At CeBIT, Asus was showing a prototype (keyboard not working) of its forthcoming gamer laptop: the G74SX 3D. It uses a Core i7-2630QM processor and an NVIDIA graphics card, with a blanked out model number. A quick visit to the control panel however, revealed a GeForce GTX 560M (a model which doesn’t officially exist) with spec:
This mobile graphics card is based on a GF116 GPU, a new revision of the GF106 which equips the GeForce GT 555M as well as the GeForce GTX 460M. Compared to the GTX 460M, the GPU clock is up 15% while memory bandwidth is down 33%: though the GDDR5 is identical, the bus is down from 192 to 128 bits. Note that given the NVIDIA architecture, the GF106/116 can’t exploit the 192-bit bus to best effect, which should mean that the reduction in bus size has less of an impact than you might think on first analysis.
Broadly speaking, the GTX 560M is thus very similar to the desktop GeForce GTS 450 which will soon be replaced by the GeForce GTX 550 Ti, which is also based on the GF116. NVIDIA is probably waiting for the launch of the GeForce GTX 550 Ti to launch the GeForce GTX 560M (shouldn’t be too long a delay).
