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Gamers and CPU Techs, Is it worth it to get the top model of my new laptop that includes SLI graphics card?

With the help of the community I have narrowed it down to two laptops, both are top of the line Toshibas at BestBuy and my final question I need help with is whether it will be helpful or worth it to go ahead and get the top model of this laptop that has the SLI graphics card? There are two models and they are $1499 and $1999, the only difference is the 2nd one has SLI card. What will the SLI graphics card do for me and would you recommend that I get this one? I play multi table online poker for reasonable stakes, run my business online, download media files regularly, stream video and I hook up my laptop to use my big screen LCD TVs as monitors daily. Both CPU specs are below... Intel® Core™2 Duo mobile processor T5450; 2GB DDR2 SDRAM; DL DVD±RW/CD-RW drive; 240GB hard drive capacity; fingerprint reader; Bluetooth; Windows Vista Home *Premium NVIDIA GeForce 8700M GT graphics with PCI Express x16 subsystem and 256MB GDDR2 video memory (up to 255MB additional shared memory with TurboCache) Or for $500 more they have the exact same computer with an upgraded SLI graphics card.. NVIDIA SLI Dual GeForce 8600M GT graphics with 512MB GDDR3 discrete graphics memory and up to 255MB additional memory with TurboCache

Public Comments

1. I would always choose a SLI card over any other card, SLI technology is new and included im every top of the line graphics cards and i switched from a non-SLI to an SLI card and the difference is gaming latency was incredible, big jump in graphics performance with the added SLI not just for gamings but for other graphics programs like Photoshop and editing videos. Heres a bit about SLI technology: http://www.slizone.com/page/slizone_learn.html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scalable_Link_Interface
2. well, i would say the extra 500bucks for lower-spec SLI is definetely not worth the money... GeForce 8700M GT is exactly the same as GeForce 8600M GT except for the clock frequency... 8700M runs at a higher clock if u plan to play the latest, then a SLI system would help since new games are taking advantage of dual cards now, otherwise SLI doesn't really help oh and dun get T5000 cpu, this will be a bottleneck if u get SLI, get T7000 cpu instead if u are serious in getting a gaming laptop, i recommend GeForce8800M GTX instead, this monster, even in single card mode, is more than enuf to pwn Geforce8700M GT SLI