The Kepler GTX 860M can win in some cases ( Titanfall, X-Plane 10 and GRID 2), but most games show an advantage for the Maxwell counterpart. To make it brief: The ranking from the synthetic GPU benchmarks also applies for the gaming tests. Our gaming benchmark consists of 16 more or less fresh titles, which are tested with 1920x1080 pixels, (very) high details and – if supported – activated anti-aliasing on the 15-inch notebooks. Much more important in practice, however, is the gaming performance. The latter manages 797-915 MHz under load, which is still decent. 1,029-1,097 MHz during 3D operation is significantly higher than the Kepler version. The Maxwell chip is particularly superior in terms of clocks. This is even superior to the GTX 770M (960 CUDA cores). Compared to the GTX 765M, the Kepler GTX 860M gets 50% more CUDA cores, more precisely 1,152 instead of 768. Thanks to the huge efficiency improvement, 640 CUDA cores are sufficient for the Maxwell GTX 860M to compete with the in-house rivals. Much more important is the number of shader units. It does not really matter if Nvidia equips the graphics card with 2 or 4 GB memory based on our experiences. Other similarities of the two cards include the memory interface: The GTX 860M uses modern GDDR5 video memory, but a 128-bit interface is not up to date anymore in 2014. Smaller notebooks use the soldered GPUs with the Maxwell chip GM107, whereas bulkier gaming cases with MXM slots use the significantly bigger Kepler sibling (GK104 chip), which is also manufactured in a 28 nm process. It is easy to understand why Nvidia produces two versions of the GeForce GTX 860M. The different operating systems can also have an impact here and there, although the differences should be marginal. The results for the mentioned GeForce 700 generation are not 100% comparable due to older drivers.
GEFORCE GTX 860M 2GB BENCHMARK DRIVER
Operating system is the 64-bit version of Windows 7 Professional, which was installed on a 240 GB Intel SSD 520.Įven though Nvidia already released the promising beta driver 337.50, we used – similar to the Maxwell rivals – the ForceWare 332.35.
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Our review unit was equipped with a Core i7-4700MQ (2.4-3.4 GHz) as well as 8 GB DDR3 memory. The base is the P150SM(-A) barebone from the company Clevo, which is also used by other notebook manufacturers (Eurocom, One, etc.). The benchmarks of the Kepler GTX 860M are from the W504, which was kindly provided by Schenker Technologies for our gaming tests. Besides the 13-inch Schenker XMG P304 and the 15-inch XMG A504, the Nexoc G728II also got a good overall rating. We already reviewed three notebooks with the new Maxwell GTX 860M in the last couple of weeks. For the original German article, see here.