Having shipped its first GeForce GTX 500 series desktop graphics card, Nvidia decided it'd be a good time to extend the name to its mobile product line. The company has kicked off its GeForce 500M family with a "new" mid-range chip, the GT 540M. Unfortunately, there's not a whole lot to get excited about as Nvidia continues its ongoing practice of rebadging chips.
The latest entry features almost exactly the same specifications as the GeForce GT 435M, including the same 40nm fabrication, 96 CUDA cores, up to 1.5GB of memory with a 128-bit memory bus, and support for DirectX 11. However, thanks to the "maturation of the production process," Nvidia has raised the graphics, processor and memory clocks by a marginal degree.
While the GeForce GT 435M has a core, shader and memory speed of 650MHz, 1,300MHz, and 800MHz, the GT 540M is set at 672MHz, 1,344MHz, and 900Mhz. Despite the 22MHz, 44MHz, and 100MHz increase, power levels remain the same. The updated part is already shipping to Chinese customers in an Acer notebook with global availability expected next month.