MYTHLOGIC Pollux 1400: Clevo's W150HR Tested

Testing Wireless Display 2.0

One thing we didn’t cover in our Bigfoot review is the potential trump card in Intel’s wireless deck: Wireless Display 2.0, aka WiDi 2.0. The idea is pretty simple: connect a wireless receiver to your HDTV, and using software you can send your laptop’s display output over to your HDTV. With the price of the HDTV receiver hovering around $80 online, I’m not sure how this technology is all that amazing, but it is sort of cool. You’ll still want to plug in your laptop, since sending HD video over wireless will drain the battery pretty fast. Using a Blu-ray disc in particular will suck up your battery in under two hours, although playing 1080p HD content from an HDD/SSD shouldn’t be quite so stressful.

So what’s the catch with WiDi 2.0? You need an Intel wireless adapter for it to work, since it uses Intel’s drivers and software. MYTHLOGIC sent us over the necessary equipment to try it out, consisting of the Netgear Push2TV HD adapter (PTV2000), a BD-ROM combo drive for the W150HR notebook, and PowerDVD Blu-ray playback software. Here’s a gallery of the Netgear unit and accessories.

Where WiDi 1.0 was limited to 720p content, WiDi 2.0 can stream 1080p video. Of course, you need a good signal (e.g. you’re not at the other side of the house), and overlapping wireless networks can create problems. We tested a 720p video first (running stretched to fill a 1080p display resolution), and everything worked fine. We then played a 1080p video, and all was initially well, but when I started streaming Internet video to a separate PC over wireless…well, I ran into problems with WiDi. The connection initially synced up at 130Mbps, but with the second PC streaming Hulu content (at around 500KBps), the WiDi dropped to a 54Mbps connection. Not surprisingly, such a connection proved insufficient for streaming a 1080p display—even typical PC use caused the display to flicker and render slowly.

The above issue occurred with a 2.4GHz router (Netgear WNR3500L), however, and that appears to be the root of the problem. When I switched to a Linksys E4200 router with a 5GHz connection, I didn’t have any problems with WiDi. I tried pulling data to a second laptop on a 5GHz radio while watching HD content, and WiDi continued to work as expected.

Now here’s where things get a bit confusing. 1080p video streaming works; I ran several H.264 videos without any issue. Blu-ray on the other hand introduces another variable: HDCP support. I tried two different displays, a Dell S2309W panel and my old Toshiba 46H84 1080i HDTV. Both displays had HDCP errors with WiDi, although connecting directly to the laptop via an HDMI cable worked fine. Chalk up another win for the anti-consumer HDCP lobbying groups I guess. Others have had similar issues, but it looks like at least some people have managed to get Blu-ray streaming working, so the right combination of drivers, WiDi software, firmware, and display should work, and hopefully Intel will get all HDCP compliant displays working properly in the future.

How about gaming? WiDi 1.0 apparently had latency of around 0.5 seconds, which makes it practically useless for anything more than viewing movies and perhaps browsing the web (though even with browsing, using the mouse and seeing a half second delay would be super agravating). WiDi 2.0, at least on this particular notebook, appears to have trimmed latency down to around 0.1 to 0.2 seconds. This makes it far more useful if you're using the mouse, but even then there's a noticeable lag. For FPS gaming, the delay is unacceptable. RTS games would probably be out of the question as well, unless you're not into measuring your CPM (clicks per minute). I did try both types of games, and I quickly stopped playing after feeling a bit motion sick because of the difference between when I expected things to happen and when they actually happened on the screen. Yuck. One type of game still worked alright, however: driving simulations (and potentially flight sims as well). I played a few races of DiRT 2, and because turning, stopping, accelerating, etc. aren't instantaneous, the .1 second delay didn't bother me much. Of course, YMMV.

With the right hardware (e.g. a wireless network running on 5GHz with a decent router), things worked well enough. There’s certainly a lot of compression work going on—Intel’s Quick Sync technology converts an approximately 2000Mbps stream of 1080p30 content (1920 * 1080 * 30 * 32-bit) to something WiDi can handle, which appears to mean around 50Mbps max and closer to 15Mbps average. There’s some loss in quality and latency is still present, but the latency doesn't matter if you're just watching movies, which is appears to be the main point of WiDi.

I still end up back at the big question of: why? You have to buy an $80 peripheral, and all it does is let you get a compressed version of your 1080p content on a display "without wires". Except, you’ve still got a wire connected to your laptop for power. And you still have to worry about issues like the HDCP stuff I had problems with on two different displays, as well as wireless signal quality. For the 2.4GHz router testing, WiDi 2.0 definitely left me wanting more. With a 5GHz capable router, it was better but still not what I would consider perfect. Perhaps I’m just not the target market, but I rarely find myself wanting to show my laptop content on an HDTV where I can’t just plug in an HDMI cable. If the idea of wirelessly sending your display content to your HDTV sounds like something you'd like to use on occasion, WiDi 2.0 could be what you're after. A better long-term solution would be if all HDTVs started incorporating WiDi receivers, but that would be another added cost in a fierce market, for a feature only a small number of users would likely want.