GeForce GTX 580M SLI Vs. Radeon HD 6990M CrossFire
A flagship graphics launch is bound to fail unless it's the fastest game in town. Well, both AMD and Nvidia say their respective juggernauts have that title. Clearly, only one company can be right. Is the Radeon HD 6990M or GeForce GTX 580M quicker?
Installing New Mobile Graphics Cards
Before we move on to the upgrade process, here's an older shot that should give you a feel for what's happening inside the X7200 chassis.
One of the three hard drive bays is found above the battery, while the other two are adjacent to it. Eurocom offers a custom-manufactured bracket to support a fourth hard drive in the optical drive bay.
The CPU and chipset share one complete cooler, while each graphics card gets a cooler of its own. Today’s conversion did not require the removal of the CPU cooler.
Hardware swaps don’t get much easier than this, with four screws holding each fan to its heatsink and four screws holding each heatsink to its graphics module.
With the heatsinks out of the way, we find two screws holding each graphics module in place. Removing these two screws allows each module to be tipped upward, away from the motherboard, and pulled from its slot.
Note that even though MXM standards were originally developed by Nvidia, Eurocom worked extensively with AMD to develop these Radeon HD 6990M parts in the appropriate format.
Though the heatsinks appear almost identical, differences in the height of certain voltage regulator components compelled Eurocom to modify the version intended to mount to the AMD boards. Eurocom includes two of the Nvidia-specific sinks in its GeForce GTX 580M upgrade kit. Also included are replacement screws, the GeForce GTX 580M modules themselves, and the mandatory SLI bridge.
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The SLI bridge wraps around the back of the left (master) card, its ends clipping to the white connectors on the right edge of each card using push-on connectors.
Assembly is the reverse of disassembly.
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burnley14 I'm amazed that this product even exists. The market for people willing to pay $7k for a behemoth gaming laptop has to be pretty miniscule.Reply -
decembermouse Come on, AMD, I've seen too many articles like this declaring Nvidia's new solution to be the superior one. We know that AMD's cards tend to be more power-efficient, but that only goes so far for some people. Keep that advantage certainly, but become more competitive with overall performance as well.Reply -
aznshinobi Do you really need this much performance in a laptop, I curious. A GTX 560M could run most games on medium-high anyways (on a laptop) those laptops run about $1100, the saved money could get you a beast SB-E or BD comp and then some left for the college fund.Reply -
Crashman aznshinobiDo you really need this much performance in a laptop, I curious. A GTX 560M could run most games on medium-high anyways (on a laptop) those laptops run about $1100, the saved money could get you a beast SB-E or BD comp and then some left for the college fund.Do you really think so? Because 1920x1080 seems to be a fairly popular resolution for 17" notebooks, and a single GTX 580M appears barely-adequate for medium-settings at that resolution. Well, maybe a single HD 6990M would do. That's why the article suggested the HD 6990M might be a top solution for slightly smaller notebooks, aka "normal sized" 17" notebooks.Reply -
Crashman iam2thecrowe377W lol, that needs a big ass AC Adaptor!Remember that's input wattage FOR the adapter. The output was STILL less than 300W. These high-capacity power bricks are far from being 80-Plus Gold rated!Reply -
Todd Sauve CrashmanDo you really think so? Because 1920x1080 seems to be a fairly popular resolution for 17" notebooks, and a single GTX 580M appears barely-adequate for medium-settings at that resolution. Well, maybe a single HD 6990M would do. That's why the article suggested the HD 6990M might be a top solution for slightly smaller notebooks, aka "normal sized" 17" notebooks.Reply
This entire article is eminently STUPID! Who is going to spend that kind of money on a notebook simply so they can play games on it?
And is there a human being on this planet that can make use of a resolution like 1920x1080 on a 17" notebook screen in order to play games?
It is little wonder that the rest of the world finds us degenerate when we will indulge ourselves with toys like this, and at such a scandalous price, while millions of our fellow human beings are simply starving to death as we speak ... ;(