X1300 vs X1400

[HamTard]

What is the difference? Is the X1400 just a higher clocked X1300 core? Does it use better video ram? Does it have the same number of pipelines?

[smek]

The x1400 got a little more than 2000 3dmarks 05, the x1300 got a little over half that.

[donking!]

I researched this a while ago without coming up with a very satisfactory answer. If you look at the ATI specs, the two chips look basically identical.

http://www.ati.com/products/mobilityrad ... specs.html
http://www.ati.com/products/mobilityrad ... specs.html

Here's a thread at another forum that discusses the two cards some, but is unable to really pinpoint a difference.

http://www.beyond3d.com/forum/showthread.php?t=27228

Here's a short article from a French web site that says basically the mobility x1400 has the same specifications as the desktop x1300. And the mobility x1300 has the specifications of the x1300 HyperMemory.

http://www.hardware.fr/html/news/?date=06-01-2006#7937

Apparently the HyperMemory desktop x1300 differs from the regular x1300 in that it uses system memory to supplement it's own memory. But the HyperMemory compensates for this deficiency by accessing its memory at twice the speed of the regular x1300. Here's an article on the desktop versions. The desktop x1300 pro also does have a faster clocked core. So I guess it's possible that might be a difference between the mobility x1400 and the mobility x1300. But that's pure speculation on my part.

http://www.hardwaresecrets.com/article/254

This very brief German article claims that the mobility x1300 is designed to be used as an intergated UMA chip. I guess that backs up the french web site's claim that the mobility x1300 is more like the desktop x1300 HyperMemory, that uses some system memory to operate.

http://www.computer-nachrichten.de/hard ... x1400.html

Although, now that I look more closely at ATI web site, both the mobility x1400 and x1300 say they use hypermemory. So that can't be the difference.

Here's another German article. It says the mobility x1300 can have different clock rates set by the manufacturer; and different amounts of memory selected by the manufacturer. It also seems to say the mobility x1400 does have a higher clock rate, but I'm not sure I'm understanding that part of the article correctly.

http://www.computerbase.de/news/hardwar ... 300_x1400/

(How come the Germans have more info on this than the Americans?)

So I guess I'd say after researching this again, it's really hard to see what the difference is between these two cards, other than the amount of memory. People out there don't seem to know and are saying contradictory things.

My educated guess is that ATI is playing it close to their chest, because basically there is no significant difference between these cards and they're just trying to create two different price points.

*

Can I add, now that I think about this more, Lenovo is being pretty lame and cheap with these GPUs. I mean, Apple is ONLY using the mobility x1600 in the MacBooks. Even in their lowest priced model. With Lenovo you pay more for a worse GPU. And that makes little sense given that games are much more prevalent on PCs.

Lenovo should stop cheaping out, I think, and offer ThinkPads with the x1400 as their low end, the x1600 as their middle end, and the FireGL for people who do CAD stuff. That would make the new ThinkPads seem like a lot classier notebooks. And like Lenovo is taking care of it's customers and only giving them decent equipment.

[donking!]

The x1400 got a little more than 2000 3dmarks 05, the x1300 got a little over half that.

That's interesting. Where did you see that?

[lithium726]

donking - just becuase a GPU is hypermemory capable does not mean it is being used in that fasion. i believe the only difference between the 1300 and 1400 in the TP's is clockrate and memory amount.

[donking!]

lithium726. Do you mean Lenovo can set the GPU not to ever use hpyermemory. Or do you mean, hypermemory is only activated by the GPU when it needs it? Thanks.

[smek]

The notebookreviw.com site tested a T-60 with an x1400 and got 2092 3dMarks, I can remeber where i saw the x1300 results but it was in the lower 1000s.

[donking!]

Here's a link to a site someone referred to in a different thread. It compares the x1300 and x1400.

http://www.rage3d.de/grafikkartendb.php ... rgleich=73

As I speculated the differences between the two cards are incredibly small. Especially the clock speed difference. Although I'm not sure I buy that this will be the actual clock speeds of cards in the ThinkPads, since I read elsewhere that Lenovo can set the clock speed at different levels.

[fbrdphreak]

The X1300 & X1400 are related like the X300 & X600 were, altho from what I'm hearing the performance difference may be less.

They have the same physical specifications (pixel pipelines, shader units, etc) to my knowledge, just drastically different clocks. Actually I just remembered: the X1300 might have a 64-bit memory bus, compared to the 128-bit on the X1400. That can be a major difference

[donking!]

They have the same physical specifications (pixel pipelines, shader units, etc) to my knowledge, just drastically different clocks. Actually I just remembered: the X1300 might have a 64-bit memory bus, compared to the 128-bit on the X1400. That can be a major difference

If you look at the link for rage3D.de that I provide above, it says that the X1300 has a 390Mhz clock rate and the X1400 has a 445Mhz. If that's right, then that's not a drastically different clock rate at all. Also again, I've read in more than one place that the clock rate on these two GPUs can be set by the manufacturer, so it sounds like it depends some on what Lenovo does and apparently no one's saying.

