2x 5780 XFIRE or 480GTX 2gig?

Which is the better? The two 1gig 5780s XFIRED = 2gig or the 2gig single 480GTX?

 

The 5870s. (Assuming that's what you meant, afaik the 5780 doesn't exist )

 

CrossfireX 5870s is far superior to a single GTX 480, end of story.

 

two 1GB 5870 in crossfire does not equate 2GB of memory.

 

dual 5870s is far better than 1 480. even one single 5870 is close in performance to a 48ogtx, and the xfire is still cheaper than a single 480gtx.

 

A single 480M GTX will have less issues, especially driver related. The dual 5870s are faster but plagued with driver problems.

 

LOL what I always said - but now I ordered a M17x with CF5870 ATIs.
I fear that GTX480M in SLI will never work and GTX460M SLI (which was my prefered config) seems to be way slower than ATI5870. So I hope Dell solves this driver issues fast.

 

480M with 1GB mem would work in SLI

 

240W AC power supply or a Nuclear Power Plant?

I suggest having some kind of uranium disposal system if you venture into nVidia 4xxM cards.

 

Frankly if it works, I mean just works with half the problems that have plagued the 5870 owners I don't care if it's hot

 

x2 I am waiting for the NVIDIA option to buy my next M17

 

I'd like to try one 480M out.. better Nvidia driver support could mean that despite lacking the performance of the 5870CF's, it might end up being better for day-to-day works.

When the CF's run.. they run. But the continous amount of problems still annoys me.

 

ATI, should offer 5970's in Xfire for Moblie, Quad GPU should have a huge market for it. Add 5-10 less watts and 2 Gigs each....

 

They don't even HAVE 5970's out yet!

 

5870m Cf = 5870
480m = 5770

 

nop they don,t even have a real 5870 out for mobile but they should have that core could pwn nvidia's ofering in hell with no trouble

 

True, but even so, very few games will use any more than 1GB of graphics memory at the resolutions we're talking about on the M17x.

Drivers are software. Once the software works, then the 5870s will be utterly awesome.

Pretty much my point as to why the 480M is a pretty redundant creation. It sucks not much less power than Crossfire 5870s, and that's just a single 480M, yet offering not much more power than a single 5870 in terms of performance.

Two of those, even in the M17x, would struggle to stay cool. And it'd need one hell of a PSU just to not throttle.

Yeah, but think of the power it'd burn through. The reason they went with a 5700 series core in the 5800 mobile cards is for power consumption reasons.

They could have underclocked the 5800 GPU to be under 75W consumption, but then it'd barely be more powerful than the current mobile cards anyway.

 

This is false. CF uses in excess of 150W, vastly in excess of one 480M.

 

Hang on.. according to notebook check, it only uses 120W, while a 480M uses 100W.

 

well with ati's architecture we know that shaders core count is worth more then core clock otherwise some of the 5xxx serie card with 6xx some core and crasy fast clock should pwns my 4850 in hell but that's not the case

and again they could underclock it just under the consumsion of the 480 like 90 wats just to say and still pwns the 480 in hell with beter power and beter consumsion

hum as i told a system able to handle dual 480 coul handle a 3way 5870 cfx

 

http://www.amd.com/us/products/notebook/graphics/ati-mobility-hd-5800/Pages/hd-5870-specs.aspx

"TDP: 50 Watts"

Now, how true that is in real world usage, I could probably argue that it's a bit more than that. Overclocking also raises that fairly quickly. It will be interesting to see how well the 480M overclocks. I still won't be getting one, though.

 

This clip got me thinking about the many ATI/Nvidia threads on here lol

YouTube - ‪The Misunderstanding - Presented by AMD‬‎

 

I'd say that 50W is the raw power usage of the GPU itself, without taking into account the RAM and other components on the board. Add those in an you're probably looking at somewhere between 60W and 70W real-world usage.

From what I can see, the biggest issue with the 480M is heat rather than power usage. It shouldn't take much to bump up the power supply to 300/350W and mod the motherboard to ship this to the MXM slots. But given that the power usage for a single card is something like 50% more than a 5870M, I'd guess that you're looking at a minimum of 50% extra heat to get rid of. You'd need some major modifications to the M17x cooling in order to handle that.

 

That's pretty funny. I wonder if nVidia will fire back with a video about ATi's crappy drivers.

 

Haha yea it would be appropriate if they did.

 

Lol yeah, but then nvidia would be fair game for drivers as well. Remember the recent nvidia drivers that were frying graphics cards? probably the worst I have seen yet from either camp.

Aaaaanyway, funny vid. I would like to see how nvidia responds. *grabs popcorn*

Creative advertising ftw!

-Ash

 

awesome video!

 

Wait a sec, from what I read so far 5870M CF owners technically CANNOT play games properly, is that right?

 

We can, we just cant sleep/wake properly.

-Ash

 

http://forum.notebookreview.com/alienware-m17x/503710-dell-ati-4870-5870-driver-discussion.html

That thread really really scares me

 

I would like to stick with Nvidia for 3D vision and Physx for a while also I feel that even thoug ATI gives more framerate, Nvidia is smoother than ATI in gameplays with no lags sometimes. That was when I tried my R1 with my friend's R2.

 

That TDP figure does not include RAM ("tiny" technical disclosure issue with AMD). 1GB of GDDR5 uses between 15-20W, possibly more when you include various other power components of a MXM module. Let's call this a 20W variance for the full module.

Now if you take Nvidia's part they include the full module TDP. Yet they include double the memory, because more complex textures and higher resolutions are starting to push 1GB to the limit. If you take 1GB of TDP off their figures, you get 80W, which is still pretty high, but not quite what you would call a barn burner. Mind you Nvidia claims the 480M can come in a 1GB variety, we just talk about the high end part automatically and that's the first parts that appeared on the market.

So in the real world you have a 70W part against a 80W part, which is definitely a difference, but not a nuclear reactor difference. Remember when the 5870's first came in CF with the 920XM chips and we had power issues? That tells you something about what AMD's specs were vs the power budget of the system. The BIOS to "fix" that was probably reallocating the power budget to keep the system stable. Also note that the 480M uses less power at idle, which means that it powers lower than the 5870. This is probably a second indication why Dell has a special power BIOS on their 5870, making it incompatible with AMD's drivers. They need to control the power heavily on the 5870 both in normal use and in heavy situations. I wouldn't be shocked to eventually find this relates to the plug in of the power plug issues that are going on because the system probably is able to enter a different array of power modes when plugged in. Not sure on that one, but it wouldn't surprise me to find out they are related.

Anyway the 5870 is most assuredly a more power efficient chip. But it's also slightly slower than the 480M. What won't shock anyone is that in the desktop world power use almost directly corresponds to GPU ability. As more powerful GPU's have arisen, so steadily have the power consumption figures. And the mobile world has crept up too, but at a slower pace because the notebook world simply can't increase the maximum power at a whim.

So on a practical level they are fairly close parts. A 460M may come in slightly lower in power than the 5870, or it may not, have to see. For now if Dell felt like putting a 1GB 480M in SLI on this system they could do it. It would use more power, by around 20W, which is a good deal but could be done. Clevo is offering a desktop 130W I7, and dual 480M's and running that on a 300W power supply. That may be Clevo pushing the envelope, or it may tell you something. If you were to run a 55W extreme chip and dual 480M's you could do that fairly easily on a 250-260W power supply with room to spare. Increasing the 240W of the M17x to 260W would be an ounce or two more weight, if that. So this could all be done.