AVADirect's Clevo B5130M: GeForce GT 425M with a 15.6" 1080p Chaser

Gaming Performance: Medium and High Presets

Now that we know the 96-shader NVIDIA GeForce GT 425M has room to breathe at 1366x768, let's see what happens when we start bumping up game settings. Our medium preset makes all of these games a lot more attractive, but may also bring the gap in memory speed out into the open.

Left 4 Dead 2 is the odd man out here; everything else shows a minor to moderate increase in performance over the 420M and general parity with the 335M. Unfortunately, the GT 425M still spends most of its time either nipping at the venerable ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4650's heels or outright eating its dust. The HD 5650 is pretty heavily CPU-bound here, saddled with AMD's slow Phenom II P920 processor, but under better circumstances would probably surpass the 425M. That's not entirely fair, though: the 425M is positioned closer to NVIDIA's entry level than the 4650 and 5650 are.

Let's see what happens when we kick things up to our "High" preset. It's here that you'll also get an idea of just how entry-level the GT 420M and 425M really are, and the massive gulf between the low and the high ends of mobile graphics.

At these higher settings and the 1600x900 resolution, the GeForce GT 425M powering the Clevo B5130M quickly loses steam, rendering most of our games unplayable. That's to say nothing of bumping up to the notebook's native 1080p resolution, where none of the games are playable. Again, though, some perspective here: the GeForce GT 425M is intended as more of a budget part, and NVIDIA doesn't really bring anything to the table much slower in their 400M series. (Yes, the G 415M would be slower, but we have yet to see anyone ship a laptop using the part.)