Alienware m17x R3, 6870M or GTX460M?

Base on what we know, what would be your choice?

ATI 6870M

• Doens't support 3d yet
• Maybe it won't turn of when not needed (460m has optimus?) and will use more battery?
• A little bit more performance? (not sure, no benchs yet)
• No physx
• $50 bucks cheaper

NVIDIA GTX460M

• Support 3d (but can it run? I think not)
• Has optimus tech, probably more battery duration
• A little less performance? (no benchs yet)
• Physx/CUDA
• cost $50 bucks more

Discuss...

 

For now I'm going with the 460m, when the next set of gpu's get release(6970, 485m, ???? who knows for sure) I will probably change my mind but for now the 460m. The 4XXm series run very cool and have a lot of overclock potential, they have higher resale value because of initial cost, and have CUDA/PhysX as well. The stuff I've seen on the cards shows the difference at stock to be next to nothing.

 

Optimus, 3D display support, higher performance vs 6870m, cuda, physx, nvidia drivers..there's no question about it, 460m is the better choice.

 

+1 on that mate.

 

no brainer, 460m is the winner here, in all aspects i must add. 5870m is the direct competitor to 460m (with 460m winning most of the time by a small margin), so 6870m, which is weaker than 5870m is no match for 460m.

 

I'm not a 3D fan so I voted ATI. I just don't get anything out of 3D and to me it looks gimicky and hard to focus on.

 

I wont use 3d on a laptop, so, thats why I did this poll, because im trying to decide whichi one should be my choice...

 

This has been said on the boards but I wanna restate it in this thread again in case some newcomers don't already know this. But the 460m will give you a battery overall battery life then the 6870 will and you'll only see that quotes by alienware 6 hour battery life with the 460m. OH and the 460m gives you 512mb more memory, which might not be needed but more is merrier right? But the 6970 has 2gb, so ummmm start the 6970 thread?

 

what are you saying the 5870 and 6870 are the same card and you are classifying it as 5870>460>6870 ????? wait wuttt

in gaming the 6870 kill the 460 in performance and on power consumsion the 5870 has been said to be around 50 watts and in the last new the 460 was worst how can the 6870 be worst it's the same card

6870 does not suport 3d LUL wait wutttt my 4850 support 3d how can the 6870 not make it

physix cuda sorry i can't resist laughing now

 

460, NVIDIA is always Better than ATI lol

 

the 6970m will trump both, without a doubt and it's the best card that will be available for this system. I don't know why it's not listed for sale yet though, but it's available for this system.

 

Definitely not a positive Imo.....
as far as i can tell the 460gtx card is a poor choice for gaming for dell. unless they did something fantastic with the drivers, the 460 performs well below the 5870, and i would surprised if the difference between the Sandy bridge & the current R2 cpus is going to be enough to make it a better choice. I would *Assume* that the 6870 is going to be at least on par with the 5870, I personally haven't seen any Benches for the 6870m, but this alone makes it the far better choice unless you have to have the Cuda option.

guess the best way to see is when a few of these get delivered, and we can bench them to death....

 

How come every1 say ATI dont support switchable graphics?

Hp envy 17 ( the new unreleased version ) use 6850 and on the news release one of the few updates it got is the ability to switch between integrated card and discrete gpu. Im no expert on gpu but shouldnt 6870 be better than 6850?

 

460m is a weaker card than the 5850 and 5870 apart from playing dirt 2 and editing/designing. 6870 will be the same card, ati have dominated the 75w area with this card with an iron fist (and it is much cheaper) for the past year so why has anything changed? the 460m is plainly unconvincing and came out months later vs its competitor. even the 470m which is a 100w card isnt much better than a 5870. Saying the 460m is better than than the 6870 is deceitful. You know it isn't true it beats it in not only synthetic benchmarks but fps ratings. If you want a gaming card get the ATI, if you want the extra rubbish nvidia have added or paid to Dell and other companies into recommending it over ATI get the nvidia card. Just use your brain.

 

Some numbers for the fanfolks in the house. 5870, 6870, 460, all pretty much the same. Up the clocks on the 6870 and it's the same. 460 edged the 5870 in a couple games, 5870 edged the 460 in some other areas. It's all moot. I'd say the $50 premium is for the 3d crowd.

 

Noodle9527- the reason why everybody has said the Ati doesn't support switchable graphics is because it's something that Dell has to include/enable for it to work and so far what we've seen shows that they didn't. Some of the websites have shown, while ordering, that the 460m supports Optimus(switchable) while it's not said anything about a switchable GPU config with the Ati card. Until someone has an Ati rig in their hands or Dell/Alienware says something else we can only assume that the Ati version is non-switchable.

