Toshiba Satellite X205-S9359: DX10 to go, please!
by Jarred Walton on August 31, 2007 8:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Laptops
Battery Life
For battery life testing, we have three home built Windows Vista tests. The first script uses Internet Explorer to surf several web pages until the battery runs out. DVD playback is pretty straightforward, only we use the included DVD player on each laptop with the assumption that any special hardware acceleration features are more likely to be enabled that way. Finally, for gaming we loop 3DMark06 until the battery runs out. We have also just received our copy of MobileMark 2007, but the Satellite X205 is the only system we've tested so far with the new software. We will include results for MobileMark 2007 in a table for now and add additional systems in the future.
The Satellite X205 battery isn't as large as the Alienware m9750 battery, but it does manage to provide significantly more battery life for DVD playback and web surfing. A 95WHr battery instead of a 65WHr battery would have certainly helped it to distance itself from the other gaming laptops. Still, the results aren't particularly impressive, as it still can't reach two hours of battery life and will thus most likely not last through an entire DVD. We're working on getting an HD-DVD in order to test that aspect of battery life, as we expect it will be even worse than with a regular DVD.
In our gaming test, the Satellite X205 is barely able to beat out the Alienware m9750. That might seem pretty surprising, considering how much faster the Alienware is supposed to be. The reality is that on battery power the GPU clock speeds on the Alienware (and ABS and Dell XPS) are severely reduced and the performance offered is really about the same as the GeForce 8700M GT. NVIDIA's PowerMizer did not appear to be enabled on the Satellite X205, or at least the feature wasn't listed in the driver control panel, but the performance results on battery are about the same as when running off of AC power. Under battery power, the X205 was consistently slower, but only by about 3-5%. As usual, playing 3D games on battery power will be a short-term affair.
MobileMark 2007 generates the best battery life result in its Productivity 2007 test, delivering just over two hours of battery life. It should be noted, however, that there is a period of 20 minutes of inactivity at the beginning of the test which is probably not very realistic. That pause is repeated on each subsequent pass, so if you hibernate your laptop rather than just letting it idle, total battery life will not reach two hours on the X205. The MobileMark 2007 DVD result is basically the same as what our own test generated.
Power Consumption
Related to the battery life discussions, we also have power results. To measure power requirements, we remove the battery from the laptop and measure system power draw at the wall outlet using a Kill-A-Watt device. We test several different scenarios to try to isolate the power draw of the various components. First, we have the baseline measurement when the system is idle and sitting at the desktop. No applications are running for 10 minutes or more but the screensaver is disabled. The hard drive is set to go to sleep after five minutes, and the Vista power profile is set to "balanced". As a CPU load test, we run the SMP version of Folding@Home at 100%. Finally, for maximum power load we leave Folding@Home running and start 3DMark06. In this way, we can see roughly how much power the GPU is using in 3D mode versus 2D mode.
While the battery life results might not have been very impressive, the actual power requirements of the Satellite X205 aren't particularly high. At idle, it actually uses less power than several other laptops, including the ASUS G2P which has a slower GPU. The Santa Rosa platform helps out here, of course. Maxing out the CPU use, the X205 continues to place in the middle of the pack, behind the more powerful gaming notebooks as well as the ASUS G2P. It's only at maximum power draw that it finally closes the gap with the ABS Z5 and ASUS G2P.
For battery life testing, we have three home built Windows Vista tests. The first script uses Internet Explorer to surf several web pages until the battery runs out. DVD playback is pretty straightforward, only we use the included DVD player on each laptop with the assumption that any special hardware acceleration features are more likely to be enabled that way. Finally, for gaming we loop 3DMark06 until the battery runs out. We have also just received our copy of MobileMark 2007, but the Satellite X205 is the only system we've tested so far with the new software. We will include results for MobileMark 2007 in a table for now and add additional systems in the future.
| MobileMark 2007 Performance | |||
| DVD 2007 (Minutes) |
Productivity 2007 Battery Life (Minutes) |
Productivity 2007 Performance Rating |
|
| Toshiba X205 S9359 | 106 | 122 | 180 |
The Satellite X205 battery isn't as large as the Alienware m9750 battery, but it does manage to provide significantly more battery life for DVD playback and web surfing. A 95WHr battery instead of a 65WHr battery would have certainly helped it to distance itself from the other gaming laptops. Still, the results aren't particularly impressive, as it still can't reach two hours of battery life and will thus most likely not last through an entire DVD. We're working on getting an HD-DVD in order to test that aspect of battery life, as we expect it will be even worse than with a regular DVD.
