Alienware's M18x, Part 1: NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 580M in SLI
by Dustin Sklavos on October 3, 2011 11:50 AM ESTGaming Performance
Before we even get to the results, I'll tell you right now...most of these are going to feel fairly academic. They do even to me. Gaming on a GPU in the class of the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 580M or AMD Radeon HD 6970M/6990M honestly makes my desktop and its GeForce GTX 580 feel at least a little overkill. You really are dealing with desktop-level gaming performance at this point, and our results with the M18x will attest to that. With a 1080p maximum resolution (unless you use external displays), we can't strain the GPUs enough to really make them sweat.
You can see our "high" present isn't a big deal for even a single NVIDIA GeForce GTX 580M, oftentimes allowing higher performance than the AMD Radeon HD 6970M even while stepping up the resolution one notch. There are also a few games where we start to hit CPU limits (e.g. DiRT 2 and StarCraft II), though for the most part there's still a separation between the 900p and 1080p SLI results. Not bad at all. Now let's make the SLI work for its supper.
At our "ultra" preset it's really going to depend on the games you play. For games like Metro 2033 or STALKER, the extra GPU means the difference between a smooth gaming experience and a stuttering slideshow. Other games however already have largely enough power on tap, and the GTX 580M for the most part surpasses a Radeon HD 6970M that was still perfectly fine. Meanwhile, CrossFired 6970Ms and SLI'ed GTX 580Ms trade blows at the top of the charts and Left 4 Dead 2 and DiRT 2 seem to be largely CPU limited on the slower i7s.
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Meaker10 - Monday, October 3, 2011 - link
Not when you unlock the higher core voltage, bump up the core speed to GTX560Ti speeds =Dbennyg - Wednesday, October 5, 2011 - link
At least the XM offers overclocking. The 2820/2860 compared with 2720/2760 just offers a couple hundred MHz for hundreds extra... and I challenge ANYONE to feel the difference a few % in CPU speed makes.However very few laptops use the HM67 chipset which is required to OC with multipliers, most (like my P150HM) have HM65 which can't. So unless you're willing to fork out for a top end model it is meaningless to you, but not to those who are the target market
Amrosorma - Monday, October 3, 2011 - link
Would it be possible to get a quick and dirty look at how the notebook performs with the Battlefield 3 open beta?I imagine that's the game everyone is wondering about with regards to performance.
AmdInside - Monday, October 3, 2011 - link
Agreed. As soon as I saw this, jumped straight to the Gaming Performance section in hopes of finding BF3 benchmarks.JarredWalton - Monday, October 3, 2011 - link
The BF3 beta is pretty bad in terms of working properly. When there are all sorts of bugs (falling through the world floor, for instance), I'd wager performance won't be optimal either. We're planning to add the full BF3 release to our mobile benchmarks when it becomes available, along with Rage, Skyrim, and some other updates, but that will probably be another two months before we make the switch.Stuka87 - Monday, October 3, 2011 - link
Yes the beta is buggy. But I would have loved to see an unoffcial benchmark. Doesnt have to be in the graphics. But just a line or two that says "I tried the BF3 Beta, and FRAPs reported these results with these settings". Just so we would have an idea as to if this machine would run BF3.jrs77 - Monday, October 3, 2011 - link
C'mon, for that amount of money a matte screen should be standard. :facepalm:BTW... why are glossy screens even manufactured anymore these days? They should get dumped alltogether.
Darkstone - Monday, October 3, 2011 - link
Because some people, including me, like glossy screens for the deep white they provide? I don't like matte because of the noise.JojoKracko - Wednesday, October 5, 2011 - link
Damn right. Matte should be standard on laptops. Ban the glossy crap. I would never pay this much for a laptop with a glossy screen. (sadly) I'll be sticking with single GPU MSI laptops.yelped - Monday, October 3, 2011 - link
Although you mentioned that Metro 2033 is a un-optimized title, you failed to mention that Crysis 2 with DX11 is even worse. Check out this article for more details. http://techreport.com/articles.x/21404&source=...