GeForce G210M comparable to the 8600gt?

Alright well i'm about to buy an ASUS UL80vt that has a 210M 512 mb card. I was wondering if this card is better or worse than the 8600gt that I have in my vostro 1500 right now. And if it is how much better or worse is it. (I'm just trying to get a feel for what this card is like and comparing it to the 8600gt is the best way because I know that card so well).

 

The Geforce G 210M is a little above the Geforce 8400M GT in performance, but it should run a lot cooler than both cards.

 

I put the 210M at 2/3s the capability of the 8600GT simply because it's clocks are much higher, as well as improvement in drivers. I have a 310M in my Sony which is essentially the same chip, just rebadged. Runs very well. Almost maxes out FEAR.

 

It should be noticeably worse than the 8600M GT. It has higher clocks by quite a bit, but half the shaders and half the memory bus width. The memory bandwidth comes out equal to the DDR2 8600M GT, but the processing power is about 30% lower.

 

agreed.. it is after all "integrated". You better off looking for GT330M or ATI 5650.

 

I have heard of people pulling 4000+ 3dmarks on the UL series with the 210. The 8600 is better but I would say it is maybe a 10-15% difference and the 210 will run much cooler.

 

The 210m/310m are not integrated they basically use the same core as the 8400 GT and 8600 GS.To compensate for the low number of shaders the shaders speed is clocked very high which puts the performance on par with a 8600 GT (DDR2 version).

 

No, it does not. The 8600M GT clocks are 475 core, 950 shaders while the 210M has 625 core, 1500 shaders. The clocks are much higher, but not by a factor of two and it only has half the shaders so it's not quite on par with the older card.

 

Actually yes it is if you look at the gaming benchmarks you'll see that it performs on par with a stock clock 8600 GT (DDR2) sure you could probably overclock the 8600 and get better performance, but it isn't as strong as the DDR3 version of the 8600.(Keep in mind architecture improvements also play a role in performance boost.)

Notebookcheck: NVIDIA GeForce G 210M

Notebookcheck: NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT

 

The GDDR3 hotter 8600M GT or FX 570M is even farther in performance, it's amazing how long the GDDR3 version can offer great performance still in the latest games. I remember playing Dirt 2 almost maxed out on DX9 mode (obviously) on my ThinkPad T61p with the 570M.

 

Those comparisons are not accurate. The 8600M GT is a 3 year old card so the CPUs it is paired with tend to be wimpier (even low end CPUs from today are better than fairly powerful ones from 3 years ago) and, more importantly, the drivers back then were OEM and they were mostly garbage. Most of the benchmarks are from the first year or so and thus substantially lower than what the card is capable of. My DDR2 8600M GT with modern drivers paired with a T9300 (both stock) gets 3900-4000 in 3dMark06 depending on which drivers and OS I use. A GDDR3 one (stock) can easily reach around 5K with a decent CPU.

What architecture improvements? Nvidia shrunk the process down (GeForce 8 is mostly 80nm, 210M is 40nm) which allowed them to up the clocks, but aside from a few barely relevant things like the version of PureVideo, the architecture has been mostly the same. This is why ATI/AMD was able to surprise them with the Radeon 4000's.