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  • jigglywiggly - Thursday, March 22, 2012 - link

    summary of article
    everything is rebadge except 680m
    except we dont know anything about it >.>
  • JarredWalton - Thursday, March 22, 2012 - link

    Right. Except, none of the 28nm parts are rebadges, and only a few 40nm parts will have a 600M name (and will likely be short lived).
  • CeriseCogburn - Saturday, March 24, 2012 - link

    Summary last page large paragraph:
    Nvidia wins big.
    AMD is way behind, is still behind, going further behind. AMD needs to step up, especially with drivers.
  • mentatstrategy - Wednesday, March 28, 2012 - link

    AMD never makes the best drivers for their hardware - you have to go 3rd party for better drivers... main reason I never bought AMD/ATI - you make good hardware but, you don't know how to make drivers for it? Nvidia FTW
  • SInC26 - Tuesday, April 10, 2012 - link

    The GTX 680M, GTX 660M, GT 650M, GT 640M, GT 630M, and GT 620M are not rebadges.
    I'm personally looking forward to the GT 640M w/ GDDR5 in the Dell XPS 15 refresh.
  • aguilpa1 - Thursday, March 22, 2012 - link

    the mobile chip marketing is so f'ed up it's not even funny.

    My only hope is a GTX 680M (not really a 680 of course) brings with it the new power efficiency we see in the 680GTX and at least boosts performance up a healthy 30% from a 580m would make it a winner in my book regardless of name BS.
  • MrSpadge - Thursday, March 22, 2012 - link

    A huge mess, indeed. Fermis in 40 and 28 nm and Keplers, all named almost similar and (almost) none of them with hard specs. Yeah, sounds like one big family...
  • Wreckage - Thursday, March 22, 2012 - link

    Optimus alone makes NVIDIA's mobile lineup superior to AMD. Until AMD can catch up, people should avoid their mobile chips
  • Wolfpup - Thursday, March 22, 2012 - link

    Optimus and other switching technologies are horrible, and I wish Anandtech would quit pushing them. Driver weirdness, stability issues, worse performance....

    I and quite a number of others I know intentionally buy notebooks WITHOUT optimus.
  • prdola0 - Thursday, March 22, 2012 - link

    This is totally false. Where did you see that Optimus would have performance reduced by ANY amount? There is no such thing. Optimus does not reduce performance. There is also no driver weirdness and stability issues. Where did you get that? I've been working with an Optimus system for more than a year now and the performance was flawless.
  • Hubb1e - Thursday, March 22, 2012 - link

    I have Optimus and a 330M in my laptop and I can't get driver updates for it. So yeah, Optimus is cool for 6 months, but when the laptop gets retired so does your driver updates. At least with Gateway....
  • JarredWalton - Thursday, March 22, 2012 - link

    Which laptop is this? All Optimus laptops should be supported by the current release, see: http://www.geforce.com/drivers/results/42588

    If you're trying to update your drivers via Gateway, that's why you're not getting updates.
  • Grydelåg - Wednesday, March 28, 2012 - link

    With all respect Jarred.

    1.
    You should stick with the factory approved drivers.
    You are on your own with the driver from gforce site.
    If you use non factory aproved drivers you could also get cooling issues with the notebook.
    2..
    My Optimus ACER 5755g is really the most error filled Nvidia implementation I have ever owned (I own / have owned/used like 20+ Nvidia based cards over many years)
    3.
    There are real issues with optimus, just look at the official Nvidia forum, there are apart from the non professionals, some really skilled people who writes there.

    So I dont really see Optimus as a compeditive argument for Nvidia versus Ati as you state in the article.
    Best Rgds.
  • SInC26 - Tuesday, April 10, 2012 - link

    "Factory approved" drivers are just outdated Nvidia drivers that OEM's haven't bothered to update. You really should update your own graphics drivers for bug fixes (possibly with Optimus) and better performance. Driver updates also should not affect cooling performance.
  • setzer - Thursday, March 22, 2012 - link

    I agree, having a optimus enabled laptop with an intel hd3000 and a gf520, the only way to get decent battery life is to disable the geforce totally because seriously what is the point of the geforce 520M?
    There's better compatibility for gaming than the hd3000 but in either case they are both crappy graphics cards for games and as I work mostly under linux where Optimus isn't supported by nvidia the Optimus point is moot.
    Optimus makes sense if you are pairing a decent graphics card, say anything equal or above x40M with the integrated intel gpu, pairing low end cards is just pointless.
    What would be good is intel getting serious with gpu performance and offer at least 90% of the graphics performance and compatibility of the integrated amd apus with lower power usage. That way we could get rid of the lower tiers of mobile and desktop cards all together :)
  • JarredWalton - Thursday, March 22, 2012 - link

    If you buy a laptop with Optimus and a low-end GPU and then:

    1) Expect it to run games well
    2) Expect it to work with Linux

    ...then you didn't do your homework. But given you "mostly work under Linux" you're already in a diminishingly small minority. Optimus isn't fore every single use case, but really Linux is the only area where Optimus in my opinion is seriously flawed.

