with the W90...” which will be quite of a task having to carry this 5.2 kg (11 lbs) monster. By the way it’s not “only muscles and no brain” case, with the W90 powered by Intel’s Core 2 Duo processor (T9600,T9400,P8600 or P8400) and based on the Intel X38 chipset with up to 6GB of RAM and dual 500GB hard drive. Because of the desktop chipset, the W90 also supports desktop CPUs btw. The system it’s equipped with the Turbo Gear function which allows users to overclock the machine by “up to 25%”.

The W90Vp is equipped with an ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4870 X2 or HD 3850 X2 dual graphics with GDDR3 1024MB VRAM, and the other variants W90Vn and W90V sport a single NVIDIA GeForce 9800M GS, GDDR3 1024MB VRAM and ATI Mobility Radeon HD 3850 graphics, GDDR3 1024MB VRAM, respectively.

Other features include a Blu-ray combo or DVD SuperMulti DL burner,an 18.4-inch (W90Vp/W90Vn) or 17-inch (W90V) widescreen LCD display, a 2-megapixel web camera, WiFi 802.11n, Bluetooth, Gigabit Ethernet LAN,a 56k modem and six built-in Altec Lansing surround sound speakers.

Asus kept the Processor frequency to 2.8GHz but gave laptop Turbo button, after pressing the increase FSB from 266 to 291 MHz, thereby increasing the processor frequency to 3.05 GHz which graphics card need a salt – as reported by PCtuning. They also noticed the 6GB RAM mentioned in the Marketing statement of the laptop is actually 3 modules of 2GB each.

Although the graphics card says “HD 4870 x 2” – it is not dual Radeon, but has used two separate CrossFires.

The 18.4-inch panel has a resolution of 1920 x 1080 px and 16:9 aspect ratio – as observed by PCtuning, but it says Everest ranks it poorly. Apart from the built-n display, there are HDMI and analog D-Sub connectors.

With 8800mAh and 93Wh, the battery life should be on the shorter side.

PCtuning found the sound quite extraordinary – with the front pair and center are located on the front edge, the rear pair of keyboard and subwoofer is the bottom. It is therefore not surprising that the notebook plays really well. Especially the bass is full and the only problem at higher volumes becomes quite decent vibration entire notebook. Sound is also at higher volumes clean, full.

They report that performance of the RAM is not the highest because of lower time and memory. Also use of 3 memories limits the performance.

Asus is yet to state the release date and price of this system.

Benchmarking:

PCTuning did the following benchmarking :

CPU tests:

• They used the classic 07 Sandra from SisSoftware, namely tests Processor Arithmetic and Processor Multi-Media (Both these tests measure the theoretical gross processor performance). In both the tests, W90 scored well above average.
• In both PCMark 05 and 3DMark 06 tests, it scores highest among an elite league of cards with 7556 and 2719 respectively.
• As part of the simulation exercise for the treatment of pictures or video rendering, the 10^th version of Cinebench is used, where the W90 scores 6091.

Memory tests:

• At Sandra 07 Memory Bandwidth test, W90 falls down to 7^th place with a score of 5215, although in Memory benchmark test with PCMark 05, it scores 4903(DDR2-728) and 4502(DDR2-667)
• The Everest home edition tests show above average results for the W90.

Graphics card tests:

• Scores 19556 in 3DMark 05, and 14122 in 3DMark 06, running at default settings.
• When some high definition games were tested, they gave the following results –

              Far Cry 1.4 (Very high,1xAA,0xAF) – avg. 484 and min. 321

              FlatOut 2 (Very high,1xAA,0xAF) – avg. 60 and min. 60

              Serious Sam 2 (Maximum+HDR,1xAA,0xAF) – avg. 120 and min. 73

              Test Drive Unlimited (High+HDR,1xAA,0xAF) – avg. 63 and min. 44

This is to be noted that in the Xtremesystems forum, an user crossed 20K mark with 3DMark 06 while testing the graphics card, far exceeding the 14K mark of PCtuning. Considering the processor could limit overall performance while driving the cards, Kinc upped the FSB to 416MHz, and almost got to the magic 4GHz. He also got the Mobility 4870 X2 running at 600MHz gpu and 1800MHz memory clocks.

ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4800 series:

The ATI Mobility Radeon™ HD 4800 series delivers an immersive, cinematic gaming experience and with ATI CrossFireX™ multi-GPU technology experience the first graphics processor for notebooks that delivers one teraFLOPs of sheer power  – as Asus claims. The 8000 series is claimed to possess more than twice the processing power of previous generation AMD discrete graphics card. The 800 stream processors couples with GDDR5 or GDDR3 memory propel. It has Direct X 10.1 support. Asus also promises enhanced ATI PowerPlay™ activity-based power management technology intuitively conserves energy at idle or when demand is low. The GPU automatically adjusts between low to high states delivering the power needed to blaze through the most intense games while dynamically conserving energy at idle or when demand is low - an optimal solution for great performance and long battery life. 

More information on the 4800 series can be found in our comparison of laptop graphic cards.