Nehalem aside...

I made a post yesterday or the day before about Nehalem and its future in notebooks. From the responses in it, (thanks for those), it seems like Nehalem-based notebooks won't be out for another year +, and I have to get my laptop before a year is up.

So my next question is: does anyone have any idea when the next Nvidia platform (maybe the 200 series) will be appearing on notebooks? I googled it and I'm not sure if I searched correctly or not, but nothing came up.

I just remembered that graphics cards are most often the bottleneck for gaming systems anyway, so I guess that's more important to me than a more powerful processor.

 

there has been absolutely NO mention of it anywhere. Which pretty much means its probably not going to come out for a long time. Probably even later then nehalem which actually has a tentative release date.

Your best option is to wait till the 9800gtx comes out and decide between it and the 9800gt. It doesn't seem like the ati cards are going to be on clevos anytime soon.

 

Don't play the waiting game, else you'll wait forever and end up never getting a system. Newer and better things are always on the horizon that'll entice you to wait even longer. Who knows when Nehalem will come out, 1 yr, 1.5 yr. 2 yrs....If you need a system, make a short-term strategy, like waiting for 9800GTX release or Q9650 Quad Core, then make a strike.

 

the 9800mGTX will be like 15% more powerfull than the 9800mGT.. mabye less but no more.

the 8800mGTX and the 9800mGT are so ahead of any thing that if you need that kind of power a extra 15% is not going to make a big deal because u will already be overkilling every thing beside crysis "very high" which nether will support at any good res/fps

Imo pick a laptop .. when u start theory crafting about parts not even announced or leaked your looking at the 12months+ time frame. Which is foolish.

i've waited 6months before ordering my laptop.. and im going to end up with exactly the same performance as i could have had 6months ago in a m15x.. all ive saved is money. So if some things in your budjet now.. get it ALOT of big games are coming out over the next3months .. u will want a nice gaming laptop for them.. or els whats the point in getting one.

base purchases on Game titles/ uses
be aware of hardware refreshes but don't look at any thing past a month or 2 if u have a powerful budget that my advice from my experience waiting.


Also to say the GPU is the bigest bottleneck in gaming is not really true.. deps what "gaming" is to you..

as a Wow player its CPU (u want as fast a duelcore as possible)... as a generic releases player its GPU atm

 

nv200 is humongous and you'll have to wait for a process refresh to 45nm or something before you see a notebook version. i'd rather look at the rv770 on a notebook, that would be something to see.

 

Seemed an appropriate place to put this:

Nehalem will now (or soon) be officially called the "i7"

More of the story here.

The new badging's supposed to look like this: