Why does Acer do this?

[spadefoot]

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834215007

Great looking new machine, been waiting for the new SB-based laptops with newer, upper end graphics!

Core I7 2630QM? check!
1080P LED? check!
Plenty of HD? check!
Plenty of Ram? check!
Radeon 6850? check!
2GB of GDDR3?!?! As far as I can tell, this will totally strangle the performance of this GPU.

Why would they do this? Everything else on this machine looks like a good mid-upper or upper-mid gaming laptop, and then they strangle it in its crib with low bandwidth memory.

 

[xXaNaXx]

one word: cost

 

[spadefoot]

one word: cost

Yes, yes, but it seems like a very small savings for such a large hit in performance. Based on a little (admittedly) back of the envelope math, I'd say the end change in cost would be less than 50.00 probably more around 25-35. I know, when you're building 25000 of the things, every dollar counts, but if you were looking for a gaming laptop, you wouldn't spend 1400-1500 on this one b/c of the gddr3, and if you aren't looking for a gaming laptop, you wouldn't spend 1400-1500 on ANY laptop, in all likelihood.

It just seems like a particularly lousy place to cut a corner.

 

[xXaNaXx]

you can't look at just the cost of the VRAM itself, and that's not really the cost i was talking about. for every change a manufacturer makes to a system, (if they're any good) they have to do more R&D to test out that configuration, they have to train their support employees to handle each change, re-tool some of their assembly lines to support the new parts, etc., etc. those costs all stack up.

it's one of the reasons GM got into so much trouble...instead of streamlining their organization and basically "modularizing" their business (using the exact same parts across multiple platforms), they decided to have too much going on, and they couldn't sustain it.

i'm not saying that a simple switch to GDDR5 is going to bankrupt Acer, but there's still other extra costs to consider, besides just the cost of the memory modules.

 

[spadefoot]

Yes, there are integration cots, engineering, etc. The number I quoted was from a quick comparison a 2gb gddr3 Nvidia 250 and a 2gb gddr5 nvidia 460 (off newegg), the total difference was about $50.00. Given that the 460 probably costs a bit more as a GPU than the 250, it's safe to assume that the total cost, integration, testing, etc would be in that neighborhood, so no more than $50.00 a unit, probably less. Not saying it's not a cost issue, just saying that it seems like a minor cost cutting measure that really hurts performance without really saving much money.