Suggestions regarding performance equivalents and my p170HM

My Malibal Satori p170hm is about a year and a half old with the 2670qm, 16GB ram, and Radeon 6990m. It's been a good machine but it's been getting a little laggy running Far Cry 3 and Crysis 3 at 1080p if trying to push quality settings much above medium-ish. I have a desktop that I built a few years ago running an eVGA 780sli MB, C2D e6600 at 3.4ghz, GTX 285, and 8GB DDR3 (can't remember speed). I was going to try and get a 7970m and upgrade my p170hm laptop but I'm not crazy about loosing HDMI and it's over $400 (granted I could probably sell my 6990m to offset some of the cost). So I'm wondering if I'd get more gaming benefit by pulling the GTX 285 in the desktop and replacing it with a desktop 7950 or GTX 660ti, etc. and keeping the laptop where it's at for a few more years until I upgrade it to the latest and greatest. I'm just not sure if the OC'd e6600 dual core could keep up with a newer graphics card and actually have an advantage on newer games over my 6990m laptop with the faster CPU.

 

That's a pretty tough call. I'd personally upgrade my desktop for top end gaming and keep the laptop as is for gaming on the go. You may not get the best graphics out of the current setup, but that's not typically terribly important for mobile gaming. You could always get those new GPUs into the desktop and see what maxes out first, but having used the e6600 in my previous rig, I'd say it'd probably the first to max out by a fair margin. Could always just make due with the CPU being the bottleneck for now, then when funds are available invest in a new board/CPU.