Nvidia and Alienware have a history of cooperating to build chunky laptops with beastly graphics processing power, and that partnership rages on in 2011 with Nvidia’s latest “fastest notebook GPU ever.” The GTX 580M has supplanted the once-supreme GTX 485M and boasts six times the tesselation performance of AMD’s Radeon 6970M, or so says Nividia. The GTX 580M pumps out 1080p graphics with 384 CUDA cores, a clock speed that tops out at 1240MHz and room for 2GB of GDDR5 memory.
The Nvidia 580M and its companion card, the slightly weaker GTX 570M, are available in Alienware’s M17x and M18x notebooks. Read on for the full specs on the pair of mobile GPUs and the Alienware notebooks they intend to push along to mobile gaming success.
The pair of GTX cards support the works when it comes to Nvidia features:
- 3D Vision (for 3D on your laptop)
- 3DTV Play (for 3D on your TV!)
- SLI (for double power!)
- Optimus GPU switching (for prolonged battery life)
- Verde notebook drivers (for “rock-solid stability”)
- DirectX 11 (for Battlefield 3)
- PhysX (for physics)
The 570M offers a 20 percent performance gain over its predecessor, and both cards are about 20 percent more power efficient than Nvidia’s last round of top shelf mobile graphics. Raw statistics:
| GeForce GTX 580M | GeForce GTX 570M |
| CUDA Cores | 384 | 336 |
| Clock speed | 1270MHz | 1150MHz |
| Memory | 2GB GDDR5 | 1.5GB or 3GB GDDR5 |
| Memory clock speed | 1500MHz | 1500MHz |
| Memory bandwidth | 96 GB/sec | 72 GB/sec |
The Alienware M17x runs on an Intel Core i7 processor, up to 16GB of DDR3 RAM, and offers a GTX 580M as its most expensive graphics options. The M18x produce page doesn’t look like it’s been updated as of this writing, but it will offer the GTX 570M in single and dual-card configurations.
source: http://www.tested.com/news/nvidia-refreshes-mobile-graphics-with-gtx-580m/2529/
