Help Me Choose: Video Cards
Whether you're gaming, watching DVDs or editing video on your Alienware™ laptop, the quality of the graphics you experience is only as good as your video card. Along with the computer monitor itself, the video card determines the number of colours that can be displayed, as well as the contrast, resolution and overall gaming graphics.
How Video Cards Work
Discrete video cards can provide better performance as compared to integrated video cards. Discrete video cards are separate from the motherboard and include a specialized graphics processing unit (GPU). Because of their onboard GPU, discreet video cards don’t have to share the CPU with other programs.
Discrete video cards include memory of their own, measured in gigabytes (GB). Graphics memory is used by the GPU to accelerate graphics performance, store textures using game graphics and make gaming, movies and other entertainment intensely realistic. High-performance graphics cards require a significant amount of graphics memory.
How to Get the Highest Performance
In Alienware PCs, two or more video cards can be linked together to boost total gaming performance. NVIDIA® video cards use a technology called Scalable Link Interface (SLI®), and AMD video cards use a technology called AMD CrossFireX™ to enable two or more cards to work together when processing graphics data. Naturally, having two video cards working together to render graphics increases the available frame rate and provides more depth and detail. With the added horsepower of dual graphics cards, you can use higher resolution displays and enjoy high-definition (HD) gaming without sacrificing graphics performance.
| If you want to... | Choose... |
Experience full, rich, smooth, immersive 3D gaming at high resolutions with maximum detail. A dual video card configuration can handle all applications that a single discrete video card can handle, plus:
| Dual video card configuration |
Tackle complex graphics and applications. A discrete video card can handle all the applications that an integrated card can handle, plus:
| A single discrete video card |
| Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) | NVIDIA® GeForce® GT 650M | NVIDIA GeForce GTX 660M | NVIDIA GeForce GTX 675M | Radeon™ HD 7970M | Dual NVIDIA GeForce GTX 675M | Dual AMD Radeon HD 7970M |
| Available on | M14x | M17x, M18x | M17x, M18x | M17x, M18x | M18x | M18x |
Rated Wattage | 45W | 75W | 100W | 100W | 200W | 200W |
Number of GPUs | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 2 | 2 |
Total Memory | 1GB or 2GB | 2GB | 2GB | 2GB | 4GB (2x 2GB) | 4GB (2x 2GB) |
NVIDIA CUDA™ Cores (per GPU) | 384 | 384 | 384 | NA | 384 | NA |
AMD Graphics Core Next Archtiecture (per GPU) | NA | NA | NA | 20 Compute Units | NA | 20 Compute Units |
Graphics Clock (MHz) per GPU | 405 | 405 | 620 | 850 | 620 | 850 |
Memory Clock (MHZ) per GPU | 2000 | 2500 | 1500 | 1200 | 1500 | 1200 |
Standard Memory Configuration | GDDR5 | GDDR5 | GDDR5 | GDDR5 | GDDR5 | GDDR5 |
Memory Interface Width | 128 bit | 128 bit | 256 bit | 256 bit | 256 bit | 256 bit |
Memory Bandwidth (GB/sec) per GPU | Up to 64 | 64 | 96 | 153.6 | 96 | 153.6 |
| NVIDIA® Optimus™ Support |  | | | NA | | NA |
| NVIDIA® PhysX® capable | | | | NA | | NA |
| NVIDIA® 3D Vision™ / 3DTV Play™ support | | | | NA | | NA |
AMD Enduro Technology | NA | NA | NA | | NA | |
| AMD App Acceleration | NA | NA | NA | | NA | |
| OpenCL and DirectCompute support | | | | | | |
| H.264, VC1, MPEG2 1080p video decoder | | | | | | |
| Blu-Ray 3D support | | | | | | |
| DirectX® 11 support | | | | | | |
| OpenGL® 4.1 support | | | | (and 4.2 support) | | (and 4.2 support) |
| Windows® Vista, XP and 7 | | | | | | |
| VGA analog display support | Up to 2048x1536 | Up to 2048x1536 | Up to 2048x1536 | Up to 2048x1536 | Up to 2048x1536 | Up to 2048x1536 |
| DisplayPort multimode support | Up to 2560x1600 | Up to 2560x1600 | Up to 2560x1600 | Up to 2560x1600 | Up to 2560x1600 | Up to 2560x1600 |
| HDMI support | | | | | | |
| HDCP content protection | | | | | | |
| 7.1 channel HD audio on HDMI | | | | | | |
| TrueHD and DTS-HD Audio Bitstreaming | | | | | | |
| NVIDIA SLI-Ready |  | | | NA | | NA |
| AMD CrossFire Support | NA | NA | NA | | NA | |