If this is the case, it’s clearly a better idea to go with the cheaper model and upgrade later on, as no 500GB, 2.5-inch drive costs more than $200. Otherwise, they are both well equipped, with a quad-core Core i7 740QM at 1.73GHz, graphics provided by an Nvidia GTX285M GPU and 6GB of DDR3 RAM. In addition, the laptops come with USB 3.0 support.

At any rate, the company seems to have its sights firmly set on ubiquitous 3D functionality. In LG’s case, you might expect this to be mainly related to TVs, but they apparently have some input on laptops as well. They have announed three new 3D notebooks for the South Korean market, with prices about 20 percent higher than similar laptops without 3D capability, which might explain this sudden interest.

- With the availability of more 3D content, consumers are enjoying a new experience, and we think that’ll drive growth of the 3D computer market, Harrison Park from LG told clueless reporters.

LG hopes they can gain an advantage by betting heavily on 3D laptops now, says Reuters, probably without knowing that there’s already some tough competition since last year’s launch of Nvidia 3D Vision (included in laptops from several other manufacturers including Asus). But hats off to LG if they want to make a serious attempt–they do have the resources, but their estimates of a 20 % price increase is hopefully way off.

What this could mean for future gaming laptops is more power in smaller and/or thinner casings and 14-pound Alienware monsters could be a thing of the past. Of course, we have no idea when the rest of the major players on the market responds with equally innovative cooling solutions, but they should, and the developments will definitely be interesting to follow

In addition, the laptop has three DDR3 slots–allowing for a total of 12 gigs of RAM. In terms of storage, there are two hard drive bays in the MSI GT660, but there’s no word on RAID0 capability as of yet. One feature that seems to be returning from previous MSI gaming laptops is the overclocking feature that lets you boost the internal clocks by pushing a button above the keyboard. Another interesting new addition is a high-speed USB 3.0 port.

As a previous owner of an MSI gaming laptop my first reaction is that this is a major step forward, but we’ll wait for some benchmarks to surface before drawing any conclusions. The only thing lacking would be the latest mobile Nvidia GPU, the GTX 480M, but that might be remedied later on.

Acer was quick to launch a couple of 3D-capable laptops, but they were a bit too weak in the graphics department to qualify as gaming laptops. Asus, however, successfully adopted 3DVision in its G51J 3D laptop and coupled it with a graphics card powerful enough to cope with the latest games. Lenovo later followed - also with a decent graphics card that should be able to play most recent titles (remember that there’s some overhead for calculating 3D games).

Now the turn has come to Toshiba, which has just launched its Satellite A665 3D Edition, with what looks like very capable hardware. Just like Asus, Toshiba has also opted for an Nvidia 3D Vision kit with active shutter glasses to go along with the laptop’s 15-inch, 120Hz monitor. On the inside, the A665 is configurable with a quad-core Core i7 CPU, an Nvidia GeForce GTS 350M graphics card and a 12-cell (!) battery. Here are the rest of the specs for the Toshiba Satellite A665 3D Edition (some are most likely optional and come at a premium):

• 15.6-inch diagonal HD TruBrite™ LED Backlit widescreen display with 120Hz scan rate
• Intel Core i7-740QM quad core processor5 with TurboBoost technology
• NVIDIA GeForce GTS 350M with 1GB DDR3 discrete graphics memory
• NVIDIA 3D Vision™ kit with active shutter 3D glasses and emitter
• Blu-ray Disc™ Rewriteable (RE) and DVD SuperMulti drive with LabelFlash3
• Premium audio with harman/kardon? stereo speakers and Dolby Advanced Audio™
• Windows 7 Home Premium operating system
• 4GB DDR3 RAM
• 640GB hard drive
• 802.11b/g/n wireless⁹ and 10/100/1000 Ethernet
• Bluetooth? V2.1 + EDR (available on select models)
• Toshiba Hard Drive Impact Sensor
• TouchPad with Multi-touch Control
• 12-cell battery
• One eSATA/USB combo port with Toshiba USB Sleep-and-Charge and three USB 2.0 ports
• HDMI port
• Built-in Webcam with Toshiba Face Recognition
• Microphone input port with Toshiba Sleep-and-Music
• 5-in-1 Memory Card Reader and ExpressCard slots

The graphics card is still the same however; an Nvidia GeForce GT 335M, so there won’t be an overly noticeable increase in gaming performance, but overall system performance should be much improved thanks to the new HyperThreaded CPUs with two physical and four virtual cores.

This should make this tiny gaming laptop more suitable for everyday tasks as opposed to just gaming and make it a killer ultraportable for all kinds of uses. Nvidia’s Optimus technology is also included to provide instant power savings or improved graphics performance respectively by seamsessly switching between the aforementioned dedicated GPU and some integrated, standard issue crap from Intel. Intel’s low-voltage Core i5 and Core i7 are also equipped with the Turbo Boost feature that overclocks the CPUs on demand.

You can choose between a range of Core i5 and Core i7 CPUs, a couple of which are quad-core alternatives, and up to 8GB of 1333MHz DDR3 RAM. The hard drive bottleneck can be overcome with dual, uber-fast SSDs operating in RAID0, but if you don’t feel like spending half again the cost of the laptop, the same can be done with two 7,200rpm conventional hard drives. A base model of the ex-L 17 with the HD5870 starts at $1,899, and if you want all the bells and whistles it could set you back more than $5,000.

Source: Maingear.com

At long last: Now with 48x anti-aliasing

Several of the new features deal with the latest GeForce GTX 400 series though, which is still pretty scarce in all but the latest gaming laptops. Nvidia introduces support for OpenGL 4.0 and optimizes performance in several games including Aliens vs Predator, Crysis Warhead, Metro 2033 and Just Cause 2. Here are some other highlights:

• Support for OpenGL 4.0 with the Geforce GTX 400 series
• Support for the CUDA Toolkit 3.1
• Up to 48x anti-aliasing with three GeForce GTX 400 series in SLI 
• New options in the control panel
• Support for 3D Blu-ray

The 257.21-version WHQL drivers work with Windows 7, Vista and XP in 32 – and 64-bit versions. Download the drivers from Nvidia.com.

If it’s any similar to the other 17-inch gaming laptops I’ve seen it doesn’t show it. MSI makes the slimmest 15 and 17-inch gaming laptops on the market, but the keyboards are pretty awful. At any rate it’s a really powerful gaming laptop thanks to the Mobility HD5870.

The mobile version of the GTX 480M (M for Mobile) won’t offer the same performance as the desktop variants, since it’s not allowed to consume even close to that amount of power. It is more reminiscent of Nvidia’s recently launched GTX 465 for desktops. It has three of the original four graphics processing clusters, 11 streaming processors enabled out of the original 16 and 352 CUDA Cores. Furthermore it gets 1GB GDDR5 RAM running on 256-bit bus. The core runs at 425Mhz, shaders at 850MHz and RAM at 600Mhz (2.4 GHz effective).

Nvidia says this is the fastest notebook GPU yet, and it can also be paired up in 2-way SLI. Its main competitor is the Mobility Radeon HD 5870 – AMD/ATI’s top-of-the-line graphics card for laptops, which also has support for DirectX 11 but a 128-bit memory bus and somewhat higher clocks. Comparisons should be interesting once the first GTX 480M laptops are out. The HD 5870 is already on the market in laptops such as the MSI GX740 and Asus G73J.