GeForce 8700M GT

Well, looks like I haven't been paying attention and this slipped under my radar that Nvidia finally introduced a more powerful 8 series card for notebooks.

My question that someone may know the answer to, is how long before I see a notebook under 17" with this card inside?

 

Well, this has been asked over and over, but there are already a few notebooks that feature the 8700M GT.

Off the top of my head, the Toshiba and I think a Sager/Clevo.

 

Yea, the Toshiba Satellite X205 and Sager NP5790. Both are 17" notebooks. However, I'm looking at getting no bigger than a 15.4" notebook.

Another thing I just noticed while looking at the specs, is that yet again they used a 128-bit memory bus. Sigh....*shakes head disapprovingly*

 

the 8700GT won't fit into anything less than a 17 inch

 

Oh, well that sucks....

 

Yeah, as wuzer said...no chance.

Another notebook I know that is going to have the 8700M GT, is the new Dell XPS M1730. I'm really looking forward to that notebook. I hope it looks as sleek as the M1330, only bigger and less pricy than the current M1710.

 

So then what are my options for the most powerful 15.4" notebook I can get? The 8600M GT?

 

As of now and probably for very long, yes.

I have been using the 8600M GT in my 1520 and have been extremely satisfied with it...

 

Not unless you overclock the 8600M GT

 

Sure, you can overclock it but you won't match 8700M GT's performance since it also has a dual rank memory interface.

 

Then there's the fact that you can overclock the 8700M GT as well?

 

Dual Rank is not equal to 256 bit..
it still runs on 128bit...
I think, the 8700M GT can maximumly match the performance of the desktop 8600 GTS. That's about it.

 

There are two different 8600M GT cards out, where one is GDDR2 and one is GDDR3. A few notebooks have the GDDR3 model such as the MBP, Asus G1S and G2S. That would be the most powerful option.

 

But remember, another 8700 is coming out, the GTX Ultra, and i dunoo what it compares to

 

Read the full content of this Article: http://www.dev.notebookreview.com/news/tobii-eye-tracking-tech-is-the-future-video/

 

Link please. I don't even think that card exists.

 

My bad. I mixed up the numbers ... never mind

I was 1000 back in time there (7950, not 8750)

got lost too many hours among the Dell options

 

8700M GT spec is identical to a factory overclocked version of desktop 8600GT.

I have a OCed desktop 8600GT, its a nice card, but just don't expect too much from a 8700M don't forget performance wise its equal to a $100 desktop card.

 

I'm not... still not impressed by both Nvidia and ATI...

 

Don't expect too much from it? The thing has played every game I've thrown at it with ease. Even Call of Jueraz got around 25 fps for the town and 18 for the wilderness. And that's with everything on max at 1680x1050. Let's not forget it was a demo and DX10 games are not coded well at the moment, nor are the cards really prepared for it. I'm sure once SP1 comes out and we have the same level of optimization for DX10 as we do 9 it'll run beautifully.

Not to mention all DX9 games I play can handle everything maxed so far.

I'd say this card is great for anyone like myself that does moderate-heavy gaming. No, it's not as good as the 7950GTX, but at least in my case, I really don't need it to be.

 

lol. why is everyone trying to compare a mid/performance card with an insanely powerful card? I'm pretty sure that there won't be a card that is made to compete with the 7950gtx anytime soon.(by soon i mean in the next couple months).

i'm not really an expert at gpu's, but i'd say if you want to compare an 8x00 card. compare it to a 7x00 card. ie. 8600 to 7600 and so on and so forth..

just my two cents.

 

I agree, everyone is expecting a card with half the memory bandwith and replacing the 7700 to compete with the 7950gtx, and it almost is, the 7950gtx is a bulldozer

 

the 8700M GT seems to work like a beast on my laptop i've had an alienware, hp, and now a new toshiba satellite and the card holds up to everything. i couldn't even get ghost recon advanced warfare 2 to even be playable with the 8600M GS i had in the HP.. it just LAGGED insanely. then i got this and throw the game in and the settings are adjusted to mostly HIGH and the game works perfect! i love it!

 

what res are you running it at kraz, this card intrests me, id like to know more about it but no one really has done a whole lot of reviewing on it

 

well I haven't tried Call of Juarez or anything in DX10 for that matter. But acording to all benchmark sites, in DX10 mode a 8600GT got around 5-10fps in Juarez at 1280*1024 resolution. so i'm not sure if you tested that in DX9 or DX10.
But in DX9 my desktop 8600GT already can't play Stalker using either dynamic or object dynamic lighting at 1280*1024 resolution, and Lost Planet is unplayable at max settings at 1280*1024 resolution.
I certainly don't expect future games that looks better to magically start performing better.

 

Being as I defended the playability of the game with the fact that it was a DX10 demo, I thought it was pretty obvious which one I tested.

 

well i think what there trying to get at is better quality of image without a performance drop, we cant speculate off of demos and patches how it going to run until we have a solid, direct x 10 built game like crysis or bioshock

 

The 8700 is a great deal better than most people give it credit for...