If you look at the specs on ATIs site, both the X1300 and the X1400 have 128-bit memory buses.

So to me it still looks like (except for the RAM) there is almost no difference between these two GPUs.

[MagicBoy]

From http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/mobile/dis ... 43537.html :

The Mobility Radeon X1300 and X1400 share the same chip design – the mobile flavour of the RV515 chip – contain 4 pixel shader processors, two vertex shader processors and 128-bit memory bus. The new mobile VPU also sport features like Avivo video engine, shader model 3.0 and other technology innovations.

Mobility Radeon X1400 is designed for mainstream thin and light notebooks, whereas the Mobility Radeon X1300 is developed for cost-effective computers. The parts differ by clock-speed and memory configurations.

While the general specifications of the Mobility Radeon X1300 and X1400 are similar to the desktop Radeon X1300-series, the chips are even made using the same 90nm process technology, the mobile products sport such technologies as back bias, mixed vt and dynamic voltage control in addition to PowerPlay 6.0, all of which are designed to lower power consumption.

Considering they're both the same basic chip and on 90nm process I wonder if something like Powerstrip will allow overclocking...

[own6volvos]

So to me it still looks like (except for the RAM) there is almost no difference between these two GPUs.

Well maybe that is where they are putting the different name in then. Its not a big difference like x300 to x600, as it is just half the ram?

[donking!]

If you look at that rage3D.de link I provide above, it says the X1300 and the X1400 can both be configured with either 32, 64, or 128MB of RAM. Obviously Lenovo has chosen to use different amounts of RAM with the X1300 and X1400. But apparently it doesn't have to be that way. That leaves only the uncertain (if it's significant at all) difference in clock speed between the two.

I'm becoming more and more convinced that the difference between the X1300 and X1400 is more of a marketing distinction than anything else.

[fbrdphreak]

The physical specs are the same for MR X1300 and MR X1400—only the clocks are different. The qualified clocks for the X1300 and X1400 are as follows. Please note that these are qualified settings but OEMs are free to use a setting other than these as long as they are within the specified range. OEMs decide on which engine and memory clocks to use based on performance and power consumption (battery life) targets. Also, both MR X1300 and MR X1400 have a 128-bit memory bus (maximum), but there are OEMs that may choose to implement a 64-bit model.

X1300:
w/ GDDR1 memory: 392MHz engine / 335MHz memory
w/ DDR2 memory: 392MHz engine / 375MHz memory
w/ GDDR3 memory: 392MHx engine / 400MHz memory

X1400:
w/ GDDR1 memory: 445MHz engine / 360MHz memory
w/ DDR2 memory: 445MHz engine / 400MHz memory
w/ GDDR3 memory: 445MHx engine / 450MHz memory

[donking!]

fbrdphreak, cool. Where did you find that info?

I wonder now how to figure out what settings Lenovo has chosen?

Still this pretty much sustains my claim that the differences between the X1300 and X1400 are very minimal and hair splitting. The only real significant difference being Lenovo's choice to use 64Mb with the X1300 and 128MB with the X1400.

[fbrdphreak]

fbrdphreak, cool. Where did you find that info?

I wonder now how to figure out what settings Lenovo has chosen?

Still this pretty much sustains my claim that the differences between the X1300 and X1400 are very minimal and hair splitting. The only real significant difference being Lenovo's choice to use 64Mb with the X1300 and 128MB with the X1400.

I e-mailed ATI

I can look up the X1400 clocks on the T60, but I'll have to e-mail my Lenovo guy about the X1300.

[donking!]

I e-mailed ATI

Brilliant!:!::D

Yeah, I'd definitely be curious if you have a way to find out from Lenovo what the actual settings of the X1300 and X1400 are on the T60 as it ships. Thanks.

[lithium726]

lithium726. Do you mean Lenovo can set the GPU not to ever use hpyermemory. Or do you mean, hypermemory is only activated by the GPU when it needs it? Thanks.

lenovo has set it never to use Hypermemory. The x1300 and x1400 will never use system RAM.

as far as i can tell, the only difference is vram and clockspeed.

fbrdphreak, can you see what ATI says about clockspeeds and the memory interface of the v5200? Im curious to see if it is in any way better htan the x1600 other than the extra 128mb memory, hopefully it has a 256bit bus

[csioucs]

Well, using system ram is something decided by hardware only? When I have 1 gig of ram I don't mind using Hypermemory. If it's hardware than it is difficult. If it'something in the bios, or how the card perceives itself (softwarely) would it not be possible to "persuade" the card with "apropriate language and tools" to be a hypermemoristical one?

When the system arrives I'll check overclocking with the atitool. Perhaps some T60 owners could already check that.

[bibo]

Some of the T43s with ATI X300 graphic card and the new graphic driver can increase the graphic card memory to 256M. So I guess someday the T60s can use hypermemory technology too.

[csioucs]

Can you detail a bit more? Has anyone succeded and posted here...?