As we come close to the end of the done and dusted Kepler based GeForce GTX 600m GPU series for laptops, which did perform well to the say the least, but left us wanted more on power efficiency and heat. The situation that stands as of now is that we still cannot recommend a laptop for high-end gaming. The solution is just not practically viable. Portability does take a toll on gaming, you cannot imagine having a good 1 hour+ session of Crysis 3 while on battery-power of a powerful gaming laptop. Neither can you place it on your lap for prolonged hours due to the heat they generate when gaming.
A gaping void
Somehow, even the ever increasing influx of gaming laptops in the market, the buyers deserves a lot more. And we mean A LOT. And saying ‘deserve’ would be an understatement. The buyer’s a literally begging for more viable solutions. And even with all the effort being put in by chipset makers and laptop manufacturers/assemblers, the gaming laptop segment remains a huge void waiting to be filled, ironically.
Having said that, the long awaited Haswell is finally here in the form of Intel’s new processor lineup. So yes, there is something being sorted on the processor side. Haswell promises being more power efficient than 28 nanometer Kepler. Although it’s a mystery why NVIDIA’s next-gen GeForce GTX 700m series has taken the gamble of retaining the Kepler, even when the architecture is at the twilight of it’s career.
The Kepler lives on
But NVIDIA swears by its choice, and has shared good performance numbers of the GeForce GTX 700m series, which is meant to be paired with the newer Intel Haswells. Razer announced the Blade 14, which comes with a Haswell CPU and a dedicated GeForce GTX 765m GPU. Videos of the laptop show the machine running Crysis 3 at full settings, so the signs are good.
So far, the announced GPU lineup by NVIDIA looks like this:
Out these announced mGPUs, only the 710M and the 720M are Fermi based, as the Fermi architecture proves more efficient for the entry level segment.
Specifications of the Enthusiast lineup GPUs are given below.
The numbers above look promising. We see a steady increase in processor and memory clock speeds from the last generation, although we’re yet to see how this increase adds up to power efficiency. NVIDIA claims the performance boost from the previous generation averages out to 15%.
Getting to specifics, check this out.
The GTX 760M is about 30% faster than the previous generation, while the GTX 770M provides a huge 55% jump from the GTX 670M. That is a big jump. We suspect the GTX 770M, like its desktop brother, the GTX 770, uses the same architecture as the GTX 680m, only with increased clock speeds. This is only speculation though.
We’ve managed to dig out the OEM models accompanying the new series along with Intel’s Haswell lineup of CPUs. Intel’s hasn’t announced the specifics of its upcoming Haswell CPUs, so that information is not with us yet. So far, here are the laptop models announced:
Razor has already revealed specifications of the Blade Pro. MSI seems to be dishing out model high-end models itself. Clevo is the only one who’s announced the GeForce 780m in SLI. We’ll have to wait and see how this turns out, since that is a very power hungry setup. Two 780Ms in SLI should be drawing about 400-500Watts alone, and in laptop terms, that is heavy.
So far, these are the only details we have of the GeForce GTX 700M series, we will start receiving some review samples soon, which we will benchmark at the iLLOffice. Stay tuned to find out how these increase clock speeds translate to actual FPS improvements. According to the GTX 700M documentation sent to us by NVIDIA, they promise most latest games playable at full settings. No mention has been made about what anti-aliasing settings they are using though.
