14 DAY TRIAL // Even though NVIDIA's two DirectX 11-capable video cards have only been available for a short time, end-users are probably already starting to wonder when the company will bring out their mobile versions. ATI, business unit of Advanced Micro Devices already has the Mobility Radeon HD 5000 Series and there are already DirectX 11 laptops on sale. Whether it is to offer an answer to this question or simply get some publicity, or both, custom PC maker Eurocom listed a number of its future machines as configurable with the so-called GeForce GTX 480M.
It is obvious, and quite logical, that NVIDIA would make haste in unleashing its cards' prowess on the mobile PC market, but the fact remains that the Santa Clara, California-based GPU maker has yet to make any official announcement on the matter. Eurocom doesn't seem to mind, however, and has already added the GTX 480M as an option on the 18.4-inch Leopard and the 17-inch Cheetah and Panther desktop replacements.
The listing, predictably, does not exactly spill the beans on the card's specifications, but it does, at least, reveal an amount of GDDR5 memory of 2GB, an MXM 3.0b interface of 256 bits and a 100W number, which can be either the thermal design power (TDP) or the power requirements. It is interesting to note that the 15.6-inch Cougar has not been updated with these options, which may suggest that the discrete card has a fairly large printed circuit board that only makes it usable on notebooks of larger form factors.
According to the listing, the laptops with NVIDIA DirectX 11 graphics should become available by June. This means that NVIDIA may show off its creation at Computex. In the meantime, end-users that want to make sure the 480M is not just some typo may see the configurations first-hand on Eurocom's official website.