Stefan Mileschin

Those of you in the market for an Alienware M17x R3 or M18x (and if you're looking for a gaming notebook, you should really be considering the M17x R3), NVIDIA has some great news for you. The GeForce GTX 580M, which in our testing competes with the AMD Radeon HD 6990M as the fastest mobile GPU on the market (and tends to split the difference), has received a drastic price cut over at Alienware that suddenly makes it much, much more competitive.


Where before it was hard to justify the upgrade due to the outrageous $300+ premium for the GTX 580M, Alienware is now selling it at just $75 more than the 6990M in the M17x R3. That change in price also lines up with the M18x, where a pair of GTX 580Ms in SLI is $150 more than a pair of 6990Ms in CrossFire. The two solutions are essentially still neck and neck, but if you have need for CUDA support (like in Adobe Premiere CS5.5), want to enjoy PhysX (for Batman: Arkham City), or would rather use Optimus than manual graphics switching, the 580M is now a much more reasonable option.

Unfortunately this seems to apply only to Alienware; boutiques offering Clevo-based systems seem to still be dealing with the old pricing, which places an unreasonable premium on the GTX 580M. So if you're shopping those, it looks like your best bet is still going to be the AMD Radeon HD 6990M.