My 2 cent's on the 480M

I haven't posted here in a while, been keeping busy.

I was one of the first to support the 280M in my NP5797, when Ati was serving the 4850. Then, the comparisons were pretty close. With the recent release of the 5870, we've seen a noticeable increase in performance from the 280M, and DX11 was enough to warrant an upgrade.

Surprise, surprise, mobile GF100 was released a lot earlier than others presumed it to be. Even more surprising, the monster is a straight-up desktop GTX 465. Whatever they did to get the power consumption down, it was ingenious. It packs three times as many transistors as the mobility 5870, has over twice as many effective shader cores, has twice the memory bandwith, and twice as much framebuffer. This mobile GPU is balls-to-the-wall nuts.

Of course, there must be a few draw backs. It's power hungry, and only runs at 425mhz on the core, which is slow by today's standards. Overclocking will be a game changer.

With the Sli and Crossfire systems dominating the scene for a while, we now have a true, monolithic monster than can hold its own. I'm an advocate for it, but I don't see myself finacially able to join the club for the time being

 

I think a large part of its success will be how well it will overclock.

 

As well as whether it will scale as well as the desktop version in SLI.

 

Yeah i know... tbh i don't bet on overclock that much lol.

 

the sucess wont be for the first time the quality of the card as much as the laptop.

The best recent example is the G73 vs the 870cu ... the sager had a better quality mobo and card resulting in a much higher overclock. I think if the right company gets contracted it could be nice but it will all depend who makes it and what they use

 

Well put, moo. It does no good to pair such a high powered/expensive card with underpar components.

 

And yet, with all that power, the most optimistic estimated put it at 30% above the mr5870. Disappointing limiting a v12 to 3k rpm. Overclockability really is the big test. Need to justify that huge tdp and price tag.

 

From what I hear, 480M is on 100watts already, I wonder how many laptops will be able to support the cooling and the power needed for it to overclock properly...

 

Eh this card has potential yes but its downclocked for a reason due to the 100Watt usage. Well it can outbeat a single 5870 so so, but the thing is its going to be hard to overclock while watching that voltage and heat it runs. But having 2 gig as a single card is a lot more future proof to have than a one gig card so that's the best part. Still ATI over the price that's what it is. Its just is way too high to buy 750 yeah right!! Cmon were heading into a depression! And they are still up to their old ways of charging high for rebranded cards but it seems to be a different card oh well we have to see soon.

 

Well, we don't know whether it will only be 30% yet though in tessellation heavy games. We are seeing up to 150% performance difference, though we don't know for sure how much of it is due to the 980X CPU and how much is from the card itself.

 

Can't tessellation be turned down or off? Interesting that it does so much better with tessellation.... As i understand it, tessellation realllllly bogs stuff down and isnt really practical yet.

 

Honestly, I dont believe the 2gb would mean anything for the next year or so. Lets face the facts -- most games are console ports-- the CPU here is king.

I'm not sure that we have progressed too much furtherr than the jan 2008 release of the 8800 gtx. Yes our frame rates have improved, but nothing parallel to the price tag we pay for premium laptop hardware. I will admit nVidia made a huge leap from from the 7950 to the 8800, but i dont see that here.

Like always, we, laptop enthusiasts sit miles behind the race we watch so dearly.

 

we merely do not sit by and watch. We push just as hard in some cases. Since we don't have a lot to work with.

 

Yeah i know it was a really huge jump from 7950 to 8800GTX, and i agree most games today are more into gpu intensive and even some open CL and Cuda programs can convert video files quicker than the CPU even though the quality is so so though. It's still worth to have, but we need stop sitting around and doing nothing and demand nvidia to release better cards and enough with the re branding!

 

^^^
...and let's not forget that game developers mostly optimize for consoles, so most of the hardware performance improvements in PCs go to waste.

 

When consoles are doing 1080p + 16xSSAA + 60fps, this will be true.

 

Not quite sure what you mean-

I was referring to poor console ports. GTA 4 for example-

Did you think I was saying that consoles are superior to PCs?