
Buying a laptop, check if it has nVidia Optimus, its purpose is infuriate you - speeder
http://coderofworlds.com/before-buying-a-laptop-check-if-it-has-nvidia-optimus-its-purpose-is-infuriate-you/
======
jblow
I have owned 4 or 5 Optimus laptops and have never gotten a practical benefit
from Optimus. At best I leave it switched to the fast GPU permanently. At
worst, something goes wrong.

The state of Windows laptops these days is really kind of embarrassing. Nobody
knows how to build something of quality. Everything appears to be driven by
bullet-point features with a goal of providing USPs, but nobody really cares
if the features work or if the overall product is good.

This extends to everything (keyboard and trackpad design, screen, preloaded
software, function key mappings, etc).

I buy 2 or 3 laptops a year; traditionally the case has been that most laptops
were kind of bad but if you looked hard you could find something good. Now it
has gotten to the point that the something good no longer seems to exist at
all.

I dread the idea of buying a new laptop now. This can't be the high-level
result that these OEMs really want.

~~~
jonhohle

      > I buy 2 or 3 laptops a year; traditionally the case has
      > been that most laptops were kind of bad but if you looked
      > hard you could find something good. Now it has gotten to
      > the point that the something good no longer seems to exist
      > at all.
    

Have you looked at MacBooks? There is a significant difference between a
$300-$500 box of crap and a $1,000 MacBook. It seems like they would address
most of your concerns - great trackpad, screen, no crapware (you bring your
own Windows if that's your thing), map your own function keys, reasonable
quality keyboard (at least a constant layout), and extremely solid build
quality.

~~~
ekianjo
And double the price of every other PC laptop out there with the same specs.
Hell no.

~~~
coldtea
Not everything is about those few "specs" you measure (I'd guess CPU, graphics
card and memory). This is like judging a house on size and rent price alone --
and thinking that a $200,000 Malibu house is not really worth it compared to a
$100,000 Fargo house.

Do you get ALL of the items below for the half price PC laptop?

• More battery life (up to 50% more than most Windows laptops, and topping the
best of them by 10-20%) • Less weight. • A retina screen, with apps that fully
support it (unlike the Windows Hi-DPI situation), and that is shown (on test
and measurements) to be the best in laptops for brightness, color rendition
etc. • OS X (and iWork / iLife apps for free as of Mavericks!). • solid,
sturdy alimunium enclosure, machined from a single piece of metal (something
that costs), and an industrial design that someone has toiled over, and not a
quickly churned out plasticky mess of a case and parts placement. • Cheap SSD
options (compared to buying one yourself or Wintel laptop SSD prices, the pre-
configured Mac options are cheaper). • a multitouch trackpad (of the same
quality as Mac's one)? • NO DVD drive (yes, I'd pay to remove that piece of
obsolete crap and have no moving parts on my laptop). • thunderbolt ports, mag
safe adapter, illuminated keyboard, etc etc.

If you don't get all of the above, then you don't really get "the same specs".
Just the same memory/CPU/GPU. Especially people who buy laptops but don't seem
to value portability (weight/size) and battery life are strange to me...

~~~
dangrossman
Not for half the price, but if you're willing to spend just as much on a PC as
the MacBook, you can definitely get the same specs and quality. None of those
aspects you listed are unique to Apple anymore, from the machined aluminum
chassis to magnetic power connectors or superior battery tech (the Sony Vaio
Pro 13 gets significantly more minutes-per-watt-hour than a new MBA for
example). The quality definitely isn't there if you don't spend the money,
though. Most PCs on the shelf in stores are junk.

~~~
ekianjo
At the same prices as the MacBooks, you actually get way better specs and
extremely solid build as well. And let's not forget the Macbooks come with
drawbacks, such as non-replacable batteries and stuff like that. And I don't
like their trackpad either, but that's a matter of taste.

~~~
acdha
> At the same prices as the MacBooks, you actually get way better specs and
> extremely solid build as well

You keep saying that without providing any examples. Care to enlighten all of
the people who have apparently been buying the wrong laptops?

~~~
ekianjo
OK, I'm sure you will nitpick about what I'm going to say, but the following
are pretty decent alternatives: ASUS Zenbook UX301, Dell XPS 15, HP Spectre
13t-3000 Ultrabook, Samsung ATIV Book 9 Plus, Toshiba Kirabook. They are all
not perfect, but credible alternatives. Feel free to discuss.

