160M vs 260M vs Mobility 4650

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blade12

Limp Gawd
Joined
Dec 29, 2005
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As the title says, how do those 3 mobile videocards compare with each other? I am in the market for a new laptop. I have a few laptops that I can trying to filter out, and I cannot find any reviews on the 160M and 260M. I believe this is probably the best place to post this question. Just a simple ranking between the 3 performance-wise will suffice.

For the hell of it, lets even throw in the 240M (I assume the 240M is a weaker version of the 260M).
 
To speak in english, I am going to compare the mobile chips to their desktop brothers.

260m=9800gt in performance (112 shaders, 256 bit bus), is about 9% slower than the desktop version
160m= 9600 gt in performance (64 shaders, 256 bit bus)
240m= between the 9500gt and 9600gt in performance (has 48 shaders instead of 32 or 64 and a 128 bit bus like the 9500gt, one of the new 40nm parts), note the 240m is actually slower than the 160m

The mobility 4650 is the exact same core as the 4650 desktop chip, except it has been downclocked 9%, note though the 4650 in laptops almost always use ddr3 while it desktops almost everyone uses ddr2 and saves the ddr3 for the faster 4670. Should be about the same performance as the 160m in games where memory bandwidth is not important, in games where it is important the 160m will be faster due to the 256 bit bus.
 
I have been looking for a new laptop and it looked pretty clear about the video cards, but I had a question about the mobility 4650. When I was looking at laptops there was some question about how much memory the 4650 had on it.

I ran dxdiag and the available memory came up at over 3GB for the 4650. Is it using system memory somehow to supplement on board? I could see onboard memory for the card anywhere in the system. The spec card stated 512MB onboard (no specification of ddr type)

Are some of these cards buikld with 1GB and some with 512MB?

Thanks
 
Yup, GPUs will share the system memory in addition to having dedicated memory most of the time. My geforce 8400m says it has 768MB of available memory though it is clearly a 128MB card.

No doubt most of them will be 512MB at most, it's pretty rare to have 1GB of available memory for a laptop card (if its been done at all yet)
 
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