I don't think you'll find anything specifically referred to as a gaming notebook. It would be some regular consumer notebook but equipped with something like a Radeon 7500 or GeForce 2/4 Go.

The first exciting AMD notebook I remember was the eMachines M6805 with Mobile Athlon64 and Mobility Radeon 9600.

At the time, Pentium 4 was most popular, with Pentium M "Banias" coming in too. Pentium M "Dothan" is later and is PCI Express based.

Back in 2003 I had an HP Pavilion ZE4000 series (probably ZE4315US) with Athlon XP-M 1800+ (1.53 GHz), 256MB RAM, 20GB HDD, DVD/CD-RW combo. Can't remember the spec of video chip, though.

I have one at the moment with an S3 ProSavage DDR onboard but was hoping for something with a more potent GPU and something that would run DDR333 or even 400, however it seems like it was way before one would put the words "AMD" and "gaming notebook" in one sentence.

I remember having a T4x-something IBM back in the day with a Radeon and it was actually pretty potent, I played NFS Underground on it. IIRC it was 1024x768 so it ran pretty smooth, but that was a Pentium M.

The Pentium M was an awesome notebook CPU.

If you absolutely needed the best performance, Athlon 64 or a high-end Pentium4 would be faster but they would use at least double the power to do it.

I had a Compaq that had the "Athlon 4" CPU I think at 1400mhz? and a Savage Twister-K graphics chip.
It was pretty meh.
Wasn't the CPUs fault for sure, just overall quality was let down by the graphics.
I'm not for sure what chipset was used.

Gericom made at least one Athlon XP notebook (Gericom Hummer Advance 2560XL). It even came with a Radeon 9600.

I had one of these back in the day and if I remember correctly it was just a big hunk of hardware with Desktop SDRAM in it.
I eventually threw it out, because it had a custom fan embedded in a massive heatsink which was impossible to replace. Not impressed.

We had Targa Visionary XP210 with XP-M and Radeon 9600. It also uses desktop DDR module. Big and heavy thing.
It's still here somewhere, I remember HDD broke down about 10+ years ago taking large amount of pictures down with him.

there were some great 'desktop replacement' laptops around in the 2000's, both amd and intel, some with good graphics cards and big screens which made them suitable for gaming

Many thanks for the suggestions, now we have at least 2 possible options! Bet these two are rare as hens teeth these days.

Athlon 4 was what AMD called the XP before I guess they decided to latch onto WinXP instead of Pentium4 heh. Radeon 9600 with a Athlon XP-M is about as good as it's going to get for an XP-M. Athlon 64 came in around that time.

Those DTRs sound pretty neat. Surely low volume products though.

I've got another one, Presario R3200, opened it up to repaste the CPU but it's socket 754 Athlon XP, how weird! It has a GeForce 4 420 Go 32MB card.
Never knew there were Athlon XP's on socket 754! Everest 2.20 says it's a K8 ClawHammer chip.

I think the Pentium4 and the Athlon era were generally terrible for laptops. Too much heat, short battery life, and lackluster performance due to other compromises necessary for portable hardware at the time meant that if such a system lived, it's probably at best worth scrap, if even that today.

The best things to come out of it were the mobile chip variants which could be used in desktop motherboards for better control and thermals. For example the Athlon XP-M chips work great on nForce or VIA KT333 based motherboards, allowing for easy speed control (multiplier adjustable for different power-saving on the mobile), but would also run more cool and with higher frequency than the desktop variant.

If one wanted to have a retro-gaming PC that was faster than a Pentium3, but before the Core2-series chips, I would pick an AthlonXP-M hands down over a regular AthlonXP or a Pentium4.

I don't mean to derail your thread, am just "thinking out loud"...

You're absolutely right! I also stay away from desktop CPU's like the Pentium 4(M).
Thankfully this is an athlon XP-M 2800+ but very weird to call it an XP-M as it's neither an Athlon XP anymore, nor an Athlon 64. It's something weird inbetween and K8 arch, never seen it before. The Presario R3000 runs on Nvidia nForce 3-150 chipset.

This is also the first notebook where my IDE to mSATA adapter works, paired with an Exram 256GB disk.
However I'm capped at 30MB/s. Not sure if it's a chipset limitation in this notebook? HDTune says UDMA Mode6 supported (Ultra ATA/133) but only UDMA Mode 2 (ATA/33) active.
I do have the latest nForce 5.11 drivers installed.

