The Notebook Review forums were hosted by TechTarget, who shut down them down on January 31, 2022. This static read-only archive was pulled by NBR forum users between January 20 and January 31, 2022, in an effort to make sure that the valuable technical information that had been posted on the forums is preserved. For current discussions, many NBR forum users moved over to NotebookTalk.net after the shutdown.
The 260m GTX is faster by a fair amount, and it uses better GDDR3 ram. The the 445m has DX11, which really isn't important yet, but it also consumes a fair amount less power, and produces less heat. Which one is better depends on what your priorities are. For a gaming machine take the 260m.
The 445m and 260m both have 16 pipelines. The 144 number is the amount of shaders, not the same thing.
The 260m uses 256 bit GDDR3, which is way better than the 192 bit DDR3 in the 445, giving it about 50% more memory bandwidth. The 260m has about 36% more raw processing power based on GFLOPS, though the 445m has a newer architecture, which reduces the difference. Even so, the 260m gtx should be at least 20-25% faster in real world apps.
Also, 3GB of video ram is useless. Look at the absolute fastest desktop GPUs available, they have 1.5GB max. You'd see no difference in performance between 1GB and 3GB video ram on the 445, especially not on a 900p display, and not considering the relatively slow DDR3 ram that they're using. Dell just adds extra ram as a cheap way to make the specs look better.
Problems? See this thread at archive.org.
