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What the best laptop GPU's ???

chaparral

chaparral

chaparral

Caporegime
Joined
27 Nov 2005
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Guernsey
Does anyone know which laptop GPU's are the best now days ???

Be great if someone can list the lastest fastest ones in order of speed ;)

Was looking at some laptops yesterday that had HD 5470 & GT 240M GPU's or something like that..
But i had no idea on what these laptop GPU's were like..:confused::o
 
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The 480m is not cheap and really quite unknown in terms of how it would be in a laptop.

http://www.notebookcheck.net/NVIDIA-GeForce-GTX-480M.30196.0.html

the key thing would be, not massively faster thana 5870 mobility, costs loads more but no reviews of laptops with it in, its not available yet and is unlikely to ever be widely available. It uses from recollection, around 30-40% more power(though most people gaming will be plugged in) but heat, in the same enclosed space IS an issue, the 480m is already downclocked to 425Mhz just to get it in, its a FULL Fermi, cut to 465gtx specs, then cut down another 30-40% in clock speeds.

I wouldn't be surprised to see it either incredibly noisey in laptops with uber all out fans to keep it cool, or lots of throttling, which will kill its speed.

Considering availability and cost, I wouldn't be surprised if you could find crossfired 5870 laptops close to the price of a 480M single laptop(if they ever actually really appear).
 
Whats the budget?

Most middle range machines these days, from 550 up to £1000, have at best a gts250m or an ATI equivalent in the 5650. We have had a little bench in this thred which shows just how close these cards are in similar spec’ed machines.

Above and over that I found that I was very hard stretched finding a machine under £1000 with a card that is any better. Take almost any laptop out there with a resolution of 1680x1050 and above, pick any one and you can almost guarantee that the graphics card will be inadequate when playing the latest games at native resolution with any kind of eye candy (Bar possibly some of the custom builds you can get in clevo chassis).

In the other thread I mention that I have two fairly recent machines in the MSI GX620 with a 9600m gt and an Acer 5942g with a 5650. The MSI suffers from the above be honest, in that the 9600gt is just not capable at the native resolution of 1680x1050 in anything at all recent. On the other hand the 5650 in the acer is capable at its natve res of 1366x768 but fails in desktop real estate.

The 240m you mention is also benched in that thread, granted we only benched Crysis but it should give you some kind of idea what the cards are capable of. If the budget will stretch, look for machines with either the 250m or the 5650. Both are very capable at lower native resolutions and give a decent user experience.
 
Freddie1980 said:
I hope your not planning on playing games on your laptop. Bad idea, very bad idea.
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In what way?
I gamed on a laptop for around 2 years with the 7800 & 7900GTX cards. It never let me down once. Details were kept reasonably high for the time, performance was good and I had the bonus of portability. :)

Always hear the arguement that you can get a gaming desktop and "normal" laptop for the price of a gaming laptop. Never understood what people's point was though...
 
VinceB1 said:
Elaborate please... we are all awaiting your wisdom, why is it a bad idea to game on a laptop?
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I've lost count of the number of people I've tried to help who's laptops have crashed and failed as a result of gaming. Typical story:

'Over the last few weeks my computer has been crashing when playing Empire Total War and it seems to be getting worse and more frequent.'

'Ok, can you tell me your computer specs namely the CPU, Ram, OS and video card.'

'According to DirectX my CPU is an Intel XXX, 4Gb ram and the video Geforce 240M'

'Ah so your using a Laptop'

'Yes.'
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Seriously about half the problems I come across is people who drive there Laptops into the ground with hours and hours of gaming. Those tiny non ventilated cases are just not suitable for handling components that get stressed by games. Heat builds ups and if it's not properly cooled the silicon starts to degrade over time and it can't be reversed or repaired and in most cases people have only had there laptops for about 2 years. And if the silicon doesn’t degrade the solder can become lose and the contact pins come out of place just look at the original 360’s, they didn’t have suitable cooling which caused Microsoft a huge amount of problems.

Laptops are just not suitable for gaming and today more so then ever as components consume more power and generate more heat then ever before. A laptop was originally designed for business users who need a computer for the road to send emails, write reports and show presentations to customers they weren’t designed with gamers in mind that’s why we have desktops.
 
Fair comments but let’s be honest, 2 years out of a laptop is pretty good going. Mine last around 12 months before they are replaced, besides when buying a laptop much like when buying a car, there is a certain amount of servicing that needs to be done in order to keep it running at its best.

Anyway to look at it another way, a blanket comment saying that gaming on a laptop is a bad idea, in a computer enthusiast forum is, well, lets say fairly inaccurate. There are machines out there that are capable of dissipating the heat that the card produces effectively, therefore keeping the laptop cool and keeping wear down. A laptop is no different to any other pc in that things can go wrong but how is that any different to a desktop?

