Oolite Bulletins

I have finally replaced my 1999 vintage Dell X200 with a new one (tearjerking blog here.)

It's replacement is an Asus U33J Bamboo. Small enough to be portable, powerful enough to run a few games, looks 'nice' too.

It has an Nvidia N310M graphics card (on demand). Installed Oolite yesterday and it defaulted to the inbuilt graphics card. A few tweaks later and we have:

99 FPS and Full Shaders.... Ho! Time for some OXPs...

Now I can write and play on the same laptop.

Very Happy.

Cheers,

Drew.

I have a couple of questions - battery life and cost...

Still planning on getting something I can write on and play Oolite on for my 40th in September...

From a recent test/review: This was the U53JC, but as far as I could gather, the only difference between U53JC and U33JC is screen size (15.6 vs 13.1).

Battery life estimated between 5-8 hours (according to Asus)

Unsure of 'reality' yet. 1.5 hours on the train this morning left me with 70% (playing oolite for half an hour). So perhaps 5 with 'heavy-ish' usage.

I'll be good and use just Word on the way home to see what that looks like.

Cost... ahem. Not cheap. A bit of style over substance here. Retails for just over £800. Got mine for just under this due to some wacky amazon vouchers my wife had online. You can probably get cheaper and faster elsewhere, but I wanted light weight and a bit of bling given I hope it will last another decade..

It's quality though; very very nicely put together.

Spec is

i5 2.53 Ghz
4 GB Ram
500 GB HD
Nvidia Geforce N310M on demand
1366x768 (widescreen)
Windows 7 Home Premium

Runs current Oolite 1.75.1 like a dream. 99 FPS, full shaders. CPU only registers at 35% - no OXPs yet though!!

Cheese is right on the spec. Screen size is the only difference (note no resolution difference, just bigger). I went for the smaller one for portability. Internal spec is the same.

It's not a gaming rig, but it's got enough 3d power to hold its own. I'm very pleased with it so far.

Click Oolite icon to spinning cobra is just over 5 seconds.

Cheers,

Drew.

Perhaps in six months time it'll be closer to my £400 budget!

Good to see you trying to restart the economy...

Thread derailment alert

drew wrote:

Click Oolite icon to spinning cobra is just over 5 seconds.

I have a desktop, rather than a laptop (Intel quad-core and 4GB RAM + horrid onboard graphics running Ubuntu 10.04).
Icon to spinning Cobra (including going to full-screen mode) less than 3 seconds!
Who's got the fastest?

Three seconds also... desktop.

Smivs wrote:

Thread derailment alert
Icon to spinning Cobra (including going to full-screen mode) less than 3 seconds!
Who's got the fastest?

With all my 100+ installed oxps is takes me about 9 seconds (including rebuilding cache) . But for testing sake I deactivated all oxps. Result: ±1.5 seconds. (Clearly below 2 seconds and that is with rebuilding cache as that is always on by default on my computer.)

Oh, ok, I have to tell as well. When I'm allowed on my sons brand new i7, Oolite pretty much blinks into view. It's a custom gaming rig he has bought for his own money and I have to say Oolite looks very nice on it. On my laptop (in dire need of a reinstall) Oolite uses about 6-8 seconds to start with about 80 OXP's installed. It's a pretty powerful HP Elitebook 8530W, with an nVidia Quadro graphics chip. Windows index of 6.2 not counting the HD which is at 5.8

AMD dual core 64, 2.7 Ghz
2 GB Ram
320 GB HD
Nvidia Geforce 9500 GT (1GB)
1280X1024
Ubuntu 9.10

With all the OXP loaded, about 6 seconds. 78 OXPs

Without OXPs, about 2 seconds.

Flushed cache both times.

PS: Desktop

Blimey, mine takes like 20 seconds, but then I remember well having to wait 20 minutes to load Elite into my ZX spectrum, off an old audio cassette, and then with only a 50% chance of it working.

ahh, oxp-less, about a second. and for once in my life i'm not 2 yrs behind everyone else!

5 seconds on my laptop, an older Thinkpad (T43) with a 2.13Ghz Pentium M, and 2Gb RAM, with ATI graphics in Debian Linux. no shaders, and 50FPS, but I paid $150(US) for it. . .

Hmm, about 40s the first time I loaded it, but only 15s the second time.

Ancient Vista machine though

These types of comparisons are meaningless, really. The startup times depend - apart from the different processor specs - on the number and type of OXPs installed, the memory available, the processes running in the background, disk fragmentation, whether there are cache memory hits involved (have you noticed how much quicker the game launches the second time you start it, compared to the first one after a reboot?) and probably other factors that escape me right now. Just a while ago, I had Oolite launching in something like thirty seconds, simply because McAfee decided to run a background scan shortly before I fired up the game.

Benchmarking has to be very carefully planned, in order to be sure that you are measuring exactly what you want to measure, with minimal to no external interference.

Battery life seems to be around the 6 hour mark on light word-processing duties.

Cheers,

Drew.