Thanks to the appearance of a curiously thin MSI gaming laptop at CeBIT a few days ago, we had an inkling that NVIDIA's new batch of laptop GPUs were inbound. Indeed, the 800M series has just become official, with a number of features geared toward portability and battery life. For a start, the lower half of the stack -- the 830M, 840M, 850M and 860M -- has been endowed with the company's latest Maxwell architecture, which allows gaming credentials to be claimed by thinner and lighter machines. The new Gigabyte P74 is a decent example: It contains an 860M inside a 21mm-thick chassis and we managed to play BioShock Infinite on it, running at 1080p and max settings with a frame rate above 40 fps -- that's a level of performance that NVIDIA says would have required a 55mm-thick laptop three years ago. The other big promise with this generation concerns battery life, and it comes courtesy of a setting called "Battery Boost."
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