In our gaming test, the Satellite X205 is barely able to beat out the Alienware m9750. That might seem pretty surprising, considering how much faster the Alienware is supposed to be. The reality is that on battery power the GPU clock speeds on the Alienware (and ABS and Dell XPS) are severely reduced and the performance offered is really about the same as the GeForce 8700M GT. NVIDIA's PowerMizer did not appear to be enabled on the Satellite X205, or at least the feature wasn't listed in the driver control panel, but the performance results on battery are about the same as when running off of AC power. Under battery power, the X205 was consistently slower, but only by about 3-5%. As usual, playing 3D games on battery power will be a short-term affair.
MobileMark 2007 generates the best battery life result in its Productivity 2007 test, delivering just over two hours of battery life. It should be noted, however, that there is a period of 20 minutes of inactivity at the beginning of the test which is probably not very realistic. That pause is repeated on each subsequent pass, so if you hibernate your laptop rather than just letting it idle, total battery life will not reach two hours on the X205. The MobileMark 2007 DVD result is basically the same as what our own test generated.
Power Consumption
Related to the battery life discussions, we also have power results. To measure power requirements, we remove the battery from the laptop and measure system power draw at the wall outlet using a Kill-A-Watt device. We test several different scenarios to try to isolate the power draw of the various components. First, we have the baseline measurement when the system is idle and sitting at the desktop. No applications are running for 10 minutes or more but the screensaver is disabled. The hard drive is set to go to sleep after five minutes, and the Vista power profile is set to "balanced". As a CPU load test, we run the SMP version of Folding@Home at 100%. Finally, for maximum power load we leave Folding@Home running and start 3DMark06. In this way, we can see roughly how much power the GPU is using in 3D mode versus 2D mode.
While the battery life results might not have been very impressive, the actual power requirements of the Satellite X205 aren't particularly high. At idle, it actually uses less power than several other laptops, including the ASUS G2P which has a slower GPU. The Santa Rosa platform helps out here, of course. Maxing out the CPU use, the X205 continues to place in the middle of the pack, behind the more powerful gaming notebooks as well as the ASUS G2P. It's only at maximum power draw that it finally closes the gap with the ABS Z5 and ASUS G2P.
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torrent180 - Thursday, September 6, 2007 - link
I have a question for X205 owners. How serious is the issue of the weight and size? I find it really hard to judge from the pics. Is it portable enough or would you really not take it out of the house?Thanks
Inkjammer - Saturday, September 8, 2007 - link
My X205 os slightly bulky, but I don't think it weighs that much at all. It's large, but portable. My old Alienware M7700 (Clevo D900T) felt like it weighed almost twice as much. It was slightly smaller, but weighed much, much less.torrent180 - Saturday, September 8, 2007 - link
So it's worth it eh, your happy with it right, no regrets?JarredWalton - Thursday, September 6, 2007 - link
My personal take is that it's bigger than any other 17" laptop I've used, so it required a larger bag than the 17" bag I have. Weight isn't my primary concern, but size... well, it could be better. Still, I don't think anyone that's after a true DTR is going to care too much. People looking for more portable laptops are probably already discounting 17" chassis designs.Inkjammer - Friday, August 31, 2007 - link
I'd just like to chime in that jumping up to the 163.44 drivers available from www.laptopvideo2go.com does make quite a bit of difference in performance gaming wise -vs- the standard drivers available from Toshiba's website. My framerates were a somewhat smoother after making the driver jump.From what I understand, the 8700GT can be overclocked further with RivaTune and the 163.44 drivers rather nicely. I've not tested it on my x205 - yet. I've gotta re-install Vista Ultimate since I'm upgrading the primary HD in the system (the Hitachi hybrid-HD) to a Hitachi Travelstar 7K200 200GB drive.
