New Mobile GeForce Go Graphics

Brent Kupras writes "NVIDIA just launched a whole bunch of GeForce Go 7xxx graphics cards for notebooks. There is a Go 7900 GTX, a Go 7900 GS, a Go 7600 and a Go 7300. The GTX version looks like just a faster copy of the old Go 7800 GTX. There are also a few benchmark results of these new chips against the older NVIDIA chips and ATI's chips."

Re:Enough power to run Aero Glass

[Blazeix]

I have the NVidia Quadro FX Go1400 in a Dell M70 Laptop, and I can run Windows Vista Beta fine. True, I only have a batter life of about an hour when I'm doing anything graphic-intensive, but it can still run all of the most recent games.

Dell's Latitude Line

[SlashdotOgre]

I hope Dell considers offering some of these cards in their upcoming Core Duo Latitudes. Currently the D610 & D810 are only offered with Intel's integrated card or a Radeon X300 (which uses "Hypermemory" basically borrowing RAM from the system like the Intel card). The X300 unfortunately has some lockup problems with Xgl in Linux, so having the option to go nVidia would be great.

Re:Drivers

[Snover]

Problem solved. [laptopvideo2go.com]

Re:Drivers

[sloose]

You might want to add support to your card manually by editing the nv4_disp.inf file (check your setup folder), before you install the latest drivers.

You can get a preformatted inf file here [guru3d.com].

If you want to do it yourself, in windows go into device manager and view the properties of your video card. Then go into the details tab and select hardware ids in the dropdown list. You can then use the last value displayed and add it among the other hardware id's in the nv4_disp.inf file. For most unrecognized cards, this requires adding two lines of text to the file.

Re:Drivers

[LEgregius]

Starting with the 7800 GO, nvidia is directly supporting the GO chipsets with their drivers, which is good given that Dell like to never update them.

Re:Kidding? Way more than enough for Aero Glass

[MojoStan]

Got it. Similarly, no one plays Direct X 9 games with a GeForceFX 5200 (a low-end DX9 GPU).

Vista is still in beta, though. When Vista is complete, I'd be really surprised if a GeForce Go 6200 with enough RAM couldn't run Aero Glass with acceptable performance.

Re:External Graphics Cards?

[MindPrison]

I would happily pay $300-400 for an external graphics card (USB or otherwise), that I can upgrade at will and use with my other computers. Is it technically impossible to do something like this?

Nothing is technically impossible to do really, it's always a matter of time. But at the moment it's not likely because of transfer-speeds.

Have you noticed the difference between SHARED memory and ONBOARD memory? Those laptops with onboard memory are WAY faster at handling 3D because the 3D card itself can access the memory directly without having to transfer content via bus/cpu/standard-ram. If you had an external graphics card it'd work just fine with Video-playback and such, even at pretty high speeds, heck...you could even playback HDTV 1920 without jitter - BUT 3D graphics with lots and LOTS of textures are an entirely different game. Imagine that you have several 1024 x 1024 bitmaps that are RAW (uncompressed) and imagine how many of these you need to build a real-time city. Now we're cooking. Before you know it..you realize why the graphics card-ads on the box always brag about their hefty GIGABYTE per frame transfer speeds, this speed is vital because you need to transfer such HUGE amount of textures realtime to the various polygons and you couldn't possibly fit them all on the card, so you need to do background-transfers while using the On-board memory on the GFX-card itself. Getting complicated? Well - it is! And that's why.

Then you might ask - why don't they make onboard GFX-cards interchangeable. well - that has been tried too, but you're on a laptop mate! This means you'd be dragging the thing around half the planet and anything Wiggly that can potentially move and get disconnected during transfer should be avoided at all cost, so most of them dropped that idea (very VERY wisely so!) I've had such a machine itself, it got warm...the GFX card failed on the laptop simply because it got too hot and the mini-PCI connectors got heated...and if you remember your classroom physics you KNOW that METAL EXPANDS....and vice versa when cooled down....bad idea!

Are there any future solutions for this you might ask? Of course there is, you could potentially have it today if your laptop have the bus for it, but you also need a ton of customers wanting this. So ...I don't think that will happen - after all ...you're on a LAPTOP...you bought it to be portable....and if you want to drag along a huge powerful graphics card, external Audigy and a gazillion other parts..you might as well pack it all in a desktop pc ;) seriously.

Re:I want a Turion + NVidia + Linux laptop

[scenestar]

You want an asus A6k or an ASUS z92k.

http://www.infosyncworld.com/news/n/5970.html [infosyncworld.com]

its a bit old, but it runs debian like a breeze.