ATI Mobility 9400m or HD4650

[lancer]

Which is better, i know i should know but i really have no idea when it comes to mobile graphics cards.

And which desktop card would either be comparable to?

Does anyone have either one of these?

Newegg.com - SONY VAIO FW Series VGN-FW590FWB NoteBook Intel Core 2 Duo T9600(2.80GHz) 16.4" 6GB Memory DDR2 800 500GB HDD 7200rpm BD Combo ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4650 - Laptops / Notebooks

or

MacBook Pro - Apple Store (U.S.) 2.66ghz and up versions

I'm getting one next week, which would be better for gaming, the mac i would dual boot into windows 7 for gaming?

thanks

 

[roirraW "edor" ehT]

The ATI 4650 is "newer" than the nVidia 9400, plus I like ATI better than nVidia so I would go with the ATI. From looking at NewEgg (comparison of their best rated desktop closest matches to the 9400 and 4650), it looks like the 4650 supports DirectX 10.1 and the 9400 "only" DirectX 10. It also indicates that the 4650 has 320 stream processing units whereas the 9400 has 16. More is better . I know it doesn't show an OpenGL version for the 4650 but I guarantee that it does have that as well; they're just missing the information on NewEgg for this product.

Otherwise their specifications are fairly similar, although the 4650 has a slightly higher GPU speed. I don't know if any of these items don't apply to the mobile versions you're looking at. I suspect that desktop 4650 more closely matches the mobile version of the same than the 9400GT does the 9400m.

You might also be interested in ASUS best, HP worst for notebook reliability. I know we recently discussed this in another thread here Best Laptop to Buy at this Black Friday which you may also want to refer to as some people have a better opinion of HP than I do.

Good luck!

 

[roirraW "edor" ehT]

At GeForce 9 Series - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia and Comparison of AMD graphics processing units - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia I got the following information, FWIW:

http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AiN1hdbKRKHLdDczWUotSWZRR3pkSzNFbjZqcWwzdFE&hl=en

I took the information from both pages that pertain to those two chipsets and rearranged them in Excel to most easily compare the two, and then uploaded it to Google Docs for public viewing; just follow that link.

 

[Petros]

Notebookcheck: AMD ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4650
Notebookcheck: NVIDIA GeForce 9400M (G)

The 4650 seems to be several orders of magnitude better.

 

[roirraW "edor" ehT]

FYI I just noticed the subject title is incorrect "ATI Mobility 9400m or HD4650" instead of "nVidia GeForce 9400m or ATI Mobility Radeon HD4650".

 

[roirraW "edor" ehT]

I also notice that the 2.66GHz and up models say "NVIDIA GeForce 9400M + 9600M GT". Looks like info about this is at: Does "NVIDIA GeForce 9400M + 9600M GT with 256MB" mean that I get two graphics cards? - Mac Forums.

 

[Petros]

Notebookcheck: NVIDIA GeForce 9600M GT
Interesting. The 9600M is definitely a lot more beefy than the 9400m, although it still doesn't catch up to the 4650.

 

[roirraW "edor" ehT]

Wow, it sure is a heck of a lot better. Humongous difference, although as you said, still not a full match for the 4650.