~~~
acdha
ASUS Zenbook UX301: $1,999 (Amazon.com) Apple MacBook Pro 13: $1,799
(Apple.com list)

Both with the Intel Core i7 2.8GHz / 3.3GHz TurboBoost, 8GB RAM, 256GB flash
storage, etc.

The main difference is that the Mac display is 2560x1600 and the ASUS is
2560x1440 and the ASUS has a touchscreen.

This is a realistic competitor – I can't speak to build quality never having
touched one but this is hardly the “way better specs” you've been claiming.

The same holds true for the Dell XPS 15. Comparing the only Dell XPS 15 which
uses SSD primary storage[2] to the MacBook Pro 15" leaves us at $2,349 vs.
$2,499. Again, I can't speak to build quality but unless you find a
touchscreen a killer feature versus Apple's modern trackpad this boils down to
how you feel about Windows 8 versus OS X or whether you've had a bad
experience with one of the two vendors.

You've proven that your earlier “double the price of every other PC laptop out
there with the same specs” claim was simply untrue.

1\. Only the top-end model has an SSD as primary storage if you don't want the
weight + power + size hit of an extra HDD:
[http://www.dell.com/us/p/xps-15-9530/pd?oc=dncwx1249h&model_...](http://www.dell.com/us/p/xps-15-9530/pd?oc=dncwx1249h&model_id=xps-15-9530)
2\. [http://store.apple.com/us/buy-mac/macbook-
pro?product=ME293L...](http://store.apple.com/us/buy-mac/macbook-
pro?product=ME293LL/A&step=config)

------
dangrossman
There's no good story about switchable graphics still, even after all these
years. My 2010 HP Envy had both an integrated GPU and discrete ATI Radeon, and
a custom driver from HP/ATI that gave you a tray icon to switch between them.
Worked great in 2010, but the fact that a custom driver was required meant in
the following years I had trouble with newer games, and the computer barely
functioned at all in Windows 8, often booting to a black screen even in safe
mode.

As for the "who buys an i7 for battery?" \-- well, I do. You don't have to
choose between battery and performance with Haswell CPUs. I finally gave up on
discrete graphics to get an ASUS UX301LA -- an i7-4558u that gives me 8 hours
of battery life in an ultra-thin ultrabook form factor, yet the Intel Iris*
GPU is faster than the discrete Radeon of my 2010 laptop. Games like
Starcraft/Diablo that don't push boundaries run perfectly at the native
2560x1440.

If Intel's integrated GPUs keep improving as much as they did this generation
over the last, the days of discrete mobile GPUs are numbered.

~~~
3825
It looks like Google fails to correctly decipher Intel Isis (probably because
it is still new). If you were searching Intel Isis, OP probably meant Intel
Iris[0]. Intel Iris and Intel Iris Pro were introduced with Haswell
processors.

> Intel Iris Graphics and Intel Iris Pro Graphics are new brands for Intel's
> high-end integrated graphics introduced with some variants of its Haswell
> processors. They utilize the same basic blocks as the HD series, but have a
> higher maximum frequency, and additional eDRAM cache for the "Pro" series.

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_HD_and_Iris_Graphics](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_HD_and_Iris_Graphics)

~~~
ansible
The Iris Pro with eDRAM (Crystalwell?) is an interesting offer from Intel. If
I was in the market for a new laptop this year, I'd be keeping an eye out for
those Haswell refresh or maybe a Broadwell based laptops, similar to the
newest Macbook Pro.

