Is a laptop with SLI worth it?

I would say not, it's a lot of cost for not really a significant amount more performance. In my opinion, stick to a single card and then save money for your next system, that extra 20-40% performance increase probably won't be worth the amount of money sunk in.

In my personal opinion it's too much money for a system, and if you've followed the trends in latest years, each new generation of vcards doubles performance of previous generation.

I agree with all of the above

Ok, here's my personal experience... I upgraded my old Dell 9300 with an Alienware Auroroa m9700. It was maxed out and had a 2x256mb 7900GS SLI setup. After spending over a month with the machine, I decided to sell it on ebay and have recently purchased a m1710. Now, everybody's experience is different, but for me SLI was just a monumental pain in the ass. I don't think the technology has evolved far enough yet to warrant the extra hoops you are required to jump through on SLI systems. It works for some games, and completely doesn't for others. What's worse is that you have little or no warning that SLI is actually working. You have to turn on visual indicators in the driver settings, boot back into the game and check if SLI is turned on, then boot out, turn off visual indicators, boot back into the game and play. Rinse, repeat for every game you decide to install. Sometimes, my SLI would just stop working for no reason whatsoever and I'd either have to disable/re-enable in the drivers or reboot the machine. You are constantly dependent on newer drivers to update the SLI profiles for the games you are interested in playing, otherwise you have to try to create one yourself and test it with various differences in the config until you optimize the performance. It was just a real pain for me. I much prefer a one card design where you can just boot up the game and play without having to worry about whether SLI is running or not. I'd also have very strange anomalies that would pop up if SLI was on (affecting sound drivers), but would stop when SLI was turned off. It would only happen with certain video drivers. Like I said, I got the impression that SLI support is still relatively immature. I'm sure this will improve with time, but until then I have no interest in trying an SLI rig again for quite awhile.

I had other reasons for switching to the m1710, but the SLI issues definitely played a part.

Depends whats in SLI, if its to 7900GS's, i would say forget it. A single 7950GTX can keep up in most cases and even beat them in some...

If it was 2 7900's or 7950... maybe then.

Thanks groove you really gave a good insight on the pains of SLI. Once again, I just don't see how it's worth it in the long run. Especially since having 2 7900's over 1, isn't really much extra performance. I dunno, i say go single card.

I agree with all of the above and plus you have to think about weight and cooling. I've heard that people have had problems with having two graphics cards in a laptop can have a tendacy to be extermely hot in certain situations. If I were you like they've already pointed out I'd save your money for the future and maybe by then they will have the technology more thougth out.

Well just check the benchmark result in my sig, I don't think you will find a 7900GS SLI setup that will get close.

If you buy the M1710 get the 2.33Ghz 7600G processor and the Go9750 . A dual core intel running at 3.1Ghz is no chump change and will give many destops a run for their money.

However, if you wait you can probably go faster with the cards coming out later but there is always something coming out later so it's a moot point.

Right now, NOTHING (laptop) beats the M1710 with the Go 7950 period.

SLI in laptops, as a concept, just doesn't make sense. Until they come out with a multi-core chip, having two physical graphics cards within a laptop just isn't efficient in any respect. Also, the maximum resolution of 1920x1200 for most laptops isn't enough, you very well could be processor bottlenecked in some games. I have relatively the same system (9300->XPS2) and I'm waiting until the second generation Core 2 Duos are out (800FSB =D) as well as a G80 mobile part, probably mid-summer when the coupons are at their best .

Agreed.

I'm really hoping on the G80 to coincide with the santa rosa launch, they better be working hard to get that card in laptops or mobile gaming is going to be really behind.