Awards

What Laptop & Handheld PC
Editor's Choice
Services to the Mobile Platform
What Laptop & Handheld PC Awards 2003

Tom's Hardware Guide
Tom's Hardware Guide Reader's Choice Award - Best Mobile Technology

PC Games Hardware
PC Games Hardware Price/Performance Award

HardOCP
HardOCP Must Have Hardware Award

UKGamer.com
UKGamer Approved 4 Stars

Gamers Depot
Gamers Depot Cup of Drool Award - 2003

Reviews

Custom PC
"What really sets the Envy apart and truly earns it it's name is the graphics subsystem. For once this is a notebook you could really take to a LAN party without worrying that your frame rates were lower than your opponents battling away on huge hulking desktops. The guilty component, is ATI's Mobility Radeon 9600 chipset. The GPU is clocked at 350MHz while a whole 64MB of memory (dedicated, not shared) runs at 300MHz (effectively 600MHz) and shares the same architecture as a desktop Radeon 9600."

"Even better, you can even upgrade the graphics to take advantage of future ATI Mobility chips, making it much more flexible than other notebooks."
James Gorbold, October 2003

Anandtech
"The Mobility Radeon 9600 beats the GeForce FX Go5650 "no questions asked" in all of these scenarios, with the highest difference of 415% (36.6fps vs. 7.1fps)."

"In this case, the GeForce FX Go5650 was auto-detected, and the game selected lower quality settings than it did on the Mobility Radeon 9600. We ran the benchmark in four different settings to give an idea of the different code paths, and the respective ability of each graphics processors to run through each scenario."

"For a mobile system that uses a Mobility Radeon 9600, Half-Life 2 won't be a software title that is intimidated by this. Like its desktop counterpart, the Mobility Radeon 9600 has the wits to match even the best [desktop] offering of NVIDA in this benchmark."
Andrew Ku, September 2003

Maximum PC
"The GPU hits frame rate heaven."

"It's patently clear that the 9600 is now the fastest mobile gaming gun in town."

"The lesson here is simple. In all future notebooks we want to see...Mobility Radeon 9600 graphics."
September 2003

PC Magazine
"The [VoodooPC Envy M460's] paint job screams, and so does the performance."

"MPEG blockiness is nicely controlled by the chip, and 3D performance is aided by the 12 pixel-shader operations per cycle."

"And the Envy proved the Radeon's worth....it far outclassed other notebooks. On 3DMark2001SE, it hit 9303 while most high-end notebooks barely pass half that."

"With a three year warranty and an upgradable design--the video card can be removed and replaced with a future ATI part--enthusiasts will have plenty of time to appreciate this machine's colorful performance."
September 2003

Tom's Hardware Guide
"It has to be said that (Mobility Radeon 9600) is no doubt a very potent chip."

"Despite being paired with a much slower CPU, the Mobility Radeon 9600 was able to beat NVIDIA's flagship mobile chip"

"Another point in favor of the ATi chip is the fact that, during our entire testing routine, the driver never once caused us any grief - no lock-ups, no crashes. That's more than can be said for its rival (nVidia's GeForce FX 5600 Go which experienced serious driver issues in Quake III and Splinter Cell)"

"If the scores in this review are any indication, though, chances are it's the Mobility Radeon 9600 (that's the overall performance leader)."
Harald Thon, August 5th, 2003

Extremetech
"nVidia is unlikely to make significant gains in the high-end mobile graphics market for some time."

"We expected a pretty intense battle between these two mobile entertainment engines, and that's what we got during our recent head to head tests It was a pretty good brawl, but in the end, only one laptop emerged victorious. "

"VoodooPC's Envy M460, with its upgradeable GPU daughtercard, is helping to bring more respectability to laptops as LAN party systems. Because this PC maker caters almost exclusively to performance-hungry gamers, VoodooPC chose not to even offer the GeForceFX Go5600 as an option."

"What to Buy: If you're looking for a fast and furious mobile graphics system, the VoodooPC unit we tested here today won't disappoint in terms of performance. Based on our testing, you're likely to get better performance from notebooks using this part, than nVidia's GeForceFX Go5600. But again, this assumes other system components to be equal or nearly so."

"Despite the tight race that continues in the high-end desktop 3D GPU arena, ATI continues to offer a more compelling price/performance GPU in the Radeon 9600 Pro. That same price/performance is now being deployed in laptops, and the result is that ATI still holds the high ground in the mobile GPU market. "

"However, when we dial up the pain, ATI is still able to stay north of 50fps, whereas nVidia's performance is cut in half, and the GeForceFX Go5600 can't even clear the 30fps bar."
Dave Salvator, August 1, 2003

HardOCP.com
"Let the LAN-addicts and space-conscious power users rejoice as the Radeon Mobility 9600 is upon us."

"The Mobility 9600 is equipped with some serious shader horsepower."

"Considering how impressive the performance of the "vanilla" Radeon Mobility 9600 has proven to be, we can hardly wait to see what type of frame-rates ATI's flagship Pro mobile solutions will be capable of."
Kyle Bennett, July 16, 2003

PC Games Hardware
"ATI continues the success of M9 with Mobility Radeon 9600"
"The Peacock Freeliner is the best choice for gamers thanks to Mobility Radeon 9600."
May 2003

Chip.de
"This is the finest (creme de la creme) that ATI has to offer for the notebook user. Real-time rendering in great quality - and on a notebook! Mobility Radeon 9600 makes it possible. The ATI anouncement is another [shot] from ATI against the competitor Nvidia and the GeForce FX 5600 Go".
May 2003

HardOCP.com
"I am very sure that the Mobility Radeon 9600 will be in my next laptop."
Kyle Bennett, July 11, 2003

UKGamer.com
"If you want the fastest 3D performance then you better wait and get the M10 because it is set to blow the Geforce FX GO 5600 away."

