Mobility Radeon X700: The Graphics of the Travelmate 8100

Final Words

The Acer Travelmate 8100 is certainly an impressive notebook. The combination of CPU speed, storage space, good display size and resolution, and the Mobility Radeon X700 make this notebook a very good performer in the mid-range mobile segment.

We are excited to see this part spar with the fairly recently announced GeForce Go 6600 line from NVIDIA. We will bring out a comparison as soon as we are able to round up the necessary competitor. It will be interesting to see whose designs are capable of greater performance when tighter thermal constraints are applied to the design. For now, the Go 6800 Ultra packs the harder punch in designs that we’ve seen where the TDP is ultra high and both systems are equipped with GDDR3. Scaling that down from the high end could tell quite a different story, especially since the MRX700 is fabbed on a .11 micron process.

As for this review, the MRX700 is clearly a solid part. Our tests do show that the mid-range mobile platform is still a couple of steps behind the desktop, and lower resolutions than 1280x1024 are preferred when gaming with the Acer Travelmate 8100.

We do prefer to see gaming possibilities at native panel resolutions, but with the nice sized panel in this machine, we can’t knock Acer’s decision. And on the upside, Half-Life 2 was playable at the highest resolution possible, which bodes well for future games based on the engine. For the smoothest experience, we do have to recommend gaming at resolutions with fewer pixels than 1280x1240. If the game in question supports 1152x720, that may be the sweet spot for this solution. Tweaking the settings for 128MB of RAM will also be necessary in some cases, but generally running with full image quality is possible.

We have been quite happy with the recent move of higher powered graphics to the mobile space, and the MRX700 is a worthy mid-range part in the current climate. Even just a year ago, something like this would have been the most that we could expect from high end mobile parts. The fact that we now see real mid-range parts translating directly into a mobile package is very exciting.