Performance, Availability, Pricing and Final Thoughts
Performance
Of course, users who are buying laptops with this kind of GPU are going to be at LEAST as interested in the performance as they are in the power management and battery usage. Though I did not receive any systems to test for our own benchmarks, NVIDIA supplied us with some numbers comparing their 7800 to the previous Go 6800 flagship product. As we are not seeing any competing products in these results, we can be at least reasonably assured of their validity.
The two test systems are nearly identical, but the Go 7800 system used a 2.13 GHz Dothan processor to the Go 6800’s 2.0 GHz.
Gaming performance took a leap of anywhere from 40% to 80% in these results. Somewhat more impressive, along with that extra GPU power, is the INCREASE in the battery life of the test system in productivity and DVD testing.
Availability and Pricing
As I mentioned in my introduction, NVIDIA not only wanted to produce the fastest mobile GPU on the market, they also wanted to get it to the users quickly. NVIDIA is sticking to their new mantra here, as numerous vendors are going to be selling systems based on the G70 mobile core TODAY.
There are 10 vendors and models on this list that have availability today or very soon. Notice that this is not merely a US release either, but a strong international representation is included as well. This release will only include Intel based notebooks, which is a bit disappointing, but the Dothan core processors are proving to be quite competitive gaming processors.
But what will this new technology cost you? The only place we have seen prices listed before the publication of this article was Dell.com, where you can configure a system with the Go 7800 GTX for a $349 premium over the Go 6800 Ultra. That is a pretty significant price differential considering how easy it was for Dell to implement the 7800 GTX over the 6800 Ultra; after all they have the same thermal design and packaging. Hopefully we’ll see the other ODMs selling their parts more aggressively priced later today.
Final Thoughts
It looks like NVIDIA has yet another winner on their hands with the GeForce Go 7800 GTX GPU. We eagerly await getting our hands on some of these systems. ATI still hasn’t released their next generation desktop GPU and now they are behind in the mobile market as well. NVIDIA seems to be on a company-wide binge of good products and good fortune that is propelling them further out of reach of the competition.
Note: I have included the complete specs of the G70M for those interested below.
