780m VS R9 M290x in Alienware 17

Hey all I'm configuring an Alienware 17. I'm just undecided on the graphics card. I've configured the first column the same as the middle column but with the 780m and it's price is £2028. The second column has the R9 M290x at £1728. My question is is it worth getting the 780m for an extra £300 or isn't there much difference? Cheers.

 

Not easy for anyone telling what you should spend your money on. We are talking 500 $ extra.

R9 is a bit slower at most programs, but could still be more than enough for you.

Aka it depends on what you are using it for and what you want to pay to be able to use it for that.
In 6 months you probably can replace your card and still save money or get a better GPU for 500$ + what $ you get for that R9.

BTW. If mantle works as intended eventually the R9 could even be better than the 780M for many games etc.

You tell your needs and im quite sure that the " red camp" and the " green camp" will tell you what you should buy according to them.

 

I'll be mainly playing games like fifa 14, football manager and Starcraft. I know these aren't very demanding but I'd like to know I have enough power if I wanted to play something demanding in the future.

 

:laugh: thing about computers and future.

The future is cheaper for the same amount of speed or faster for the same amount of money.
Its more about how bad you want it NOW.

 

If it's a direct question of the R9 vs the 780M, then I think you'll find that the 780M is significantly faster in every regard. Also, consider that the R9 is a rebranded 8970M, which is a rebranded 7970M.

The R9 is literally a rebrand of a rebrand. It's the 7870 clocked at 900mhz instead of 1Ghz. :/

 

Well said TromeBro

Daniel, I've used three 7970m cards, and one 670mx / 680m. In my experience nVidia overclocks better, is much easier on the nerves when doing so, and feels a tiny bit smoother.
AMD was powerful, impressive, gained performance in leaps and bounds with driver upgrades, and was unbeatable for the price at the time. For me money talks, so I wouldn't be able to justify even 300$ extra for a 780m, let alone 500$, but for you, who knows.
Don't disrespect the AMD card. It's a monster.

 

You can also watch this

 

Thanks everyone for your advice. I think I'm going to go with the R9. Basically because it's £300 cheaper. If need be I can upgrade at the back end of this year. Thanks again.

 

Difficult to tell others what they should do with their money, but i would have done the same.

Put more into your CPU so that when you sell your R9 and buy a 880M in a year, it even beastier.

 

i have the r9, runs crysis 3 well, and all my other games, the 880m is just a 780m with 8 gigs of gddr5.. if i were u, save some money and sink it into the cpu..

 

Good Decision... I was looking at getting a new M17 with the 780M however I found the R4 with 7970M for half the price... The 7970M is a beast and R9 is even better.. AMD Driver support is horrible however, hopefully mantle will be good once a few iterations of the drivers occur....

 

Can you upgrade the CPU?

 

GTX 780M is around 20% faster than R9 M290x

 

This was the case when the 7970m first launched but AMD has long since caught up I think, most people are not having issues with their AMD drivers anymore.

Are you asking if you can upgrade the CPU down the line or right now? The CPU and GPU are both user upgradable down the line after you get the computer. Unless your going to be doing CPU heavy intensive tasks or plan on overclocking then the base CPU in the 17 is just fine for any gaming your planing on doing.

As a previous owner of the 7970m it was a really good card, it did everything I needed of it and then some, so even being a rebrand don't sell the R9 short, I think it will do just fine. And it isn't like Nvidia does not just rebrand their stuff either

 

I seriously doubt so.. There is literally no difference in some benchmarks in between both cards and the R9 beats the 780M in some of them...

 

I think he's referring to OCing. My 780m's spank my 7970m's once I start to open up the taps.
My best 3D Mark 11 GPU score with OCed 7970m CF was just under 13,000 vs 780 SLI OCed just under 18,000 (limited by my PSU). Even with a PSU handicapping the 780m's that's more than 20%.

 

Classic example of the Green Team Vs the Red Team and arguments as if we were paid to make the arguments.

But for me i hit 14.9K with the newer drivers on GPU, using 7970XF hasnt tested this in about 4-5 monts with this high OC, and could be higher now with current drivers. Others did close to 15.5K back then. Not far from 15%. Compared to mr Fox that doesn have PSU issues we are back at way above 30%. For my 7970M's i dont know how if my PSU is the limit right now. Going higher shuts me down, and not on temperatures. I run quite a bit of my total power on my CPU where i use apx 100W for all normal use all the time (TDP at 110W), you guys dont need that to avoid the CPU to handcuff the GPU's
Donno how high the R9 could be oc'ed. It could be more than the 7970M even though its a "rebrand". Donno if anyone has tested this. BUT R9 does not yet XF.


