The laptop lately has been going into repair mode every time I boot it up. I have been a desktop user for a long time and so I am a little perturbed at this behavior from a seamless build when my desktop is a mishmash of parts old and new which should be more unstable. I also have some distressing news to report about Rift and the laptop. . . A vanilla install of rift doesn’t play well at all with the low clock speed of the quad core. This is obviously a single threaded game. Wow has no problems on higher settings so AMD is saved by good coding but this is not good news for anyone trying to run everyday run of the mill games.
So. . . AMD has to stop playing the efficiency game and boost the clock speeds, simple as that. This would mean larger batteries and add a significant cost to the OEM bottom line when considered with their overall strategy as a bargain brand. There is a silver lining here though, and that is the fact that ultrabooks don’t have decent graphics and require low watt processors so this processor with a little tweaking could be a dream for that segment, or even without tweaking.
Where the A-series really shines is the addition of a fully functional graphics unit, which is why I purchased the laptop in the first place instead of an i5 that was available at the time. The i5 simply didn’t have game level graphics, and was dual core instead of quad core. I wanted a laptop that could use the vreveal video editing suite since I was purchasing a video card for my desktop from AMD in the 6xxx or even 7xxx range and I didn’t want to waste my purchase. That video editing suite happens to leverage the Radeon cards in that range similarly to Cuda for nvidia.
I’m going to be spending some time tinkering with rift on the laptop to see if I can juryrig the game into spreading across all four cores. They had experimentation on multiple core implementation a few months ago and I suspect the new processor isn’t being detected properly. What gives me such a notion is that the software render of the game is smooth and the core is rated at the 66xxm performance level, so chances are there is something just not right about this herring. By the way, other than this major digression the laptop is quite nice overall for what I need it for. But for Gods sake, get the extended battery. . .
Steven A, on computing and life... 