First Proper W880CU with GTX480M Review Online!

hi all clevo fans, first good review of the new W880CU with GTX480M is now out at tomshardware. follow the link and enjoy reading.

GeForce GTX 480M: AVADirect?s W880CU Is Packing The Heat : Out With The Old, In With The New

For those who havent got much time to read, here's the conclusion.

"It might only have two-thirds the muscle of a moderately-priced desktop graphics card, but the GeForce GTX 480M still beats down its Mobility Radeon-based competitor by nearly 19%, once you divide out the presented results. The only problem, then, is price. The cheapest MXM module we could find costs three to four times more than the cheapest desktop card that uses similar hardware (the GeForce GTX 465).

Anyone who requires complete portability from their gaming PC really has only a handful of solutions, none of them supremely mobile, and all of them extremely expensive. The most potent of these desktop-replacement gaming machines is powered by Nvidia’s GTX 480M GPU. With so much expense providing so much gaming power, this might just be the ultimate portable gaming solution for buyers whose needs are great and whose budgets are even greater."

 

First of all they conclude that the 480M is more power efficient than the MR5870 which is hard to accept, although the performance difference of 19% is perfectly in line with what we have already predicted. How a 30% increase in power consumption with a 19% increase in performance is more power efficient is beyond me.
But more interesting is that according to their tests the 285M is performing almost the same as the MR5870 ???

 

I dont think the 480m uses that much more power than the mr5870 as ati dont publish the real power requirment of the card as they dont include the MXM connector power supply were as Nvida do.


you are right that it seams strange that the 285m is doing so well when we no its not as good as the mr5870

 

MR5870 is only marginally faster than 285M right? i guess that's what they meant there. from the way i look at it, the biggest problem with GTX480M is still the price. at 2-3X the price of MR5870 but only ~20% faster... that's not really convincing, is it?

 

285M faster than 5870MR... Well, it's tom's hardware...

 

let just hope ati has something under its sleeve

 

has anyone measured the true TDP of the entire MR5870 card? most of us assume that it's about 75W TDP, but is there a concrete lab tested result? at idle, the nvidia's solution is more efficient thanks to its aggressive power saving measures, but for MR5870, it doesnt clock down so well.

another thing i would point out from the review is that overclocking result is not present, nor is the temperature of the GPU. is there a reason why no one has ever attempted to overclock GTX480M? since W880CU has such elaborated cooling capabilities, im sure there is a good overclocking headroom potential.

 

http://forum.notebookreview.com/sager-clevo/496497-clevo-d900f-sager-9285-benchmarks-thread.html

 

Put the MR5870 in there, o/c and overvolt it to 1000/1250 and rerun the tests...

But from the looks of the temps in the 901F chassis there is still headroom for overclocking, reaching GTX 465 clocks with the GTX 480M would be overkill, then you would truly have a desktop GPU in a laptop.

 

According to their test: Power, Efficiency, And Battery Life : GeForce GTX 480M: AVADirect?s W880CU Is Packing The Heat

The 480M consumes 34W more than the MR5870. However I would like to stress that power consumption is not always equal to the TDP. Usually the TDP is a bit lower than the actual power consumption.

 

Wow, review basically shows why the GTX480m is a bad buy.

 

It may be because nvidia always had better tuned drivers. That's one of the reason i am aiming towards an nvidia solution. Hopefuly prices will go down, the price for a 480m is overkill, and maybe something like a 460m will appear in the time to come.

 

"Nvidia Always had better tuned drivers" - Based on what exactly? Aren't Nvidia cards notorious for dying out, hence the oven bake method...

 

"better tuned drivers" is very much debatable. both ati and nvidia regularly fine tune their drivers and they are very much on par with each other in this aspect. i would argue that nvidia currently has better support for mobile gpu drivers with their verde driver program. but ati is catching up too.. much of ati driver complains are from M17x 5870CF owners right now.

on a side note, the dying batch of nvidia cards has nothing much to do with their driver support (or the way their driver works). that is a manufacturing defect and it's affecting at the moment, 8000 series (or perhaps some 9000 series) mostly mobile gpus.

 

Agreed... Unless you really need high-res DX11 on the move, settling for a MR 5870 is enough for most; while a desktop is far less costy solution to yield the same performance.

 

This is the first review I see when the reviewer is actually trying to find some excuses...Wow.
We already know that without OC'ing both 480M and MR5870 behave similarly in games (if tested in the same laptop).
Wonder how to get 19%?
Test gaming FPS @ unrealistically low resolutions
I'm only interested in max pre-tests and ultra settings @ max resolutions.
Who will ever play any game on a 17" screen @ non-native res?

 

notebookjournal.de also test gtx480m too and get same result with tomshardware. may be both sites got something from nividia

edit: here you go http://www.notebookjournal.de/tests/technik-review-grafikkarte-nvidia-geforce-gtx-480m-gamecheck-nkmo-1179

 

They have to get same results. Whether they are paid by Nvidia or not is not important. What important is to realize that "official" reviews have to be always taken with a grain of salt. Every new iteration will receive some amount of bashing and praise and the reviews will show 10-20% performance increase.
Whether or not it's true in real life, we're welcome to discover in our own rigs running our preferred games.

Generally, all the performance talk is a pure weapons grade balognium.
We are all biased, and seeing how some argue about pro's and con's (based on a couple of freshly-hatched reviews) without ever owning ATI or Nvidia GPU equipped laptops, is funny. But ask those who had both and you'll most likely receive a simple answer - There's no absolute card.
Too many factors influence our opinions.
Personally, I don't even look at the performance levels any more (even a single 260M would handle all the games I like), but rather @ the general stability of the system, load temps in extreme conditions, DPC latency issues, stuttering, drivers, etc.
Those kinds of "reviews" will appear when more owners do their biased analysis and testing.
But it's nonetheless fun to watch and speculate...