"A notebook that has a Mobility Radeon 9600 is your perfect mobile gaming partner."

"With 3DMark 2003 running the latest patch (330), the Mobility Radeon 9600 clearly leads the FX GO 5600 by a very large margin (well in excess of 75%)."

"in every test we performed ATI's Mobility Radeon 9600 had a clear lead, in some cases that lead was in excess of 50%."

"We get the impression that NVIDIA aren't really paying enough respect to the mobile market as they should."

"ATI on the other hand seem to push their mobile products almost as hard as their desktop counterparts, and it's clearly showing."
Lawrence Latif, July 11, 2003

Gamer's Depot
"ATI's Mobility 9600 is unquestionably the finest mobile GPU you can get."

"The Envy M:460 is the first high-end notebook PC to feature ATI's highly-anticipated Radeon 9600 Mobility (Code-named M10) GPU...It's the first Mobile GPU to fully support DirectX 9 and in certain cases eclipses many desktop graphics cards."

"It'll be interesting to see how Voodoo's competitors respond to this notebook, and more notably as to how NVIDIA will respond to taking a performance back seat to ATI's Mobility 9600."
Duane Pemberton, July 8, 2003

PC World
"A breakthrough in portable gaming."
July 2003

PC Magazine
"Go with the Mobility Radeon 9600 if you need DX9 support or more 3D graphics power."
June 30, 2003

Popular Science
"Laptops finally rival desktops with ATI's Mobility Radeon 9600."

"The Mobility Radeon 9600 can even be upgraded like a desktop card."
June 2003

TechWatch
"Nvidia...has lost market share and they do not yet have a product that can compete head to head with ATI's mobile products."
Dr. Jon Peddie, March 31, 2003

HotHardware
"..the Mobility Radeon 9600 Pro is nothing short of amazing. Care to play a little Unreal Tournament 2003 with anti-aliasing enabled? Go right ahead - it's like a hot knife through butter."
Chris Angelini, March 2003

Tech Report
"At this point, ATI's graphics chips should need little introduction, so I'll cut to the chase. ATI's Mobility Radeon 9600s promise to be the fastest, most feature-filled graphics chips for mobile applications, and they promise not to be too hard on notebook batteries, either. ATI's Radeon 9700 Pro was the first graphics card to bring DirectX 9 features to the desktop, and it looks like these new Mobility Radeon 9600s will be the first graphics chips to bring DirectX 9 to mobile platforms. Bravo, ATI. "
March 2003

CNN.com
"ATI, meanwhile, is touting the future flexibility of the Mobility Radeon 9600. Right now, when mobile users want to upgrade their laptop's graphics capability, it's a relatively easy, but expensive technique: They throw away their laptop and buy a new one. Using a new technology called FlexFit, ATI said it is giving notebook manufacturers the ability to offer consumers upgradable graphics.

"If notebook manufacturers decide to take advantage of this capability, it will be a boon for consumers, particularly gamers on the go."
Chris Morris, March 2003

HardOCP.com
"Still the Mobility Radeon 9600 series that we are looking at today simply blows the competition away."

"I can't wait to own one as there will certainly be more gaming in my life because of it."

"ATI is again raising the bar for mobile performance and functionality. From the performance benchmarks we have seen firsthand, the laptop just became an even more practical gaming machine and the best idea for LAN parties since caffeine."

"Looking at the results for this benchmark, it is hard to believe that these numbers were generated by a mobile part."

"In this case, we are seeing extremely good performance from the ATI part when running a benchmark created by NVIDIA. The fact that ATI's latest mobile card can perform so well in their competitor's own benchmark speaks volumes about this card's performance. As a mobile graphics card, it is extremely hard to find an area where this new ATI model fails to excel."
Kyle Bennett, March 2003

Tom's Hardware Guide
"Pure notebook power is the catchword at ATI's mobile division."

"One thing is already clear: ATI has succeeded in staging a coup with its DirectX 9 capable graphics chip for notebooks. "
March 2003

Anandtech
"The chip should be one fast mobile graphics processor."
Matthew Witheiler, March 2003

Gamers Depot.com
"[Mobility Radeon 9600] clearly kicks ass when you turn on the visual improvements like 4x AA and 8x Anisotropic filtering. From this early look it's easy to conclude that NVIDIA is pretty much sitting on the bench in the game of 3D Graphics - they still can't ship a product and yet keep making product announcements as if they're right around the corner."

"After seeing this chip in action it's no wonder why major OEMs are lining up in droves behind it."
Duane Pemberton, March 2003

Maximum PC
"Tit for tat, butter for fat, ATI's dog kicks nVidia's cat."

"The ATI [part] did beat nVidia's finest desktop part in some key benchmarks."

"ATI's test rig did indicate that ATI's new mobile part will be the fastest mobile GPU ever created."

"All of these scores easily leapfrog the results we got from a Dell Inspiron 8500 sporting a GeForce 4 4200 Go."
May 2002

AMD Zone.com
"In 3DMark2003 scores show the [Mobility Radeon] 9600 double that of the Ti4200."

"As you can see from these tests the performance of the [Mobility Radeon] 9600 looks good."
Chris Tom

Performance, technologies and features listed above can vary with specific notebook implementations.
Please consult with Notebook vendor for a complete list of supported features.