Sandy Bridge is the sobriquet of the processor Microarchitecture established by Intel as heir to Nehalem. The advancement began in 2005 and was wholly developed in Intel’s research center situated at Haifa, Israel. Sandy Bridge controls the same 32 nm manufacturing process as Westmere. It was officially announced last January 3, 2011 before Consumer Electronics Show (CES) 2011. The first batch of mainstream processors was carried last January 9, 2011, according to Intel’s official site. With Intel’s Sandy Bridge rollout plus a few Core i7 quad-core mobile processors, it was foreseeable that a heavy dose of gaming laptops would be among the first portables declared using Intel’s latest CPUs.
While the subsequent systems all feature Intel inside, when it arrives to their graphics, things begin to fragment. For example, Acer’s new 8950G-9839 uses A’MD’s new Mobility Radeon HD 6850, which it pairs with a Core i7-2630QM, 8GB of RAM, 750GB hard drive, and 18.4-inch LED-backlit display.
Similarly, the Toshiba Qosmio X505 presents the i7-2630QM and 18.4-inch screen, but chooses Nvidia GeForce GTX 460M graphics. (It’s also available with a Core i5-2410M processor.) Toshiba offers this Qosmio line from between $1,300 and $1,900, while the Acer costs $1,599.99.
Asus has also built its hottest gaming laptop around the GTX 460M card (and Core i7-2630QM), but the G73SW-A is slightly smaller with “just” a 17.3-inch LCD. It comes with 8GB of RAM, backlit keyboard, and up to a pair of 500GB “hybrid” hard drives (which include 4GB of flash memory to speed up boot times). This “Republic of Gamers” notebook will be accessible next month opening at $1,849.
Finally, MSI is rolling out its GT780 with either the GTX 460M or the brand-new GTX 560M. Like the Asus, this gamer comes with a 17.3-inch screen, room for two hard drives or solid state drives, and LED-backlit keyboard tweaked for gaming by peripheral maker SteelSeries. It also holds MSI’s Cooler Boost Cooling Technology, it means that users can entrée via a hot key on the keyboard.
