8600M GT replacement

I need to buy a new laptop, currently I have a dell vostro 1500 with a 8600M GT and I want to buy a laptop with a GPU that is equivalent or better than that.

So far I've been looking at laptops with following video cards:

GeForce GT 540M
AMD Radeon HD 6370M
AMD Radeon HD 6470M
nVidia GeForce GT 520MX
Geforce GT520M

Any help would be appreciated, I'm sorta out of the loop when it comes to laptop GPUs since I bought the vostro in 2008.

Edit: I know it's a stretch but any chance that the Intel HD 3000 is as good as the 8600m GT?

 

You should fill out the FAQ and post here:
What Notebook Should I Buy?

This way it will allow people to find you a better bang for buck.

However, for the sake of satisfying curiosity, out of the GPU's you wrote up there, the 540M is the fastest.

I still maintain you should fill out the FAQ and allow people to help you find a better 'bang for buck' if possible.
;-)

 

At this point any new machine will be better. Intel's HD 3000 IGP in the Sandy Bridge CPU's is nearly equivalent to the 8600m GT and the AMD 6520G/6620G integrated graphics is about 50% faster. Any dedicated card will be worlds faster.

 

While the previous poster was right about low-level cards being as powerful as the 8600M GT (which is the card in the laptop I'm using right now), I think you might mean to ask about which current card sits in the graphics range that the 8600M GT did in its day.

I've got a 555m in my Sager NP5165 and I think it fits the bill. Plays everything I've thrown at it OK whilst still allowing for decent battery life (certainly better than laptops with the powerful 560M). Maybe the 540M would be OK there too,

 

For that comparison, I would say the GT 540M would be today's 8600M GT while the GT 550/555M is more akin to the 8700M GT.

For the OP's list of video cards, any of the ones listed with the exception of the Radeon HD 6370M would easily match or exceed the performance of the 8600M GT.

Well, the HD 6370M would match a 8600M GT with DDR2 VRAM. I'm so glad we've gotten away from using slow VRAM. I remember how disappointing it was to find that great laptop and then being a complete let-down when I found out it had DDR2 VRAM. Almost as insulting as the Santa Rosa Macbook Pro with the 128 MB GDDR3 8600M GT.

 

I did mean to ask what laptops today are as good or better, absolutely, today rather than a relative value but thanks for all the replies, it was very helpful.

Right now I'm really surprised that you get a lot more bang for your buck today, than what you used to, seems a lot has changed since 2008 .

Thanks for all the help

 

what's your budget?