NVIDIA® GeForce® GT 555M 3GB graphics with Optimus???

[jimmyjam_85]

Hey all,
Im going to be purchasing a dell X17, and a friend of mine suggested not getting some features i wanted and told me to pay 150$ extra to get the upgraded vid card NVIDIA® GeForce® GT 555M 3GB graphics with Optimus

The one that is standard is NVIDIA® GeForce® GT 550M 1GB graphics with Optimus

In my mind an upgrade of 150 to a vid card should provide substantial improvements.

Im having trouble finding benchmarks and stuff on the difference in the cards. Im not very experienced in vid cards either... and was simply looking for other peoples opinions. i cant beleive this has dedicated 3GB, so any info would be useful. Thanks

[Baka]

If you have the money to spare, why not ._. If you're on a strict budget, then I don't think so. Who cares if it's 3GB dedicated memory. 1GB is plenty enough for whatever we need now :x

Not exactly sure about performance difference but GT 555M is about as strong as the old 9800M GTX isn't it? ._.

[rjbg84]

What was his reasoning on getting the 3gb version over the 1gb one...how much did it come up to??? Because if it made over $1400, you were better off with an Envy 17 3Dor any comparable sager with a better card...

[svl7]

I'd expect a certain performance boost of the 555 over the 550, but I haven't seen any benches so far.

555m has 144 cuda cores vs 96 on the 550m and also the memory bus is faster. I guess with a little overclock the 555m isn't that bad.

Both cards have DDR3 RAM, so the bigger memory bandwith of the 555m will be useful imo.

[DJ_Pawel]

The 3GB memory has to be a typo, not even desktop cards have that much memory.

*Edit:

GeForce GT 555M Specs

Model GeForce GT 555M
Interface PCIe 2.0 x16
Max memory 1536 MB
Max core clock 590 MHz
Max memory clock 1800 MHz
Max bandwidth 43.2 GB/s
SLI no

[Karamazovmm]

the gt555m is the same chip as the gt 445m that was offered in the xps17 pre refresh, its actually better than the abused gt 425m gt 435m gt 525m gt 540m and gt 550m, which are the same chip overclocked again and again.

you guys are right the 3g and 1g wont offer him no improvements, since the card wont benefit due to lower power of the processor. Now if you were talking about 1920*1080 and higher with more powerful processor like the gtx 570 and 6900 desktop version you were going to see the difference, outside that, just a market gimmick

[jimmyjam_85]

If you have the money to spare, why not ._. If you're on a strict budget, then I don't think so. :x

I have extra to spare, just want to make sure its worthwhile... Id rather spend the 150 and upgrade something to something better a year or two from now... rather than spend the 150 more now and not really see much improvement.

What was his reasoning on getting the 3gb version over the 1gb one...how much did it come up to??? Because if it made over $1400, you were better off with an Envy 17 3Dor any comparable sager with a better card...

The entire system is only around 950. I think he is pretty nieve and just figures it is a huge upgrade because it says "3GB". He basically wants me to not get a Blue ray player and pay extra to get this card.

I feel like 150 extra for that card is alot, considering i could improve other stuff like processor and ram for that much.

[Karamazovmm]

if gaming is a priority the gpu upgrade is going to make more sense.

[jimmyjam_85]

the gt555m is the same chip as the gt 445m that was offered in the xps17 pre refresh, its actually better than the abused gt 425m gt 435m gt 525m gt 540m and gt 550m, which are the same chip overclocked again and again.

you guys are right the 3g and 1g wont offer him no improvements, since the card wont benefit due to lower power of the processor. Now if you were talking about 1920*1080 and higher with more powerful processor like the gtx 570 and 6900 desktop version you were going to see the difference, outside that, just a market gimmick

interesting, thank you. The processor is
"2nd generation Intel® Core™ i7-2630QM processor 2.00 GHz with Turbo Boost 2.0 up to 2.90 GHz [Included in Price]"

I figured it wouldn't provide meaningful improvements... especially since i mainly play SC2.

Would it be safe to say that if i wanted to have significant improvement i would just have to go up a tier in price... say to the 1300-1500 range?

[Karamazovmm]

processors have a lesser improvement in game than most people think, and since this is a poor card to fit in a 17'', you are going to be first gpu strained than cpu strained