IT DIDN‘T TAKE long for Nvidia to announce its first mobile GeForce 500-series part and the GeForce GT 540M is what brings its mobile GPU’s forward a generation, or does it? Considering that pretty much all of the specifications are the same as the GeForce GT 435M, bar some adjustments in clock speed, this seems to be yet another rebrand to please its OEM partners, albeit this time it appears to be a China exclusive.
With the mobile GeForce 400-series barely out the gates and only just now appearing in notebooks, we’re not quite sure we’re following Nvidia’s logic here. But then again, when did logic ever play into it? So what we’re looking at here is a 672MHz 96 shader part with a shader clock of 1344MHz. That’s a small improvement over the GeForce GT 435M, but so small that it’s unlikely to have any real impact on performance.
Add to that up to 1.5GB of DDR3 or GDDR5 graphics memory with a 128-bit interface and clock speeds of up to 900MHz and this looks like the ideal kind of mobile GPU to stick in a consumer focused 15-inch mass market model. The GT 540M does of course support all of the usual Nvidia stuff such as Optimus, CUDA, 3D Vision and PhysX and yes, it does support DirectX 11.
According to the press release, the GT 540M is currently only on sale in China with Acer as Nvidia’s major partner there, but the same press release states that the GT 540M will become available worldwide at some stage next month. Presumably this will happen when Intel launches its mobile Sandy Bridge platform code named Huron River, although at this time it’s unclear who Nvidia’s launch partners will be.S|A
Lars-Göran Nilsson
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