Would MSI have made a better thing if they used the 200W MXM for the GT80S 980s...

Really, yeah the power brick would be immense (or forced to use 2x330W configuration like the Eurocom ones do for unleashed SLI power), but honestly the laptop is already expensive enough and doubtful a lot of people will find it a bigger hassle than it will be to carry another power brick, staying at their desks. It's already quite something to lug around 4.5+1.5kg combo of laptop and power adapter, imo the sacrifice would be worth it for wrecking PC people's 3DMark scores (slight sarcasm intended, you can't be called a gamer without getting top-level 3DMark scores once in your life). You can also use a socket multiplier (no extra cabling, just one to plug into your socket and get two for one) to plug both the power bricks in, if MSI would have followed the Eurocom method, since a normal socket in Europe withstands about 3000W and in US ~1800.

 

Physically fitting and cooling two of those non-standard cards would require a complete chassis redesign for what is likely to be a one-time footprint for an extremely low-volume product.

 

Tell me how high volume will be a laptop clocked at $4600 like the new upcoming GT80 is. MSI is far away from having any issues in fitting (check out the 980 for the GT72S) and cooling, well, can be solved through a few ways like changing the composition of the cooling pipe metal all the way to putting the fan very close to the heat emitter. If Clevo can do a SLI laptop while holding as well a overclocked socket processor, this would at least make for an interesting prototype/concept.

 

As everything in a notebook, those designs could work, however they are at the point of diminishing returns with any more heatpipes so to go a lot further the whole cooling system may need a redesign. Plus the gains for all the extra watts in terms of performance is again at diminishing returns.

 

We need a GT80P Pascal SLI desktop mobile 2017

 

I really don't understand the fuss with Pascal, except they'll finally abandon 28nm and VRAM doubles (which imo is not that great since no game uses more than 5GB currently). Everything that is about Pascal is only for enterprises, aka those who afford ridiculous technology like NVLink slots.

 

The performance jump should be up to double the performance compared to Kepler --> Maxwell.

 

Yes, the important metric of sheer performance should improve a lot. HBM is there to held feed faster cores and get rid of the bandwidth limitations.

 

Still, Pascal comes out for enterprise in Q2 2016, while the reference desktop graphics will come sometime in end-2016/beginning 2017, so it's safe to say Pascal MXMs come out in mid-2017 at best for laptops. An awful lot of waiting has to happen.

 

980M from 980 took 1 month.

 

Still ETA for consumer cards is late 2016 - early 2017, and in my case I want to take advantage of where I live now and not pay VAT/sales tax

 

We will have to wait and see timings, nothing is set in stone yet.

 

You do realize that the 200 watt card doesn't have an SLI connector so there was nothing they could have done even if they wanted too.

 

My bad then, it's hard getting info on it when there's barely any info about it, I took what I found at face value and didn't see the lack of SLI connector there.

 

No problem at all really, I know its like pulling teeth sometimes. Though the grape vine there is an 180 watt version with an SLI connection but I would say only Mr. Fox and Prema have probably physically seen them to verify completely. With these even existing it puts quite a few questions in my head such as where will the show up and on what. That's the difficult questions that gets me on the edge of my seat.

 

There are pictures of most cards over at tech inferno.

 

How do you know Pascal MXMs will even exist?

The GT80S with Dual MXM GTX 980s is something of Nvidia getting rid of extra 980 chips as I've heard they never really performed how they were supposed to.

On top of that they intend to release new cards, so if you have a stockpile why not use it right?

I'm skeptical on the entire idea... Seeing as laptops only get 300W power bricks won't all laptop based video cards be hindered anyways?