Once you:
1) remove bloatware
2) update Vista with performance patches
3) get drivers that don't suck (the factory ones are horrible at DX10)
4) update DX10 to latest refresh


***results***
Lost planet Test(DX10) is now at 1024x768 and medium detail but PLAYABLE at 27-40 fps (average showed 33snow 34 cave, but minimum frame rate is my real concern) Note this is a massive improvement from the stock driver. I wasn't even able to play with these settings at 720x448 with playable (>25fps) frame rates!

Juarez Test (DX10) now runs at 26.1fps average at 1024x768 (everything off)... I know this doesn't sound impressive, but compared to my previous 13-15fps, this was a pretty massive improvement. No this isn't playable yet due to the minimum frame rates of 7, but keep in mind the demo isn't even playable (>25fps minimum) on desktop 8800s in SLI. (35 average, 17 minimum)

Oblivion (DX9) runs now maxed out with everything on at 1440x900 (except AA and bloom which do not work with HDR on) I ran around outside with water and mountains and trees... 31fps minimum outside... mostly high 30s outside, 40s inside.


Now if I can find some decent drivers that I can overclock with...

I was getting 800MHz core and 1000MHz memory before with the stock drivers.
(4 hours of DX10 benchmarks without so much as a visual defect)

 

Read the full content of this Article: http://www.dev.notebookreview.com/news/hp-slate-21-is-an-android-powered-desktop-with-tegra-4/

 

Note the drivers are the biggest hurdle...

I am currently staying with the 163.16 drivers despite no overclocking because I cannot touch the performance the drivers give me at stock clocks with the older drivers.

Anyone know what the latest drivers are that do not prevent overclocking or a method around the latest drivers overlock prevention?

I really want to see what this 8700 can do...

FYI, the x205s cooling system is amazing... 800/1000 was on a very hot day in my home office with 3 other computers with no air conditioning.
The laptop was a little warm... but so was the rest of the room.
Nowhere was the laptop "hot" to the touch... not even "slightly uncomfortable". I was absolutely amazed at how cool the thing ran despite a very daring overclock on such a miserable day for it.

 

so now we have one guy claiming DX10 Call of Juarez got 25 or 18 fps with everything max at 1650*1050 resolution, and another guy with with 25-26fps with everything off at 1024*768 resolution,,, seems like a pretty big difference there.


well my experience with desktop 8600GT drivers. The stock drivers sucked, a better driver released 2-3 weeks after launch of the card improved performance by about 20-30%, after that driver for the next 3-4 month no more performance increase from new drivers(beta and official). So seems like Nvidia hit the limit of the card already.

 

you cant say that allready, the card was just realeased a few months ago, and there still figuring out the direct x 10 thing, im sure they can almost double the performance of these cards with better drivers

 

it wouldn't surprise me at all. mostly done in optimizing software in the game engine itself in the first place, but also hugely do to driver updates.

 

guess we cant really know until they release more drivers

 

You might want to check out the fact that he is running a more powerful processor, has 256MB more of video RAM, and separated the two areas where I did not.

I don't think we are even close to the potential of DX10 cards yet and frankly, I think the 8700 is still VERY much underutilized. The more I play with this, the less I think this is an overclocked 8600. There may be something to this dual-layer 128-bit memory interface.

Note the MASSIVE improvements driver updates gave... the windows vista patch had a pretty noticeable boost as well.

Vista, DX10, and the 8700 are all new, all very much wet-behind-the-ears, and still have a lot of growing to do IMHO.

Heck, I stll have 175MHz/300MHz of growth room to play with if I can just get this card to overclock again...

 

a more powerful processor and more vram should have negligible impact on FPS at best, especially in a game like Juarez thats not CPU dependent. He didn't run his game at that high of a resolution, his extra VRAM should have little if any impact. His FPS puts his 8700M GT as a better performer than the desktop 8800gts.

8700M GT might be new to the laptop, but it uses the same core as the desktop 8600GT which was released 4-5 month ago. Other than a driver based performance boost from stock to the driver released a week or two after launch, I have yet to experience another performance boost from drivers for the past several month.

"Both GPUs connect to 512MB of GDDR 3 graphics memory over a 128-bit bus. However, Nvidia said the 8700M GT's bus is configured in a "dual-rank" mode. It has bandwidth of 25.6GBps - the 8600M GT's is 22.4GBps"
I dunno what that dual rank mode is about, but judging from its memory bandwith its certainly still 128-bit, with a slightly higher clock than 8600M GT.

 

1680x1050 is more than TWICE the pixels of 1024x768.

1680x1050 is what, the third highest resolution available in laptops??
Not high res?

1680x1050 is much closer to 1920x1200 than to 1024x768 in pixel count!

Are you one of these guys that must have 1920x1200 and everything else is low-res?


Juarez has many issues... the biggest indicator is the very uneven and very wide frame rate variance in EVERY card that runs it.

Claiming that a better processor and more video RAM do not matter are a bit pretentious... the truth is you don't know. The biggest bottleneck is the software... the hardware is not yet shining in either case.

