Introduction and Specs

Looking at an NVIDIA gaming GPU but can’t decide on the GeForce Go 7900 GTX or the GS? We pit two similarly configured Dell XPS M1710 laptops against each other to test everything from performance to power consumption to see which GPU you should get.

Back in April of this year, NVIDIA made headlines with the announcement of the GeForce Go 7900 GTX and Go 7900 GS. While neither of these new mobile GPUs included any new features that weren’t seen on the GeForce Go 7800 series, the Go 7900 GTX and GS offered nice performance bumps from the previous iteration. However, in writing that preview, I was a bit puzzled at the lack of benchmarks that typically accompanied a product launch. At the time we had nothing to go but NVIDIA’s product description and some third party benchmarks.

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Now that you can easily get your hands on NVIDIA’s latest mobile graphics chip, the availability of the GTX and GS simultaneously creates a predicament for consumers — which GPU do you get? On one hand the GeForce Go 7900 GTX is the fastest configuration you can get, but it is also more expensive than the GS model. The Go 7900 GS is attractive in price, but how much slower is it compared to the GTX model and is that sacrifice worth it?

In this article we will take a close examination of these two mobile GPUs comparing notes on power consumption, operating temperature, and of course performance in applications and games.

At the time of announcement in April, this is how the line-up of NVIDIA’s mobile GPUs looked:

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But taking a closer look at the two models we can see that the GeForce Go 7900 GTX has 8 more shader ALUs, an extra Geometry processor, and a higher core and memory clock frequencies than the GeForce Go 7900 GS.

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For more information on the features of the GeForce Go 7900 graphics processor, check out our quick write-up for all the basics.

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