NVIDIA GeForce GTX 480M, Fastest Notebook GPU Yet

Name: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 480M, Fastest Notebook GPU Yet - Page 2
Brand: NVIDIA

by Dave Altavilla — Tuesday, June 15, 2010, 10:30 AM EDT

Clevo D900F Externals and Internals

To say the Clevo D900F is a desktop replacement notebook would be an understatement. The machine is based on a 17.1-inch display and weighs in at nearly 12 pounds (11.9 to be exact) of pure badassedness. This notebook is really a desktop machine in notebook skins and is actually built upon Intel's X58 Express chipset and with a standard LGA 1366 CPU socket under the hood. It's bulky for sure and you can't stay untethered from the wall for very long, but if you really want your gaming rig to follow you around your domicile, this machine definitely serves up quality and performance.

The fit and finish of the D900F is excellent and it comes with a myriad of connectivity options including HDMI and mini-Display Port outputs, 4 USB 2.0 ports, eSATA, an Express Card slot, SD/SDHC Flash card slot and of course Gigabit Ethernet, 802.11n WiFi and modem networking capabilities. The D900F has a full sized keyboard with numpad, a spacious touchpad and high gloss, almost "urethane-like" finish to it that does attracts smears but polishes up easier than most notebooks with a quick swipe of a soft cloth.

Caution High Temperature Parts - Ya think?

Under this glossy exterior is where all the magic happens however and once the magic gets revved up you know keeping it all cool took some creative engineering. In this case, three barrel or "squirrel cage" fans, as they are commonly known, cool an elaborate network of copper heat pipes and fine-pitched finned radiator heatsinks. Then fans draw air in underneath the system and push it out over the heatsinks. The far right side assembly in the shot above is in place to cool the CPU, while the other two fans cool a pair of heatsinks/pipes that keep the GPU cool. With a 100 Watt TDP chip in a notebook, you need this sort of exotic cooling.

Left: GPU, Chipset, Core i7 - Center: NVIDA's Mammoth GeForce GTX 480M - Right: Intel X58 Chipset

What's perhaps even more surprising is that this GeForce GTX 480M MXM module came equipped with a full 2GB of GDDR5 memory on board. As you can see, the rest is a fairly organized and cleanly laid-out design, with X58 system controller and memory in the middle, feeding the two data-hungry beast processors to either side of them. Excuse the thermal paste on the Core i7 940 chip. We figured you've seen one of those before and we wanted to leave the application in tact.