Overview
GeForce GT 420M is a middle-class Mobile Graphics Card based on the first revision of the Fermi Architecture.

Architecture
The Fermi Architecture is manufactured with a 40nm technology and uses a technique known as Hot Clocking: The Shaders are clocked twice as fast as the Central Unit. While this leads to a reasonable performance boost, it causes enormous amounts of energy dissipation, leading, ultimately, to a significantly higher operating temperature.
Fermi is also the first GPU architecture with fully cached memory access which increases memory performance.

GPU
It equips a GPU Codenamed N11P-GE-A1 which has 2 Stream Multiprocessors activated and thus offers 96 Shader Processing Units, 16 TMUs and 4 ROPs. The Central Unit is clocked at 500MHz.

Memory
The GPU accesses a 512MB frame buffer of DDR3, through a 128-bit memory interface. The size of the frame buffer is adequate. The Memory Clock Operates at 800MHz.

Features
DirectX 11.0 Support (11.0 Hardware Default) and support for Optimus, 3D Vision Surround, PhysX, Realtime Raytracing and other technologies

Power Consumption
With a rated board TDP of 23W, it is suited for 15" or larger laptops.

Performance
Gaming benchmarks put its performance somewhat below a desktop GeForce GT 430.

System Suggestions
We recommend a modest processor (Intel Core i3 Mobile) and 4GB of RAM for a system with GeForce GT 420M.