Conclusion
We’ve seen how two Mobility Radeon HD 5870s generally outperform a single GeForce GTX 480M, but a chart of the average performance difference will further prove the point.
Eurocom’s X1800 Leopard is the first notebook we’ve seen to approach mid-priced gaming desktop standards in 3D performance, slamming the runner-up GTX 480M. Nearly as impressive is that two Mobility Radeon cards cost $189 less than a single 480M, while providing 43.5% more performance.
We probably could have guessed this six months ago, but the GF100 isn't really a GPU you want in a mobile system, even cut down to 352 CUDA cores and running at 425 MHz. Of course, the company recently unveiled a more complete GeForce 400M family composed of GF104, GF106, and GF108 GPUs. We've seen GF104 and GF106 improve Nvidia's position against AMD on the desktop. Perhaps those same derivative GPUs will help lend the company's mobile parts better performance, more conservative thermal properties, and lower cost, too.
Our special thanks goes to Mark Bialic of Eurocom for making the comparison of two vastly-different graphics configurations possible from the same notebook platform.
