So what's the difference?

[bistro]

OK...finally found a report on this. The new Ivy Bridge chip has around a 40% increase in graphics power over the previous Sandy Bridge mobile CPUs. Meanwhile, back at the ranch, the graphics card sports the Nvidia Optimus technology. Basically the Optimus technology can switch the graphics-rendering from the card to the CPU whenever the demand drops (i.e. going from gaming to office apps). The Ivy Bridge is especially great for notebooks with just integrated graphics because now they can play the newer games at a little higher game settings (from super Low to around Medium or even High) and still have pretty decent gameplay; depending of course on the particular game's demands. Those notebooks with Ivy Bridge AND a graphics card with Optimus save a bit on battery power because the power demand on the card is lessened when rendering apps....can gain as much as an extra hour of battery time. But if you choose to do so, supposedly there are settings in the Nvidia Control Panel where you can force the card to handle ALL the graphics. We'll see....

I just ordered the MSI GT60 0NC-004US gaming laptop:

Ivy Bridge Core i7-3610QM CPU
2x Seagate Momentus GT 720GB Hybrid (8GB SSD each) in RAID 0
16GB 1600 RAM (comes w/ 12GB standard, but the extra 4GB was free).
6x Blu Ray reader/8x DVD burner
Nvidia GeForce GTX 670M 3GB VRAM graphics card
720P HD built-in webcam
Bigfoot "Killer" N-1103 WLAN
Programmable color backlit keyboard by SteelSeries
Dynaudio sound (including a subwoofer...can you believe that?)
1x angry bank manager

Should be getting it in about a week.