Anyone tried the Nvidia 8600 Mobility?

[inthere]

I'm forced to use a Macbook Pro for business reasons and when I 1st switched, I noticed a HUGE drop in graphics performance after switching from a Geforce 7600M card to the Ati X1600 that was in the Macbook.

I've read several reviews that say the desktop version of the 7600 was faster than the 8600 desktop version, and I was wondering if the same was true for laptop versions. Anyone tried both? I've been waiting over a year for crap Apple to upgrade their graphics cards, and now they may be coming out with something that may not even be faster than the X1600.

I H8 Apple............

 

[rodney_ws]

I'm not the biggest Apple fan in the world (understatement), but I can't really knock their choice for a GPU. What other mobile GPU offers the feature-set of the 8600? Even though I haven't seen any benchmarks, I think it would be pretty easy to extrapolate its performance by looking at the performance of the non-mobile 8600s. With 32 stream processors, the GeForce 8600M GT matches up pretty closely to the 8600 GT desktop card except that it has a lower core clock as well as a lower shader clock. So just have a look at some 8600 GT benchmarks and shave off a few percentage points.

 

[lostandwandering]

I agree with Rodney, I'm no apple fan either. According to notebookcheck.com, the 8600m GT performs about the same as a go 7900GS, at least in the 3dmark sector. They don't have any numbers based on games. As far as the (desktop) 7600GT being as fast as the (desktop) 8600GT, read this: 8600GT vs 7600GT. The only game the 8600GT wins at is Supreme Commander. The fact of the matter is the 7600GT was an incredible card considering it was a mid-range card. It was beating the X1800 when it came out which is why ATi was forced to create the X1650. The X1600 did a terrible job of keeping up. The 8600mGT will be better than the X1600.

 

[rodney_ws]

I believe the 8600M does exceptionally well in 3DMark (relative to its price) but in nothing else... but I'm too lazy to look up numbers to validate that thought.