    As for Wolfpup, I know you get on here every time we mention Optimus and you spread the same old FUD. You have never once responded to my questions about specifically where Optimus has caused you problems. The reason, apparently, is that you've either never actually used Optimus, or you've never actually experienced a problem directly related to Optimus, and so you just wave your hands and say it's a horrible technology. Is Optimus perfect? Well, no, but then neither is any other technology. More to the point, given the alternatives I'll take Optimus every time. Which alternatives are those?

    1) Discrete only GPUs in laptops, where battery life gets killed. The lowest power dGPUs idle at around 3-4W, which is 50% more than where a modern Sandy Bridge laptop idles.
    2) IGP only laptops, which means forget about gaming on Intel. For AMD, Llano is actually decent, but it's still only good for our "Value 1366x768" settings.
    3) Manually switchable graphics, with driver updates dictated by your laptop vendor. Go ahead and ask how many driver updates people with manually switchable laptops have received over the lifetime of their laptop--usually it's one update if you're lucky, two at most.
    4) Manually switchable graphics with muxes also do the lovely flash and blink on the screen for anywhere from five to ten seconds every time you switch.

    Optimus gives you the battery life of the IGP when you don't need the dGPU, and the performance of the dGPU when you do need it. It gives you a switch that takes place in a fraction of a second with no screen flicker. You get driver updates from NVIDIA and Intel whenever they provide them and no need to wait for the laptop vendors to release an updated driver. The "problems" with Optimus are that you don't get alternative OS support, and you tend to lose some performance when running in high frame rate situations (e.g. >120 FPS). Since there's not much point running higher than 120FPS anyway, given the 60Hz refresh rates of most displays (120Hz on 3D displays), Linux support is really the only valid complaint. That's less than 5% of users on laptops/desktops, and NVIDIA has decided that they're willing to lose that business on laptops.
  • orionismud - Tuesday, March 27, 2012 - link

    Hopefully people interested in this get to your reply. Anandtech needs a comment system where you can like / dislike.
  • lurker22 - Thursday, March 22, 2012 - link

    This is why I haven't upgraded my 9800GT. I don't have the patience to spend a couple hours trying to figure out which is a good card anymore. When their numbering system isn't even in order for what is a "better card" it's just plain obnoxious.
  • MrSpadge - Thursday, March 22, 2012 - link

    They want you to "just get the bigger GBs"...
  • Warren21 - Thursday, March 22, 2012 - link

    I was helping a friend build a new budget desktop gaming PC and ran into this same age-old scenario.

    He came up with his own "killer!" build to compare to mine and had put a $75 GT 520 (2GB DDR3) in there as opposed to a $130 6850 (1GB GDDR5) in my original plan. I had to explain that the GT 520 is garbage in comparison...

    Ended up going for a $220 eVGA GTX 480 1.5GB, BNIB with 3 years of warranty. Awesome sale.
  • ET - Sunday, March 25, 2012 - link

    I think that you'll have to find a better excuse for not upgrading from the 9800GT. Maybe you're okay with playing older games or at low resolutions, and that's fine, but considering that you're reading Anandtech, which has reviews with comprehensive performance comparisons, I don't see why any numbering issues should confuse you so much that you're be unable to find a good upgrade for your old card.
  • xrror - Thursday, March 22, 2012 - link

    lol

    I just imagine some sort of interview question:
    Q: "Tell us how you really feel about re-branding"

    A: "[...] and instead had to pussyfoot around what we knew"

    Does credit go to Dustin or Jarred for this line?
    still laughing...
  • JarredWalton - Thursday, March 22, 2012 - link

    Dustin I'm sure. I'm not quite so snarky.
  • lazymangaka - Friday, March 23, 2012 - link

    Aww, my new laptop came with the 40nm 630M instead of the 28nm. That makes me a slightly sad panda.
  • Lepton87 - Saturday, March 24, 2012 - link

    Seems like nvida left a huge gap between GK104 and GK107, wonder if it's gonna be filled.

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