Santa Rosa: Crave goes hands on with the new Centrino

By Rory Reid on 02 May 2007, 6:06pm

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Graphics performance
The Intel 965 chipset in Santa Rosa laptops delivers fairly potent graphics performance -- for a laptop. Many laptops will utilise the integrated Intel GMA X3100 graphics chipset, which is DirectX 10-compatible. In many ways this card is like the Xenos graphics chip at the heart of the Xbox 360, as it uses a unified shader architecture. In reality, it's nowhere near as fast as the Microsoft console, but it supports HDMI output with HDCP compliance, and has Intel's Clear Video technology, so you get smoother hi-def video playback, sharper pictures, and more control over colour and contrast settings.

Santa Rosa also does clever things to the display in order to stretch out battery life. It does this by changing the 'refresh' rate on the display. Sure, LCDs don't have a refresh rate as such, but the new Centrino platform can reduce the number of times per second the liquid crystals are twisted or untwisted -- thus reducing power drainage and increasing battery life.

Crave's test results
We can't tell you how good Intel's X3100 chip is, since we don't have one. Our Santa Rosa sample uses an Nvidia GeForce 8600M GT with 512MB of RAM, which by our reckoning is a faster solution. We tested it with 3DMark 2006 and it achieved 3,668, which is excellent for a laptop that isn't designed to be a gaming machine. It helped F.E.A.R run along at 29fps at a resolution of 1,024x768 pixels, with all the settings cranked to maximum, and 4x FSAA and 8x AF enabled.