spoke to reseller SLI-ETA middle of MARCH

I was speaking to a Sager Reseller and they figured that SLI will be available in the middle of march

 

Ouch , that must suck. By the time they release SLI, the 9800M GTX will hit the market LOL

 

I've seen some bencmarkmark testing of the desktop 9800gtx at Expreview. Not so impressive at all performance wise. Just slightly better than 8800gtx. there are other advantages though..

 

which are..... ?

 

Looks good.. thanks!

 

Precisely - and look who'll be the first to have the mobile variant......DELL!

 

Too little to late... Intel's new chipsets, cpu's and so forth are scheduled in June and require new Socket B mobo's. So you'll get a sli notebook with a 3 month lifespan before the newer ones hit the the shelves if March is correct... and the new chipset is supposed to bench twice as fast as current SantaRosa offerings.

My guess is we'll see the introduction of the 9000 series NVidia mobile gpu's in the newer Montevina generation notebooks instead of the SantaRosa's older tech... hard to guess though since the new Intel stuff seems more concerned with low power than brute force.

 

@MightyAA:

Remember, the NP9262 does not use Santa Rosa. It uses the desktop-based Conroe processors. It will be unaffected by the Montevina release.

 

Not quite true if I understand it right. SantaRosa is a platform. While you use the desktop cpu, you also still use SantaRosa's mobile chipset P965 Express, and that is being updated as well probably at the same time as part of the Montevina platform (also includes the ICH9M southbridge upgrade)...

 

The Santa Rosa chipset would not support 800 MHz RAM, which the NP9262 is fully capable of utilizing. The Santa Rosa platform is only for Intel's mobile processors (otherwise, you could throw Conroe processors into any notebook with a Santa Rosa chipset, since the chipset would also control the socket).

The P965 Express chipset is not used with Santa Rosa. Santa Rosa platforms use the P M965 Express (M, obviously, indicating mobile). Notice that the three SKUs mentioned in your article all have an "M" following the initial letter. Intel's forthcoming desktop chipsets can and will affect the NP9262 when they are released, but the point of my post was that Santa Rosa and Montevina will have no effect at all on the NP9262 (it's the NP5793 that uses the mobile chipset).

Future tech is always going to affect current tech. You just have to decide for yourself when you're through waiting for the "next big thing."

 

You'll never have the best laptop for more than a few months no matter how long you wait for it. I just hope the price of the 8800 drops enough within the next year or so to make it worth going sli.

 

Definately agreed on that. But for newer sweeping introductions to chipsets, it's usually better to wait if you can. The reasoning is future upgrading... cause you know they'll have something bigger and better to upgrade to eventually, and you'll be hoping it works in your rig w/o having to buy a new one. Just like how my current m570u can't work with a 8800M because it's obsolete. But I did upgrade from my 7900 (the best available) to a 7950 GTX when they came out, and I didn't have to worry about the then new Core2Duo's since they worked too.

@Eleison: Thanks for clearing that up in my head about the chipsets. So is the sli slated for march exclusive to the "desktop" or mobile notebooks?

 

Sager/Clevo doesn't manufacture an SLi Santa Rosa notebook, so for them, at least, it is exclusive to the desktop chipset. I'd be willing to bet that Alienware's M17x (which IS built off of the Santa Rosa chipset) is also waiting for nVIDIA to finish driver support before it launches. It's really just nVIDIA working out the mobile SLi for the 8800M, whichever chipset is being used.

 

umm, yes its not clevos fault, its really Nvidias fault