Price: Apx 30% difference.

Rebrand: Less changes on the R-9 than the 780, but both still use last gen GPU chip (and from what i read so does the 880M). Both has from what ive read changed something in handling of temperatures regarding automatic overclocking, both has most likely changed a few components to be able to stable run higher clocks. The 780 has also done changes on the Cuda cores from the 680M. Before they change GPU type we still mostly talk about som sort of rebrand regardles off team green or team red or what?


Performance: My guess is that less than 10% buy their GPU for beeing best at benching aka most peeps shouldnt care. In here we are not average, probably pushing the numbers to 30-40%. Its nice to know what it can do once you have it for that benching program and that benching program only. Better suited to compare equal cards and what we can get out of them compared to others with the same card. The benchmark videos are quite boring after a while too and not someting you put on for entertainment. I used to bench to optimize. If someone else with the same cards could go higher, it was worth a tweak to try to improve. And now its pretty much running as fast as they can while beeing stable.

Different programs has different performance differences depending on focus of the producer of the games and the GPU providers focus on drivers towards that game. Any actual number is impossible. It would be average numbers. Im not an average user, most others are not either.
We use some programs and we dont use others.
Most programs dont even care about your GPU performance.

Performance in the programs you use should be concidered for what you buy and then compared to price. It could be 5% difference, no difference or above 50% difference depending what you use.
At some point the extra cost is really really worth it.
On average the 780M is faster than the R9 in most tests.


For me its BF-4 beeing the most GPU heavy I use. Right now the advantage probably lies on the 780M but its not 20%.
Mantle works, but its not perfect yet. For crossfire its not working now. (meaning im excluded for now)
If your favorite programs utilizes mantle noone knows really what the difference between the two cards is. Right now the only two games taking advantage of this is BF4 and Swarm.
Tests done on single R9 290M is quite OK from what ive read, improving quite a bit, but still its not perfect.
Seems also that mantle gives the AMD CPU's more improvements than Intel CPU's when in combination with AMD GPU.

For me, mantle could keep my M17R2 alive for quite a while once they sort the X-fire out.

Bottom line, when the extra performance for what you need is worth the investment to you, DO IT.

 

GTX 780M is atleast 20% faster.

Notebookcheck did a review where 8970M (R9 M290X) was tested with a brand new driver while they didn`t bother to test the GTX 780M with the newest Geforce driver. Nvidia had issued out not 1, but 3 newer drivers from the driver Notebookcheck tested with. 2 of them with major improvements.
The Notebookcheck review found out that GTX 780M was 15% faster than 8970M in the review.

Just go over the latest game tests they have done where they use new drivers and you can see that GTX 780M is clearly much faster:
Assassin Creed 4: 29% faster
Call of Duty Ghosts: 31% faster
Batman Arkham Origins: 40% faster
Battlefield 4: 6% faster
Fifa 14: 20% faster
Total War: Rome: 26% faster

etc etc.
You see? It fluctuates between 20-30% between R9 M290x and GTX 780M. But in average we are probably looking at +20-25% for GTX 780M

AMD basically gave up while Nvidia was clearly this generation`s winner in notebooks. Three rebrands (7970M = 8970M = R9 M290x), I mean, come on...

 

EXACTLY, they gave up on producing new hardware. Also have you all seen the new maxwell desktop GPU's they consume 60 watts of power in full load. Imagine the maxwell mobile GPU's the 7970m rebrand x 2 will not stand a chance in power consumption per watt performance nor silly mantle support. THAT developers have to get in the works first .......

 

Yes absolutely looking forward to see what Maxwell can do for us notebook users.
First up is GTX 860M which is looking to be atleast GTX 770M performance if not slightly better.
High end Maxwell (GTX 880MX) is part of 2nd generation Maxwell and those is said to have ARM processor as well as the GPU die. The ARM processor will reduce CPU overhead just like Mantle does, but will work on any game because it is just a piece of hardware which Nvidia optimize with regular drivers. Plus we get unified memory, and that ARM processor could also offload stuff from the CPU and help with PhysX.

Really looking forward to that card

 

Even then, I doubt the 20% price difference is worth $600 more?

 

If it works with all functions on the Alienware 17 there is no doubt I'll get the 880MX it will make mobile hardcore gaming possible. Think of the power consumption at full load ... oh my god. Delicious. If maxwell mobile is as optimized as the desktop version is we will be seeing a reason for that huge price tag. ALSO bolded above is why mantle is dumb.

 

Someone might want to mention to the R9 that it is supposed to be slower...

Alienware 17 (AMD) - Gaming Laptops - Laptop Mag