6990m - 7970m

Can the thermal pads on a 6990m be reused on a 7970m? Considering pulling the 6990 in my R3 and tring a 7970 to see what kind of difference it'd make.

 

You should get around double the performance. I would buy new thermal past though since idk how well dell's stuff will work after you swap the cards.

 

Agreed, if you plan to use it for more then a few benchmarks, I'd definitely suggest new pads. If it's a trial thing, the pads should fit just fine, but you'll want to purchase pads if you plan to use it long term.

Just my 2 cents.

 

Isn't that a bit exaggerated? Sure the 7970M is a lot faster than the 6990M, but not twice as fast.

I would buy new thermal pads. Especially since the new GPU you'll buy wont be under Dell warranty and the stock pads aren't that great.

 

No, that's about right. It's about twice as fast. Not to mention it matches its desktop counterpart, the 7870, when pushed back up to 1GHz, which apparently is feasible on stock voltages.

So yeah, it's about twice as fast.

 

I have yet to see a single 7970 stock surpass dual 6970's stock scores. not to mention 6990's that are faster than 6970's. Comparison hs to be done @ stock clocks. Sure if you Overclock the hell out of that card it will surpass the 6990's. A question for 7970's owners out there: who's keeping their cards at 1Ghz on the GPU core for daily use?

 

It's a moot point, I'm going to wait until I get home and order a 680m. Just don't want to chance getting a bad 7970 and really don't feel like dealing with the lousy driver issues either.

Thanks for the input.

 

I've yet to see a benchmark where the 7970m is twice as fast as the 6990m (at stock clocks).
According to the benchmark results on notebookcheck the 7970m is about 1.7x faster than the 6990m in 3dmark11 and 1.44x faster in 3DMark Vantage.
Games:
1.45x faster in Metro 2033 (ultra)
1.6x faster in Crysis 2 (ultra)
1.32x faster in CoD Black Ops (ultra)

It is a lot faster, indeed, but not twice as fast.

 

So twice as fast means that it has to have literally twice the FPS in games? Check out the minimum framerates then. Also most users tend to keep it at 1GHz for 24/7 use because well... it doesn't get much hotter. I keep mine undervolted because my heatsink is burnt out and overheats like crazy if I don't. Looking for another one but...they're hard to find. >_<

 

Did you take some survey from all owners of the HD7970M whether they oc their GPU at 1Ghz all the time? I actually think it's the opposite; most persons do not oc their GPU at all.
Either way, that doesn't matter since you're comparing an OC'ed GPU to a stock GPU which doesn't make any sense at all.

 

I was referring to the speeds of around crossfire 6990m's my bad. As to performance, 7970m>6990m by far. lets just agree on that.

 

That's very true indeed. Let's hope same evolution persists, imagine what monster laptops we would have in 5 years or so.

 

Just order from Dell. Only $40 shipped with new pads

 

They told me that they didn't have any more about two weeks ago. I suppose I can try again though.