NVIDIA GeForce 500M: Refreshing the 400M

Just four months ago, NVIDIA released their top-to-bottom 400M lineup. Since the announcement, it took about a month but we then got the ASUS G73Jw (460M), Dell XPS L501x (420M), Clevo B5130M (425M), and ASUS N53JF (425M) in rapid succession. All of these were decent offerings, with a nice blend of performance and features at reasonable prices. Of course, Core 2010 products are last year’s news, and with the launch of Sandy Bridge the whole industry is moving to 2nd Generation Intel Core Processors (aka Core 2011). With an improved IGP threatening low-end discrete GPUs, what better time for NVIDIA to refresh their mobile parts?

Unlike the desktop GTX 580, the new 500M mobile parts are all using existing architectures; there are even a couple of new 400M parts to round things out. The major change is that we’re getting higher clock speeds, both on the GPU cores/shaders as well as the memory. In a few cases we also have additional shaders available, as well as clearing up some potentially confusing part names (really!). Read on for details on this year’s NVIDIA laptop offerings—coming soon to a Sandy Bridge laptop near you!

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