Montevina notebooks - watch your configuration

THE LONG AWAITED Intel Montevina notebooks are finally shipping - full HD graphics with improved 3-D fits well with FSB1066 and DDR3-1066 memory, all feeding a 3+ GHz dual core CPU or, soon 2.5+ GHz quad core, the first on a laptop. At least, high-end setups have the DDR3 here, and it does help in some cases.

Interestingly, DDR3 - despite its slightly high latency on standard modules - does help quite a bit in integrated 3-D graphics performance, as it provides a lot more spare bandwidth for the IGP to do its work without fighting with the CPU FSB data transfers.