Refine search for Notebooks

Gaming Notebooks: The Full Story

Author	Stuart Andrews
Published	22nd Mar 2007

Discuss this article

Email this to a friend

TrustedReviews Newsletters

In the last year or so, that has changed. First, the combination of short, floating-point optimised pipelines and high speeds in the Pentium M, Core Duo and Core 2 Duo processors ensured that notebook CPUs caught up with their desktops equivalents. Intel’s matching chipsets have meant the same for the underlying architecture and memory sub-systems, and AMD has been maintaining pressure with the Turion X2 line. Meanwhile, a growing commitment to notebook graphics – particularly from nVidia – has brought notebook GPUs much closer to the performance of desktop GPUs. Once, the power requirements and heat output of high-end GPUs put them out of contention within the tight power budgets and heat limitations of a notebook. As a result, laptop users were restricted to cut-down versions of mid-range chips.

Last year, however, things started to move in the right direction, thanks to a combination of die-shrinks and smart architectural design. First, nVidia hit us up with the GeForce Go 7800 GTX chipset, then ATi responded with the Mobility Radeon X1800XT. Before long, nVidia hit back with the GeForce Go 7900GTX and then the GeForce Go 7950GTX. Now ATi is due for a comeback with the Mobility Radeon X1900.

You can even have dual graphics card in SLI in your notebook - if you have the money.

These aren’t dramatically cut-down chips. The Mobility Radeon X1900 has the same 36 pixel pipelines and 8 vertex pipelines as the desktop Radon X1900GT, while the GeForce Go 7950GTX has the same 24 pixel pipelines and 8 vertex pipelines as the desktop GeForce 7950GT. While there will be minor differences in clock speeds, you are effectively now getting desktop power in a notebook format. However, there is one minor caveat: with 312 million transistors in the Mobility Radeon X1900 and 278million in the GeForce Go 7950GTX, these aren’t small, low-power, low-heat processors. As a result, they’re popular in high-end desktop replacement notebooks, but if you want something you can actually use on the move – or even sit comfortably with it on your lap – you’ll still need to go down the scale to something with a GeForce Go 7700 or Mobility Radeon X1700.