You guys have to keep in mind that the high-power/high-weight/short battery life Clevo/Sager/Alienware philosophy is only a tiny fragment of the laptop market.
The NVidia 4200 Go card is a very powerful piece of hardware that was generally impractical. It is not as old as most of you seem to think it is; it was just showing up in March, when the Dx9 cards were announced.
The 4200 Go is considerably more powerful than the ATI Mobility 9000. But it's hotter and consumes more power. As far as I am aware, it's really only been implemented in a truly portable form in the Dell Latitude D 800.
The power of that card in that laptop is evident. Sporting a Pentium M-1.6, the D 800 churned out better 3D Mark numbers in CNet's test than the Alienware Area 51m, which was outfitted with a P4 3.06. If you compare Anandtech's gaming performance benchmarks, the D 800 dusts a Sager 8886 with a P4 2.8 Ghz and a Hypersonic Aviator with a 3.06.
The difference there is the 4200 Go slamming the Radeon Mobility 9000 so badly that it more than makes up the performance difference between a Pentium M and a full-on Desktop P4.
But the Dell D 800 also has poor battery life for a Centrino notebook, and weighs more than seven pounds. This is the tradeoff for that power.
The M10 is supposed to consume the same amount of power in the M9. That means that we should see 3D power of equal to the D800 and the Sager 8886 in sub-6 lb. notebooks that last 5 hours on a single battery in the next few weeks.
This is a big leap in notebook performance, but unfortunately offers no big leap for Sager fans.
Clevo/Sager/Alienware notebooks seem to be intended to be plugged in, and are only portable in the sense that you can move them from one place where you can plug them in to another.
Choosing the power of a full desktop chip in a notebook, at the cost of 10 lb. weights and 2 hour batteries is not a sacrifice most mobile users, or even most mobile gamers can afford to make.
I will be attending law school this fall and I found Sager when I started looking for a laptop. Actually, I found Alienware first, and then found that Sager was the same thing, minus the paint job.
At first, a full-sized desktop P4 in a laptop seemed like a great idea. But it's completely impractical for student needs. The computer alone weighs ten pounds, and will require me to carry either a power source, extra batteries, or both to make it through a day.
Nearly all law schools and an increasing number of undergraduate schools are requiring or strongly encouraging students to own laptops. This significant and growing market needs to carry their computers every day and needs to get a lot of mileage out of a battery. A big chunk of this market also wants to play cutting-edge games, and for them, the M10 is a great development.
For the Clevo market, you should see a proportional boost when you pair an M10 chip with a desktop processor. I'm guessing based on the current benchmark differences that the difference between a full P4 and a Pentium M should push the 3D marks for a Sager-type computer with this card to about 13,000
It looks like we still have to wait to see what the performance is really going to be.
