You can look here for comparisons between the HD 4670 and the GT 130. It seems that the ATI will outperform the GT 130 by perhaps 20-30% or thereabouts.

If I were you, I'd wait for the Clarksfield processors to hit the SXPS 16 before pulling the trigger. They will definitely outperform any Montevina based dual-cores that are currently being used by that laptop.

Perhaps for now. But if I was shelling out thousands of dollars for a new laptop, I'd go for the card that can future proof it better.

Dell generally uses GDDR3 in all their laptop GPUs. I have yet to see one running DDR2 VRAM.

Also if the 4870x2 comes with GDDR5 VRAM then you can expect it to have the upper hand in most games, except perhaps those optimised for a nVidia card. Think Crysis.

Most likely the theory would be proven true, as GDDR5 VRAM quadruples the nominal memory clock, does it not? And since benchmarks on a 4870x2 with GDDR3 VRAM place it on par with the GTX 280 SLI, theoretically speaking the higher clock rate would boost the performance of the former past that of the latter.

This post has been edited by Loki[D.d.G]: Oct 6 2009, 10:24 PM

The only prior laptop sporting XFired 4870s is the now discontinued Asus W90p. As far as I know, all the models shipped with GDDR3 versions of that card and hence no benchmarks on notebookcheck.net will accurately reflect the 4870x2 in the Alienware. If memory serves me right, then the m17x is the first laptop in the world to offer the 4870x2 in GDDR5 flavor.

Links? It's probably the i7 though, with its HT capabilities and all that.

And I wouldn't hedge my bets based on a synthetic benchmark. They have the propensity to be highly un-reflective of real world performance. And your score would only be as good as your system is optimized for that particular benchmark.

Not exactly what you requested, but you can check here for GT240 benchmarks and here for the GTX280. The m15x should perform more or less similarly with those systems as the biggest bottleneck in most cases tends to be the GPU, not the CPU.

Just a note though. If your friend is already willing to fork out so much money for a laptop, I'd advise him to take the second m15x configuration priced at RM6.6k. Getting the GT240 for a high end gaming laptop is a waste of money and I can foresee regret over that purchase, should it be made.

The HD5000 mobile series should be introduced in the first quarter of 2010. As for when OEMs would implement it in their notebooks is another matter altogether.
Source: Fudzilla.

There isn't any word on the mobile GT300 yet, but if I had to hazard a guess I'd say it'll be out in Q2/2010 at the earliest. The reasoning behind this is that nVidia has yet to even showcase their next gen desktop series GPUs.

But when you take into consideration most notebook OEMs do a refresh around late summer/early autumn, both the GT300 and HD5000 could appear in notebooks simultaneously. Just a guesstimate.

Not really. What he meant is that the fabrication plant for 40nm GPU wafers has a very poor yield. No wafers means no GPU.

Yeah that. TSMC is the one of the fabrication outfits that ATI/AMD rely on for their GPU wafers. Since they have such a low yield, ATI is currently facing a huge wafer shortage and thus even desktop GPUs are hard to come by. Maybe not in Malaysia, but in the States, the shortage is painfully apparent.

This may not be the right thread, but I stumbled upon news of the first Mobility Radeon in the wild to be tested. Read about it here

Credits to Fudzilla

Bear in mind it is a mid range card and is using beta drivers. I would expect the final release to perform somewhat better.

Unfortunately, you have a woefully misconstrued understanding of Intel's Hyper Threading technology. The only applications that will be able to make use of all logical cores, i.e. all the threads on each core, would be those that are specifically written to take advantage of Hyper Threading. If it isn't, then even if you run a game such as GTA IV, which is really happy with quad cores, Arrandale processors would still be running as duals.

That depends on which processor you are referring to.

What on earth is that supposed to mean? One laptop running two different GPUs?

But with the increasing number of console ports, there has been a slight shift in the whole dual vs quad core thing.

One thing remains though, games seem absolutely partial to high clocks

Actually the number of shader cores/stream processors for both are similar. But ATI and nVidia just do the math differently.

If you divide the number of shader cores in an ATI card by five, you'll get the nVidia equivalent and vice versa

This post has been edited by Loki[D.d.G]: Feb 5 2010, 07:20 AM