quick 8M series question

ok so im going to be buying the ASUS F3SV-X1 very soon. i decided to get it because of the new Santa Rosa t7300, and because of its nvidia 8M series 8600M GS. what i wanna ask is
1. how does the 8600M GS compare to the Go 7700 or the X1700?
2. i noticed that certain sites (including the official Asus site for the F3Sv) claim it to have "NVIDIA GeForce G8600M GS built-in 256MB VRAM
( Turbo Cache 512M with 1G Memory
Turbo Cache 1G with 2G Memory)"
Could someone explain to me the "TurboCache" part? i kno what it means generally, but will it really help significantly? and will it help overpower the other 2 cards i listed? (assuming they are better?) any help will be appreciated! thank you very much.

PS: im getting an extra 1Gb of RAM, giving it 2Gb total

 

what the turbocache means:

if you have 1 gig of ram installed on your machine, the 8600 is going to steal 256 megs of it and use it for virtual memory - so your video card will have 256 megs of fast video ram and 256 of (still fast, just not as fast) notebook ram.

so your notebook would have 768 megs of ram and your graphics system will have 512 megs

if you have 2 gigs of ram, it is going to steal 768 megs of ram from your system - you will have 1024 megs of system ram and 1024 megs of video ram.

I assume that the turbocache only activates in gaming situations- and even then only when its needed. It would be really pointless to steal a whopping 768 megs for virtual video ram, when the system could be using it... even in most gaming situations... :/

Edit: the 8600 gm is definitely better than the 7700 or x1700 - by how much is sort of up in the air at this point due to young drivers. its worth it to get it regardless just for the feature set (direct x 10 and video acceleration, predominantly).

 

Unfortunately the 8600M GS only has 16 stream processors like the 8400M series. Clocks are definitely higher than the 8400M GT, which does about Go 7600 performance. You'll probably see around Go 7700 performance or slightly higher, depending on clocks.

Turbo Cache is typically useless, unless you have very little dedicated frame buffer. In this case, I think it'll do more harm than good, stealing 768MB of RAM from your 2GB set up.

 

Well, would you think that masterchef341 was right about it using it only in gaming? Cause if thats the case I think it would be ok? And yeah i looked up the 8600M GS vs the 8600M GT, and I saw the performance gap. However, for my price range (basically $1,400 max) I cant afford a 8600M GT, and im just glad i could afford the one im getting in that setup :/.

 

That's what I mean. Many games now are hungry for system memory. If the card's taking a lot of that for itself, it may harm performance. There's no way any mid-range card is going to be able to push 1GB of textures and still give half decent performance.

You could always do a quick test - change the amount of memory allocated to the video card and see if it really helps at all. 256MB of dedicated frame buffer should be enough.

 

The video card will only take system memory as it needs it, and if the system needs more, the video card will give up as much system memory it is borrowing as necessary. As long as you have 2GB of RAM there's really nothing to worry about.

 

I dont think thats a user changeable property.

 

dont be silly and wait till september, so that you can get a nice laptop for less than that price.

Look, here in spain, there is a special sale at http://servicios.ahtec.org/index_menu.htm

IFL90
Core 2 duo, 2ghz
2gigs of ram
15,4"
8600GT GDDR3 512mb
160gigs 7200rpm

1299 €