Edit: this is what I mean (and now want):

[https://www.system76.com/laptops/model/galu1](https://www.system76.com/laptops/model/galu1)

~~~
dangrossman
Unfortunately the Iris Pro comes with a much higher TDP, which means
significantly shorter battery life and higher heat dissipation needs than all
the other Haswell i5/i7 parts (47W vs 15 or 28). You won't find it in an
ultrabook due to the heat, and you won't get the battery life benefits Haswell
brought over previous architectures. The non-Pro Iris part is the better
compromise IMO; you can find it in the thin-and-light form factor, it's much
lower power so you can still get 6-8 hours of battery life, and it's still
fast enough for most new games.

------
kevinbowman
I have a Lenovo Thinkpad W520, with nVidia Optimus. What they didn't tell me
was that the external VGA port is hard-wired to the nVidia GPU, so I can't use
it _at all_ when on the Intel GPU. Choice: battery life or external VGA? To
make matters worse, it's a reboot to switch between them, and since I use
Ubuntu which isn't supported (although props to the Bumblebee people for the
progress they've made) it's hit-and-miss if even that will work.

If the rest of the W520 wasn't such an awesome laptop, I'd be really quite
upset. As it is, I just live with it and boot into Windows if I want to use a
projector.

~~~
_delirium
Any idea why it needs a reboot? Some MacBook Pro models have that kind of
switching (integrated Intel + discrete nVidia) but don't need a reboot to
switch between them. Is it some architectural thing, an issue with the nVidia
drivers, an issue with Windows, ...?

~~~
thristian
Modern Mac OS X is a bit smarter about things, but I believe the original
versions of Mac OS X that supported Optimus required you to restart the
windowing system when switching GPUs. That required quitting all your apps,
logging out, and logging back in, which is effectively a reboot for people who
stick to GUI interaction.

~~~
_delirium
Doing a little searching, it seems it might be tied to the hardware as well,
not just the OSX version (not sure if that's a real hardware limitation or a
driver issue though). The dual-GPU MacBook Pros from mid-2010 onwards have
"automatic graphics switching" that does it on the fly:
[http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4110](http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4110)

You're right that the 2008/09 models required logging out/in to switch
manually; I hadn't realized that:
[http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3207](http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3207)

~~~
fatrachet
There is a OSX tool called gfxCardStatus that can switch GPUs without logging
out on the 08 and 09 models, works great on my 09 MBP, so it only seems to be
a driver issue not a hardware limitation.

------
Ma8ee
"this is the time I wish I could afford a MacBook".

If you work in any IT related job in the US you probably would end up on the
plus if you just spent the time you just used to try to make the crap you
bought to work properly working a few extra on your normal job and then bought
a MacBook.

I can seriously not afford to not buy a MacBook.

~~~
speeder
I am in Brazil, I earn about 20k USD year as mobile programmer (and for Brazil
this is VERY, VERY, VERY high income)

Also in Brazil everything (and I DO mean EVERYTHING) is more expensive, Macs
usually have a 100% markup compared to US, most of the extra price in taxes.
(Brazil has some crazy taxes, for example Videogames have 72% of their final
price being taxes, Cachaça, Brazil national cultural beverage, 82% of the
final price is taxes...).

Here one of the easiest way to get "easy money" is smuggle stuff (usually
electronics and clothes, but last year the government had to arrest massive
amounts of tomato smugglers), for example you can go to US, buy a bunch of
MacBooks, smuggle to Brazil, and charge 50% more of what you paid for them in
US, and profit that 50%, and for a Brazillian this still is cheaper than
buying a legal one here (that has 100% markup, as I mentioned earlier).

~~~
Ma8ee
I feel your pain. I was careful to be specific about what I said was valid in
the US, both because of very different costs and very different salaries in
other parts of the world.

------
CSDude
I have a Samsung NP700G7C, a gamer laptop, it comes with optimus disabled,
even the GPU supports it (GTX675M). It cannot be enabled, computer is unaware
of Intel HD4000 inside. As I have seen from a friend with another gamer
laptop, he always have problems when launching games, they sometimes want to
use Intel HD4000. And it goes on even if you explicitly state that "open this
with nvidia gpu". So sad.

------
spobo
If you plan on gaming, DON'T buy a laptop. This is solid advice. Gaming on
laptops is a bad experience in general.

Just buy a decent laptop with great battery life & mobility properties and a
PS3/4 or a cheap gaming PC for gaming.

~~~
mercer
It _is_ solid advice. Unless you don't need to play the latest games.

I bought a MacBook Air a few months ago and found out that a lot of
blockbuster games from a few years ago perform pretty well, as do a lot of the
indie games (from Steam, for example). I even bought a wired xbox360
controller for some of these games (Mark of the Ninja, for one).

