Nvidia optimus worth while?

[RadNow]

Anyone have any opinions about optimus? The ATI video cards in similar class to gt 540 seem better but no optimus technology to save powere etc.

Also is there much point to getting a sandy bridge laptop if your going to have a seperate video card like the ATI ones?

 

[alent1234]

is battery life important to you? do you game on a laptop?

if you don't play games then a SB should be fine. i'm playing mass effect 1 on a 2010 core i5 laptop now with only Intel HD in there and it's not too bad.

 

[Emulex]

manual switching on my macbook seems to work fine too. just have to restart the video driver no biggie. 99% of the time i use the low end graphics anyways.

 

[pilzner]

So far, I'm underwhelmed with the power-saving ability. I bought an optimus enabled laptop for 3-D editing on the train, went with DELL XPS15, i7 SB, and Geforce 525M.

Just using CPU alone, a charged battery gives me about 6.5 hours of life (just based on what the calc in the system tray tells me). If I fire up a 3-D app, it goes down to about 2.5 hours. The ah heck is that whether I'm integrated/dedicated doesn't seem to matter - it is still roughly 2.5 hours. I get that the integrated card probably needs more juice then CPU alone, but I'd still hope it to be less than GPU.

I'm still tweaking a few settings, was really hoping to find a way to get 4+ hours of life with a 3-D app running. I haven't done anything graphic intensive at all, maybe in that case the integrated card would outlive the nVidia. I also haven't actually timed the battery and am just going off what the sys-tray says.