M6600 and M4600 are coming in Feb.

I can't help you too much regarding the GPU, but if you're using the computer for mostly media editing, assuming that you have multi-threaded programs, the extra cores and threads (8 threads for quad vs 4 for dual) will help you there. However, for gaming, higher clock speeds is generally better than more cores.

 

It seems the advantage of the FirePro over the 2000M in gaming is slight, so I picked the 2000M because my main purpose was modeling. I don't know how the 2000M and FirePro compete in terms of audio/video/image editing.

If you're on a tight budget, I would go with the Firepro, but otherwise maybe people here can tell you how the Firepro and 2000M would perform in your use scenario. At this point, unless you need a Quadro card for whatever reason, I would rule out the 1000M. If you could go into a little detail, such as what kind of video editing you're doing, that might help as it seems that most laptops these days can handle photoshop and audio editing.

 

To allbald, ironyisoverrated and raj9786, thank you very much for your replies to elevul.

 

I looked at the Thinkpad W520 and it does not seem to be available with a BluRay drive. Hey, I don't always work on the long flights.

But seriously, I would consider the Thinkpad if I could get a Blu-Ray drive but again, that does not seem possible. Also, the Thinkpad does not seem to conform to the MIL-STD 810G standard like the HP and Dell laptops. If I'm wrong, please let me know.

 

Any word on battery life Havoctex?

 

Perhaps since the Lenovo HD caddy is compatible with the Dell laptops, a Dell Blu-Ray drive can be installed into a Thinkpad? Kinda pulling this outta my , but it's worth checking.

 

Do you happen to know if there is a user manual online for the M6600? I wasn't able to locate one, but maybe it's just not selectable yet?

BTW, thanks for all your input here.

-Heather

 

Max battery life for both systems with Optimus enabled is 638 minutes, 10.6 hours.

 

It's true that it's not available with BluRay, but I bought a Panasonic UJ240 from an ebay auction for $113 and it works perfectly. International shipping (via USPS) was slow but that's normal.
Swapping the bezel (for cosmetic reasons only) is a bit fiddly - but changing the drive over took about 2 minutes, and 90 seconds of that was shut down and boot back up.

I'm afraid I don't know about the MIL standard.

 

The thing going on is called Turbo Boost. Intel's quad-core processors are clever: if they only need to use 2 cores, they shut the other two down and increase the clock speeds by a large margin. You can see the single, dual and quad core Turbo speeds for each of the CPUs in the first chart of this article. Note that the CPUs can Turbo even when all cores are being used, but this requires a good cooling system. The quad core Turbo when 2 cores are used is a much surer bet -- you can be more or less sure that Intel's quad-cores will be approximately equal or better than any dual-core no matter what the usage scenario.

For audio, video and picture editing, I suspect you would not be stressing the GPU at all (possible for video, unlikely for the other two). These tend to be done in system RAM and use mostly the CPU. That said, I am not an expert in this -- look at the specific programs you are using and what kind of GPU acceleration they support.

Regarding GPU memory: both the total amount of memory and the bandwidth are important. If you have a lot of memory but only a little bandwidth (as the the case with these Quadros), games will typically fail to make use of most o that memory because they can't access it fast enough to fill it all up. That is, in order to fill it up, they would have to slow down the number of frames per second to a point where you'd give up and change the settings. This is definitely true when running modern games at 1920x1080 on a 128-bit DDR3 bus. There is a pretty good article about the impact of bandwidth -- they use 3D mark as a measure, but the same will be true in bandwidth-limited games.

That said, professional programs don't necessarily care about bandwidth as much as games (although as I said, it depends on the program).