Mobile Video Cards

[ProgressiveYummy]

I'm shopping for a laptop and wanted to get your guy's opinion on mobile video cards. From what I've read the Nvidia 6600 Go is the competitor to the ATI mobility X700. First is this correct and is the ATI mobililty X700 the better choice? How does these cards compare to their predecessors?

Thanks in advance for the input!

[ProgressiveYummy]

:confused:

[lazybum131]

It seems for the majority of laptops with the MRX700 or 6600go, the X700 performs better, at least in 3DMarks which get posted a lot more often than actual game benchmarks since most users aren't gonna go around benching a bunch of games just for fun.

What makes it difficult to say for sure which one will perform faster (aside from the reasons desktop cards have such as DirectX vs OpenGL games) is that laptop manufacturers set the video cards core and memory clockspeeds themselves according to the thermal characteristics the laptop can take. So say between different laptops with 128MB MRX700, the performance could potentially differ quite a bit if one is clocked higher. Same goes with the 6600go, which makes comparing the two cards harder. You're better off comparing performance laptop to laptop.

Both the 6600go and MRX700 perform around the same as the desktop 9700pro. So both are a fairly big jump in performance from the MR9600/9700 which performed about the same as the desktop 9600 and 9600pro (not counting the MR9800 which I think was exclusive to Dell's DTR at the time).

[ProgressiveYummy]

That's some great info!
It helps a lot to know that the X700 & 6600Go performance is approxiate to the 9700Pro. That being said, which desktop cards do the X600 and X300 mobility cards compare to?

Thanks!

It seems for the majority of laptops with the MRX700 or 6600go, the X700 performs better, at least in 3DMarks which get posted a lot more often than actual game benchmarks since most users aren't gonna go around benching a bunch of games just for fun.

What makes it difficult to say for sure which one will perform faster (aside from the reasons desktop cards have such as DirectX vs OpenGL games) is that laptop manufacturers set the video cards core and memory clockspeeds themselves according to the thermal characteristics the laptop can take. So say between different laptops with 128MB MRX700, the performance could potentially differ quite a bit if one is clocked higher. Same goes with the 6600go, which makes comparing the two cards harder. You're better off comparing performance laptop to laptop.

Both the 6600go and MRX700 perform around the same as the desktop 9700pro. So both are a fairly big jump in performance from the MR9600/9700 which performed about the same as the desktop 9600 and 9600pro (not counting the MR9800 which I think was exclusive to Dell's DTR at the time).

[lazybum131]

The MRX600 performs about the same as the MR9700, so it'll have similar performance to the desktop 9600 and 9600pro cards depending on clockspeeds.

The MRX300 is a very similar core to the X600 (4 pixel pipelines, 2 vertex shader units), but they're crippled by a 64-bit memory bus. Therefore it performs like the desktop 9600SE and X300SE cards that also have only 64-bit memory bus. The exception to this is the 128MB X300 in the Dell 6000d, which has a 128-bit memory bus so performs about the same as similarly clocked MR9600/9700/X600.