8700gt

Why is it that i barely hear anything about this graphics card? is it because not many laptops have it. or is it because its a disappointment?

 

It performs similarly to the 8600GT, as the both have the same core. It is kind of a flop, since it only has 128 bit addressing. With the impending arrival of the 8800M's, your won't be hearing much more about this card.

 

Well the 8600GT has 128 bit and i hear alot about that card. I heard hte 8700GT proforms better than the 8600 to.

 

The 8700 definitely performs better, and no it is not the same exact card. The 8700 has 'dual-rank' memory which provides some performance boost, not to mention the (I think) higher clocks. Ask someone their Crysis settings and you'll see a difference.

 

But i am getting a laptop that has a 256mb 8700 GDDR3. are you refering to a card that has 512mb?

 

I've got the 512MB card, but 256MB of that is shared memory.

The card is the card, and only differs in memory size. All other specifications should be the same.

 

The reason you don't hear as much about the 8700 as you do the 8600 and now the 8800 is that the 8700 is only available in pretty hefty laptops so the target market isn't very large. I certainly would love to have an 8700 but 17" is too big for my needs.

Even though the 8800 will also debut in fairly large laptops, it has enough performance gains over all other 8xxx series that people will be willing to put up with the size in exchange for it's graphical processing power.

 

The 8700 GT performs 15-20% less than the 7950GTX . However , it has 3 times the shader power...