But then I haven't really done much gaming in the past few years, so there
are/were tons of (older) games I haven't played yet (BioShock, Portal 2, Mark
of the Ninja, Borderlands 2 etc.). And I also don't mind turning down some of
the graphic effects.

Still, it's possible...

------
bitL
I have an ASUS Zenbook Prime UX32VD-R4002V with NVidia GT620m and Optimus
works flawlessly, both in Windows 7 and Linux Mint. Most games and demanding
software switch to NVidia, HD4000 is used only for bare desktop and browsing.
There are other issues with this ultrabook but Optimus is not one of them.
Both DirectX and OpenGL work on both chips, output via HDMI works from both of
them and I can even use CUDA in After Effects CS6 by adding 620m to the list
of supported cards. The OP's experience is probably constrained to his
particular model.

~~~
danmaz74
I have the same notebook, and my only complaint is that quite often the
notebook monitor doesn't switch on until I connect or disconnect an external
HDMI monitor. A pity.

~~~
bitL
I don't have that problem - it works flawlessly all the time. I am using
Amazon basics HDMI cable connected via HDMI switcher to the external display
(with the desktop, Chromecast and Tronsmart Android stick occupying 3 more
HDMI inputs). Try perhaps another HDMI cable?

------
marcus_holmes
bizarre timing, I've just spent the entire day moving my laptop to Debian
XFCE, and the vast majority of that time was spent trying to get the bloody
Nvidia card to work, which it won't because of Optimus, so that I can play
with WebGl. Then I find out that it'll never work because any hybrid rig is
excluded from WebGl (presumably because of Optimus randomly deciding that
browsers don't need GPUs). And of course I can't disable the Intel graphics
chipset from the BIOS. _sigh_

~~~
xamlhacker
For Linux, did you try the Bumblebee project? I had some success with it. Once
bumblebee is setup, if you want to use the Nvidia GPU for some program, you
just launch it as follows: "optirun /path/to/your/program".

~~~
zanny
Alternatively, if your gpu is supported by Nouveau reclocking, PRIME is the
best hybrid graphics experience you are going to get. I just edit .desktop
files of programs I want to run on discrete graphics to include DRI_PRIME=1
and almost all work flawlessly if your window manager supports xrender and you
have a compositor running.

It just means your gpu performance suffers using the community driver.

------
virtualwhys
I've had both mac and pc laptops.

These days I don't touch anything but Dell Precision workstations, absolute
beastly machines (i7, 2X SSD with option for a 3rd, and 32GB RAM) with dual
fans.

Runs Linux like a boss, zero issues.

The Nvidia GPU, however, that is a serious PITA -- in order to keep the chip
from going into max power mode 24/7 with a multi-head setup, I had to resort
to flashing the VBIOS. Risky, but necessary if you want peace & quiet.

------
jnamaya
I bought a lenovo w520 because if its performance. It has become hell to run
linux comfortably on this laptop. I have set it to "discreet" mode in the BIOS
and that seems to ease some of the problems...but yeah, if you want
performance and a good working laptop, especially linux, stay away from these
dual-card video laptops.

------
hengheng
While the front-end to Optimus may be less than optimal, it's quite well done
internally.

I came across it when I hooked an external GPU to my laptop. This is possible
via ExpressCard with a passive (mechanical) adapter, and it even hot-plugs in
Windows and installs the correct driver out of the box. It does require a
reboot the first time, but other than that it's smooth.

What Optimus does is texture compression before textures are sent over the
single PCI express 2.0 lane to the GPU. It can also enable my external GPU to
render back into the internal notebook display.

I'm baffled by how easy this is to set up and how flawlessly it works, and
honestly I am surprised that none of the commercial solutions has ever
succeeded. ExpressCard even supports a USB 2.0 port, so I can plug my keyboard
and mouse to the adapter, which then effectively works as a docking station
(except for power).

------
knappador
I had to check the article date twice. Seems old and kind of just a rant.