If the 8700GT does, in fact, OC well it may add a lot more value to the system.
Although, I do find one thing about your review setup odd. My x205's primary 160GB HD is a Hitachi HTS541616J9A00 Hybrid HD w/392MB (387MB reorted) of flash while the secondary is a Toshiba MK1637GSX.
JarredWalton - Friday, August 31, 2007 - link
Exactly how do you make the 163.44 drivers work? I grabbed them and have now wasted the past two hours attempting to make them work. There's no INF for the 163.44 drivers on LV2G, so I tried to hack one together and apparently failed. Miserably. My experience in the past has been that the regular driver updates are not remotely optimized for the laptop chipsets, but if that's not the case here I'd certainly be interested in giving it a shot.The second question is what you use for overclocking the GPU. Coolbits doesn't work under Vista, as far as I can see. What's the recommended utility? Personally, I don't think unofficial overclocking really adds that much value to a laptop. Remember: the 8700M GT is simply a clock speed increase relative to the 8600M GT. The 8600M GT is supposed to run at 475MHz, while the 8700M is speced for 625MHz. (RAM speed is the same 1400 MHz DDR in both cases.) There's almost certainly a bit more headroom available, but I'm not one to recommend pushing a laptop to the limits in terms of cooling.
As for the hard drives, I can guarantee that the two drives are the same in my particular test unit. However, it could be that shipping retail models switched to a hybrid drive. I don't know if this particular unit was manufactured several months earlier or might even be a prototype.
Regards,
Jarred Walton
Senior Editor, Displays and Laptops
http://www.AnandTech.com">http://www.AnandTech.com
Inkjammer - Friday, August 31, 2007 - link
I had the same problem with the INF at first - it's somewhat hidden. On their driver list for Vista, instead of clicking the download link, click the driver version number (163.44) and it will take you to a forum posting that has far more indepth information, plus a direct link to the INF. It's also got a good amount of information, errata and known isues that the site and users that has been found while using the newer drivers.Windows Vista 32-bit Drivers
http://www.laptopvideo2go.com/forum/index.php?show...">http://www.laptopvideo2go.com/forum/index.php?show...
Direct link to the modified INF:
http://www.laptopvideo2go.com/infs/160series/16344...">http://www.laptopvideo2go.com/infs/160series/16344...
My system came with a Hitachi HHD drive as primary, but I honestly can't tell if there's any benefit from it. Upon first boot, my X205 took near ten minutes to load up primary due to bloatware. I'm not sure if the test unit you received had a lot of pre-installed software, but mine had more than I'd ever seen before on any system. Wiping the drive and installing from a Vista DVD was almost a must - which is unfortunate for this laptop.
LoneWolf15 - Tuesday, September 4, 2007 - link
Sounds like the last Toshiba I've worked on...between the extras, and the Toshiba apps, it was nothing short of horrible. The worst part is, it's very hard to tell which Toshiba apps are necessary, and the ones that the average user might consider useful often have several memory-resident apps that take a ton of RAM and really slow boot time. It was worse than any other vendor I've seen to date (including HP, Dell, etc.)
JarredWalton - Tuesday, September 4, 2007 - link
I don't recall it taking that long to boot up when I first started the system, but then I probably wasn't paying close attention. First boot of Windows Vista always seems to take quite a while. Anyway, there's definitely a lot of preinstalled software that isn't necessary. I hinted at this on page 3: "Toshiba places a large sticker on the palm rest that lists most of the laptop features, along with providing an advertisement for Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter 2. Given the large advertisement, we were a bit surprised that the game isn't even included (though plenty of other software comes preinstalled)." I probably should have been more specific, but I will say more on this in the follow-up article.As far as getting rid of all of the bloatware, I didn't find it to be that difficult. Yes, it took about an hour and several reboots to uninstall all of the extra stuff (Wild Tangent games, McAfee Security Suite, Microsoft Office 2007 trial, etc.) but once done the system ran quite well. It's pretty irritating when I think about how many users will never get around to uninstalling all the extra junk, though.
strikeback03 - Friday, August 31, 2007 - link
Considering Toshiba's past problems with overheating notebooks, lots of space for cooling is probably not a bad thing.