'GX' Takes Gaming to the Extreme
The GX740 and GX640 were designed with gaming in mind, optimized with the best combination of powerful and affordable hardware to ravish even the most advanced games. The Radeon Mobility 5800 series is one of the most powerful gaming graphic solutions available for mobile computers, and in conjunction with Intel's performance processors, gaming is where these laptops shine.
The 17-inch form-factor has several inherent advantages. The larger screen alone adds to the gaming experience just by providing a more immersive environment. The roomier chassis and additional cooling features also yield the potential for faster components, and in the case of the GX740, the opportunity for overclocking.
Because the Core i5 and i7 processors incorporate Turbo Boost technology, manual overclocking of the CPU isn't much of an option, but ATI's Overdrive allows for simple overclocking of the video card. With the GX740, its Radeon 5870's GPU core can be increased from 700MHz to an impressive 800MHz and the video memory from 1000MHz to 1200MHz, given the proper environment. In the case of the GX640, its Radeon 5850 can be overclocked to the point that it is identical to the 5870 of the GX740, but due to cooling constraints, these speeds can't be realistically achieved.
As you can see from the above chart, the GX740 maintains a strong 10% lead over the GX640 when averaged amongst all of our benchmarked games. If you're interested in the raw data of these benchmarks, before they were normalized and averaged, you can find it here.