I was listing differences and why the two tests were not comparable... you seem to think they are. They are apples and oranges.

Note that the dual-rank memory interface might not increase memory bandwidth in the way most people think... It might be used for another purpose and thus does not apply in the same way a 256-bit memory interface does. Indeed, it is entirely possible that the drivers are not yet even using that feature (well) yet. Thus they list a memory bandwidth that is more likely reflecting the MHz rating rising than the interface width helping at all.
truth be told, neither of us knows and even Nvidia isn't talking.
Maybe this dual-layer 128-bit is a "marketing enhanced" disabled 256-bit path that was just taking too much juice.


Honestly the desktop 8600s are not being utilized to full potential either. Most games coming out now are DX9 with some DX10 benefits tacked on or miserable console ports and not true DX10 games. Even those fully DX10 are not well coded.

Is this surprising? No.
Frankly, DX9 has not shown us every trick and been fully optimized yet.


DX10 is supposed to be about efficiency... this means that lesser hardware will produce better effects and higher end hardware will reach heights we have not seen yet.

So far DX10 is the disappointment... not even showing DX9-level of performance with the same hardware. How can you even begin to judge the effectiveness of a piece of hardware designed for specific software and standard when the standard and software are not quite mature enough to even have its first fully DX10 programmed game out yet?

If DX10 works as claimed, the desktop 8600 will be able to run in DX10 mode and get a bonus to performance... especially in the lower resolutions where it was designed to excel. Once game designers start using DX10 to some of its potential, DX10 cards should have a decided advantage over DX9 cards when you are using them for what they are designed for. No I don't ever think an 8600-series will ever outperform a 7950-series in 1920x1200... then again, its not designed to...


When you buy a laptop, you must accept lower performance than the desktop version... this is due to power requirements, heat, and size required to cool it so it doesn't roast your legs off.

The 8700 is acually quite amazingly good at just that.

People keep telling me that this chipset is "so disappointing"... but thats because they expected miracles. They were expecting a laptop version of the 8800, and it just isn't going to happen for now.

For now I give up a few fps and have a very cool, almost silent (especially compared with alienware... I have server racks that are less noisy than my co-worker's alienware!) gaming machine that runs quite well in most released games... its DX10 so I know that if programmers ever take advantage of DX10, I'll get the benefits. For now, I have a very decent performer that plays even the most demanding DX9 games at my native resolution with most features on... and slowly but surely is gaining performance in even early DX10 games.

Perhaps DX10 will be a complete boondoggle... even then the 8700 performs well and meets or exceeds the needs of every game I have wanted to play on it.

Then again, I do not own a screen capable of 1920x1200 for now.

 

yes your results and his were differient, he claims a similar FPS on max settings and much resolution, and the only difference in hardware was amount of VRAM and CPU.

my point with the resolution: i looked over Anandtech's benchmarks for Call of Juarez, the tests showed very little difference in performance between the 640MB and 320MB versions of 8800GTS at 1600*1200 resolution. So I would hardly expect any significant performance difference between his 512mb and your 256mb 8700.

Also according to well any review sites out there, at 1600*1200 resolution with max settings, a 8600GTS(which by all accounts performs better than the 8700M) got only 6.2fps and a 8800GTS got 12.7 FPS. All those tests were done using more powerful CPU and more powerful GPU than any laptop, so it puzzles me when someone claim to have much better performance with inferior hardware.

As to CPU impact on FPS, my old Pentium D 2.8 with a 8600GT got identical FPS results as anandtech reviews in FEAR and COH using X6800 and 8600GT using identical driver. my old Pentium D 2.8 and my new X2 4400+ both with 8600GT, yet again got identical FEAR and COH results.

I'm not saying 8700M or 8600GT is a bad card, I'm very happy with my 8600GT's performance, I'm just not expecting some sudden performance increase in future games that by all accounts look very demanding graphically.

 

well this shows that the game is relying more on the GPU than the cpu, which is the right driection for direct x 10, it was supposed to take more load off the cpu

 

Our results are apples and oranges other than "improved" which is expected.

Different drivers (possibly), different CPU, different cache, different video and main RAM allocations, and worst of all very VERY buggy software. I also reported differently than he did and my main thrust was improvement and minimum frame rates and variation.

It is possible he simply has a different or more optimal driver for the card. The differences between stock and 163.16 were just plain amazing.


Can I get you to give me a link (or the text for it) for the Anandtech link you are quoting?

The only thing my search turned up is a month old and that would not have included the last few releases of drivers, the Vista performance patches, or the last DirectX refresh...

Please tell me a month-old comparison is not what you are using to claim two similar few-day-old benchmark findings are "puzzling".

I already explained the hardware is not the problem... its the game and the DX10 drivers...

Why would you want to make a game that REQUIRED the 8800 in SLI to get to framerates which aren't like watching a slideshow?

Is it really "puzzling" that things like microsoft performance patches, DX refreshes and driver updates will improve the performance?