I game on my laptops as much as I use my desktop if not more, unlike most I also lug mine to work every day and use it in the office, like I am now, day in day out for 8 hours plus a day. To say that there is not a gaming laptop on the market that is fit for purpose is way off the mark in my opinion.

As for the second point about components consuming more power, well let’s just say that you couldn't be more off the mark there either. Take any recent gpu and compare it with a similar performing GPU from 6 or 12 months ago. I bet a pound to a penny it will consume less power on a lower manufacturing process than its predecessor, to validate the point, the 4870 (160w tdp) and 5770 (108w tdp) perform at similar levels yet the 5770 consumes less power and runs cooler for the same performance.
 
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Well if 2 years is good going then I can't really argue against that. Gaming laptops are big money in fact there a lot of money and I would be disappointed if my laptop failed after 2 years.

As for power consumption I was talking about laptops from like 8/9 years ago to today. Sure technology has moved on since last year but the point remains heat is bad and heat isn't easy to dissipate in the confines of a laptop case. However if you prepared to accept that a Laptop might only have a shelve life of 2 years if you constantly game on it then by all means do what you want with it. IMO opinion a think a lot people buy this equipment and expect it to work for a long, long time and get anxious when it starts to fail after a couple of years.
 
I do agree on that, laptops have high end gpu's in, but often fairly little thought put into cooling, a good few I've seen from friends in the past 4-5 years end up being incredibly loud fan wise and get almost painfully hot to use when under long gaming load. Often people use them to play stuff like wow, and less intense games under less load but, a tiny little poorly cooled laptop isn't ideal for high end loads constantly going on. A better way to put it I guess is not fairly little thought put into cooling, but fairly little they can do to improve cooling in a laptop, without making the case the size of a Yellow Pages.

Which is why I mentioned we don't actually know how good/bad a 480M might be in real life, because its a full Fermi, just at painfully low clocks and with lots of bits fused off, its got incredibly high power draw. Remember their desktop parts are rated at 250W, vs 180W for a 5870, yet all tests show its using a good 110W more than a 5870 system, so if they are CLAIMING 100W for the 480M part, well, I wouldn't be surprised if that ended up more like 130W, maybe even more, and all cooled in the same tiny laptop. Considering I think a 5870 mobility is rated at 75W maxed out, maybe 55-60W in gaming, for maybe 10% less performance, its a pretty easy choice.

Its very very likely you can get a xfired 5870 mobility setup for the same price, and the same power usage as a 480M laptop, with more performance and two separate cores will be easier to cool than one as you can design a laptop with a second air channel, and fan if necessary.

Really though a single 5870 mobility is pretty damn good in terms of laptop gaming, anything more and you're asking for unstable, crashing, over heating, uncomftable to use, worthless power life laptops.
 
Freddie1980 said:
Well if 2 years is good going then I can't really argue against that. Gaming laptops are big money in fact there a lot of money and I would be disappointed if my laptop failed after 2 years.

As for power consumption I was talking about laptops from like 8/9 years ago to today. Sure technology has moved on since last year but the point remains heat is bad and heat isn't easy to dissipate in the confines of a laptop case. However if you prepared to accept that a Laptop might only have a shelve life of 2 years if you constantly game on it then by all means do what you want with it. IMO opinion a think a lot people buy this equipment and expect it to work for a long, long time and get anxious when it starts to fail after a couple of years.
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I suppose its down to expectations, if you buy a gaming laptop and are expecting it to be able to play the latest games and be as good as new after even 18 months then you probably should have a re-think. On the other hand if you do want to game and are willing to put up with the shortcommings and short gaming lifespan then you can't go far wrong. I don't know about you, but I find most of the machines that come to me with the problems you mention above are those that have not been looked after, or are used in conditions that help them along such as on a blanket or generally not on a flat surface.

On an interesting note - I just ran furmark on my machine for around 6 minutes until the temps leveled out, max temps under stress seem to be 70deg c which apparantly isn't even enough to make the fan spin up above 30%.

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Also guys remember that the op is looking at machines with 240m and ati 54xx so the 480m and even 5870 are, I assume, going to be out of the price range.
 
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In terms of the best you can get 5870 mobile and gtx 480 mobile for laptops these days.

No doubt they are stinkingly expensive!

Additonally any mobile chip is no where near as powerfull as their desktop cousions. For instance the 5870 mobile is as powerfull as a 4870 Desktop gpu.

You can see from this chart the hierachies of gpus:

http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/gaming-radeon-hd-geforce-gtx,review-31939-7.html
 
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