June 6th, 2007
Inside the new MBP: NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT
One of the major new features of the new MacBook Pro is the addition of the NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT video card. This is a switch from the ATI Mobility Radeon X1600 GPU which shipped in the previous MBP
The 15-inch MacBook Pro ships with the NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT graphics processor with dual-link DVI support and 128MB of GDDR3 SDRAM (2.2GHz config) and 256MB of SDRAM on the 2.4GHz configuration.
The 17-inch MacBook Pro also ships with the 8600M GT with 256MB of GDDR3 SDRAM, but as has been previously noted, it doesn’t have the LE-backlit display.
The upgraded NVIDIA card supports dual display and video mirroring and supports full native resolution on the built-in display and up to 2560 by 1600 pixels on an external display, both at millions of colors.
Previous 15-inch Core 2 Duo MacBook Pros shipped with an ATI Mobility Radeon X1600 video card with either 128MB of GDDR3 SDRAM (2.16GHz) or 256MB (2.33GHz).
The 8600M GT is a formidable video card which appears to be on par with the ATI Mobility Radeon x1900 according to early benchmarks.
Jason D. O'Grady is the editor of PowerPage.org, which has been publishing daily mobile technology news since December 1995. For disclosures on Jason's industry affiliations, click here or to view Jason's full profile click here.
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