Just be glad you're not still messing with XFree86 modeline settings or
whatever. Asus makes high quality products at a good price. Their Zenbook line
might have something you are looking for. As for Optimus, I used a bumblebee
alternative on one that just required a special parent process (optirun or
something). The light sensor would give off random keykodes due to a kernel
bug that was fixed in master. I put a sticker over the light sensor until this
was done. Other than that, everything about the hardware was pretty standard
configuration job every step of the way. The latest nvidida drivers are said
to support Optimus on Linux. Quite frankly, I enjoyed the battery life
immensely when just using the Intel graphics for running Compiz at 60fps no
problem.

------
blueblob
You want to mine bitcoins with a laptop? Why? The laptop will wear out faster,
you would get better performance per cost with a different option, many other
reasons not to as well.

Also with fairness to the nVidia Optimus, AMD has "Dynamic Switchable
Graphics" that is quite similar. The state of linux support for my laptop with
the AMD equivalent is not the greatest either.

In linux, there are quite a few projects providing some form of support to
this, (note the Nvidia Optimus section on the archlinux wiki for Hybrid
Graphics[1]) so stating it doesn't work at all on mac/linux is fairly untrue.

[1]
[https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/hybrid_graphics#Nvidia_...](https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/hybrid_graphics#Nvidia_Optimus)

------
jokoon
Laptops are not designed for gaming nor performance.

I wish some manufacturer would make a very thick, powerful laptop, as thick as
those first mac laptops, without battery, but a good CPU and GPU, and a fan
big enough to properly cool all that. If the laptop is thick it will be much
easy to cool it.

The current iMacs for example are quite thick, and such a machine would be
transportable enough as a laptop as a 17 or 15 inch screen.

You would not need a battery anyway, there are plugs everywhere, even in
trains. If you plan to work on a laptop, it's for at least an hour, if you
have an hour I think you will find time to find a plug easily. If you really
need mobility a smartphone or tablet will be more useful than a laptop.

~~~
keyme
You mean like this?
[https://www.asus.com/Notebooks_Ultrabooks/ASUS_ROG_G750JH](https://www.asus.com/Notebooks_Ultrabooks/ASUS_ROG_G750JH)

~~~
coin
Webpage is barely viewable on an iPad. I hope their laptop is better than
their website.

------
gdrulia
It baffles me for ages now, how do PC keep such high selling levels, when even
now, if you buy a laptop, very likely you will have a crap which will require
some technician attention before you will be able to use it properly. Not to
speak about crappy apps that comes already installed.

Last time I experienced problems was with Samsung Chronos 7 laptop, that my
girlfriend bought last Spring. Weird RAM usage issues, Windows issues, etc.

In the end, it really wasn't the experience that average laptop buyer is after
and no doubt that some then looking into alternatives (tablets) eagerly.

------
mbailey
Optimus effectively thwarted my genuine desire for going back to a Linux
workstation at work. Traded it in for a Mac after three weeks. Oh well, I'd
rather get work done than dick around with X I guess.

------
Friedduck
My hard-won lesson is to thoroughly review any newly bought laptop performance
during the return period and take it back at any hint of trouble, particularly
anything that may require a driver update.

------
trurl42
Having bought a laptop with a ATI Intel hybrid graphics solution in 2011:

\- I'm still stuck on the driver version from 2011, can't install a newer one.

\- Only works for DirectX, with OpenGL you can only use the Intel graphics.

~~~
nly
This is actually one nice thing about NVIDIA.. there are notebook drivers on
their website that work with most of their mobile GPUs. I'm pretty sure you
can get upstream AMD drivers working with ATI cards though... it probably
requires some ini tweaks or something.

------
frou_dh
I'm actually fairly happy that my 2-GPU 2009 MBP is primitive in this regard,
in that it has no auto-switching at all. Switching GPUs is manual press of a
radio button that then prompts a logout (there's also a 3rd party menubar
utility that lets you do it without the logout).

~~~
masklinn
Considering how well GPU-switching works in OSX, why would you be happy that
your machine is too old to support it? (and gfxCardStatus will also allow
forcing on later machines)

~~~
frou_dh
Because I only occasionally need the high-perf GPU and can sidestep thoughts
about how well or not-well auto-switching is working on any given day.

------
supermatt
I appreciate the review, but instead of suffering why not just return it? Your
describe the item as not fit for purpose, which is, in the eu at least, a
valid reason for return.