I also tried some 3D games but this Gf4 is not the fastest, 4220pts in 3DM2001SE but it overclocks amazingly well, got it from 190 to 251MHz core and to 4900pts. Maxing the PowerStrip sliders 😁

So I think I'm a step closer to finding the best Athlon XP 'gaming' laptop from way back - ASUS A2500D / A2D. This one has an Athlon XP-M 2600+ Barton in Socket A, SiS M746FX chipset and a 64MB/128Bit ATI Mobility Radeon 9600. Just wished it would've been in better condition though as one
Feels like the early 2000's notebooks are much more rare than the 90's ones 😁

The Radeon drivers are an absolute drama though, can pass Orthos Prime stress test for an hour but crash with BSOD at 3DMark, no artifacts just a straight up crash after a minute or so...or the notebook is simply broken.

martin778 wrote on 2023-05-17, 13:26:

I've got another one, Presario R3200, opened it up to repaste the CPU but it's socket 754 Athlon XP, how weird! It has a GeForce 4 420 Go 32MB card.
Never knew there were Athlon XP's on socket 754! Everest 2.20 says it's a K8 ClawHammer chip.

I'd try some other software. Everest may not be recognizing it correctly. Maybe the CPU isn't in its database so it's guessing. That sounds like a first gen Mobile Athlon 64.

swaaye wrote on 2023-05-24, 22:13:

martin778 wrote on 2023-05-17, 13:26:

I've got another one, Presario R3200, opened it up to repaste the CPU but it's socket 754 Athlon XP, how weird! It has a GeForce 4 420 Go 32MB card.
Never knew there were Athlon XP's on socket 754! Everest 2.20 says it's a K8 ClawHammer chip.

I'd try some other software. Everest may not be recognizing it correctly. Maybe the CPU isn't in its database so it's guessing. That sounds like a first gen Mobile Athlon 64.

Seconded. There are at least three authors of system spec software being active on VOGONS: CPU-Z Vintage Edition, System Information Viewer (SIV), and HWiNFO.

Need help to improve the support of 486/586/686 class CPUs in CPU-Z
SIV support for 386/486/586 class + Alpha CPUs and 3dfx + S3 + SiS + Matrox + XGI + old ATI + NVidia GPUs - Testing Help
HWiNFO support of vintage hardware

IMHO they'd be glad to see your feedback.

I've seen it with my very own eyes, it's this chip 😁
https://www.cpu-world.com/CPUs/K8/AMD-Mobile% … 2800BIX2AR.html
Clockspeed is definitely A64 equivalent as the S.462 XP-M2800+ ran at 2133MHz, this one at 1600MHz.

I've also been tinkering with the ASUS and the Radeon 9600 but I'm really starting to think it's broken 🙁 Can't get it to pass neither 3DM01SE or 03, in 03 it runs perfectly, no artifacts but at the pixel shader test it's a hard crash and reboot, same with 01 - hard reboot.
Tried different RAM, stress testing of the CPU but nope, it's either the GPU or drivers.

Oh strange. It has 128KB L2 cache. I've never heard of a K8 chip running with a tiny fraction of its cache like that.

Time to find yourself a Clawhammer Mobile Athlon 64 with all 1MB L2. 😀

Which ATI drivers are you using? Have you heard of the DH Mobility Modder.NET that lets you install any official release on a Mobility Radeon? I suggest trying Catalyst 7.11 as it tends to have great backward compatibility with games. You might also want to try other motherboard chipset drivers.
http://www.vogonsdrivers.com/getfile.php?fileid=1585

I used to own an eMachines M6805, which was a kind of DTR as well. 15.4" 1280x800, VIA K8M800 chipset, Mobile Athlon 64 3000+, 512MB PC2700 RAM, Mobility Radeon 9600 64MB. I later upgraded it to a 3400+, 2GB RAM, 802.11n WiFi, faster HDD. But those eMachines notebooks had a couple of problems. Flickering backlight and plastic case that would eventually crack and fall apart at the hinges.

Jasin Natael wrote on 2023-04-12, 21:00:

I had a Compaq that had the "Athlon 4" CPU I think at 1400mhz? and a Savage Twister-K graphics chip. It was pretty meh. Wasn't […]
Show full quote

I had a Compaq that had the "Athlon 4" CPU I think at 1400mhz? and a Savage Twister-K graphics chip.
It was pretty meh.
Wasn't the CPUs fault for sure, just overall quality was let down by the graphics.
I'm not for sure what chipset was used.

Twister-K was the integrated graphics in the VIA KN133 chipset. I have an HP with the same chipset, and the graphics performance and compatibility is pretty bad. It's missing some kind of transparency/alpha bending effects, and the hardware MPEG-2 acceleration (not full decoding) seems to be permanently disabled in the driver.

martin778 wrote on 2023-05-17, 17:22:

This is also the first notebook where my IDE to mSATA adapter works, paired with an Exram 256GB disk.
However I'm capped at 30MB/s. Not sure if it's a chipset limitation in this notebook? HDTune says UDMA Mode6 supported (Ultra ATA/133) but only UDMA Mode 2 (ATA/33) active.

Those converters have compatibility problems that cause what you're seeing. The sequential read/write speed is worse than a good IDE HDD, but with near-zero seek time, it should still run faster.