Difference between x600 and 9600?

[Mike01]

I've got a 64mb MR9550 in my Gateway 7426gx, which is an underclocked 9600. The new version of my laptop has an x600, though is otherwise identical. I looked online for some benchmarks and found this:

http://asia.cnet.com/reviews/hardware/notebooks/0,39001749,39241882-2,00.htm

The site lists a 3DMark03 score of 3160 for a 64mb x600 running in a 1.73MHz Pentium M Notebook. I ran 3DMark03 on my system, clocked at 350/200 (standard 9600 clock) and got a score of 2942, which is practically the same.

So this led me to wonder...what's the difference between the 9600 and the x600? Is it just the slightly faster main memory access of PCIE?

With such nearly identical performance, I wonder why I've so often heard people saying the 9600 is outdated and useless but the x600 will give you adequate performance. It seems to me that whatever is true of one is true of the other.

 

[RamIt]

I think the speed boosts comes from the ram being clocked @ 280 (DDR560) on the X600.
Not worth the upgrade for a marginal increase in performance when there are better solutions out there.

The X700 will basically double the performance from what you have now.

 

[fbrdphreak]

To my knowledge the X600 is the equivalent of a 9600 Pro or even 9700 (Both mobile of course). Recall that the MR 9700 was just an OCed 9600. The X300 is a crippled X600 and is the slight superior to an MR 9200, but mostly equal to an MR 9600. The X700 however has more pixel pipelines & vertex shaders, in addition to a higher clock speed.

I am waiting on final confirmation from ATI on all their MR GPU's, so I'll post when I have the comprehensive list of NVIDIA & ATI mobile GPU's