GeForce GTX 480M: AVADirect’s W880CU Is Packing The Heat

Expensive and the equivalent of a GTX 465 desktop graphics card ... but why is it called "480M".

It might only have two-thirds the muscle of a moderately-priced desktop graphics card, but the GeForce GTX 480M still beats down its Mobility Radeon-based competitor by nearly 19%, once you divide out the presented results. The only problem, then, is price. The cheapest MXM module we could find costs three to four times more than the cheapest desktop card that uses similar hardware (the GeForce GTX 465).

Anyone who requires complete portability from their gaming PC really has only a handful of solutions, none of them supremely mobile, and all of them extremely expensive. The most potent of these desktop-replacement gaming machines is powered by Nvidia’s GTX 480M GPU. With so much expense providing so much gaming power, this might just be the ultimate portable gaming solution for buyers whose needs are great and whose budgets are even greater.

Now, if we could just get AMD and Nvidia to agree to name their flagship mobile GPUs after the mainstream desktop cards they most closely resemble...