 

Had the opportunity to test the GTX 460M. And If the 6870 is a 5870M clocked at 675mhz, then the only advantage the GTX 460M has is the 3D tech, PhysX/CUDA and Optimus. Also, the new nVidia notebook drivers are a pain in the compared to the mobile Catalyst drivers.

That said, the fact that the GTX 460M is being used in a 3d ready system makes it a better value than when it's not in such a system.

 

the 460m does not suport switchable on the m17x because the m17x chipset does not even suport the integrated gpu so no switchable graphic ethier way


ati suport 3D my 3 gen old ati gpu suport 3d

 

granyte Dell UK to this day shows right on the ordering site that it has Optimus when configured with the 460m, so is this another of Dell's lies or....?

Here's a screenshot if you don't believe me:

 

i read in the other thread that the chipset that AW is using doesnt support the On chip gpu, but i cant find the post with the link...its in the other R3 thread though,.

 

i'm starting to think the UK does not have the same laptopa s the rest of the world
the m17x can't suport optimus simply because the chipset is not the right one
unless the original statement about the chipset is wrong

 

It does support optimus. User manual states the M17x-R3 is using an HM67 chipset and not PM67 like we all thought.

6870m will not have the same performance as the 5870m, it's clocked lower. The 460M isn't much slower than a 5870m, it's about on par with it overall (within 5-10%).

So many things wrong in this post I don't know where to begin. The 470M handily beats the 5870m in almost every game. 470M SLi is about 20-30% faster than 5870m Crossfire. And no, saying 460M is on par with the 5870m is not deceitful. In REAL WORLD gaming, it trades blows with the 5870m even if it doesn't come out on top all the time. Fact is nVidia has caught up and surpassed ATi in mobile graphics. Except nVidia has the added bonus of having more features and IMO better drivers.

 

I guess it's a good thing one can up their clocks with relative ease, eh?

 

QFT. We get a lot of "on paper" battles in here. ATI should be faster, but Nvidia usually better has real world gaming cards.
ATI drivers are usually FTL.

 

1. Yes, they're saying that the 5870 and the 6870 are almost the same, but that the 6870 is an underclocked version.

This mirrors the desktop series. The 58xx was the top performance line for the 5000 series. But the 68xx wasn't the top performance for the 6000 series, the 69xx was.

So yes. The 6870 is inferior to the 5870.


2. We don't have any benchmarks on this system yet apart from the 3DMark scores given by Alienware. We can't say whether the 6870M beats the 460M, or vice versa.

In fact, there aren't any benchmarks for a 6870M in any notebook.


3. Yes, the ATi cards support 3D but that's using a 3rd party driver. ATi have not released their official 3D kit yet. Dell can't rely on 3rd party drivers to run ATi in 3D.


4. To some people, PhysX and particularly CUDA are a serious concern. Laugh all you want, just because you don't use them doesn't make them useless features.
________________________________________

All in all, I voted 460M, mainly because it's currently the only card that supports 3D, and Alienware are trying to push that 3D tech. If you don't care about 3D then that levels the playing field, but overall I'd still go for the 460M mainly because it's the only one known right now to support switchable graphics (hence the 6 hour battery life).

In terms of outright performance, it's likely to be neck and neck and nobody can say for sure until we see some R3 benchmarks.

 

Where did you find a user manual? I looked on dell's site and didn't find anything. Can you provide link to manuals?

 

I said that the 470m was superior performance than the 5850/5870 but when you consider its wattage it required for the gains it was an absolute failure, the 5850 has far better performance per watt and it was about half its price. there are times that the 470m would draw nearly twice as much power and as a gpu upgrade you are looking at a meagar 10%. yeh great card dude, considering they aren't even competing in the same catagory the 470m should trounce it far better than it does. the SLI point you make is silly when you consider its power needs, what clown would want two of them? finding a laptop that contains this card is a rarity it was such an expensive waste of time!

And the 460m might be in the 5870s range but it doesn't beat it in any gaming apart from games that are opimized for nvidia cards. Even the underclocked 5850 is overall slightly stronger and theres more headroom to overclock. when you consider that the 460m release came months and months after the ATI card as a response to their dominance it puts it into perspective! If the 6870M is the same card from the information we have it will bench better than the 460m. And why do you even need need cuda wih sandy? what is the point?

 

Proof? Because if you're trying to cite notebookcheck as a source, you need something a lot better than that. AMD measures on die wattage which doesn't take into account the rest of the board. The 5870m in my system can draw as high as 75W during load and lots more when overclocked. The 460M's power draw is along the same lines. The 470M may draw more power than the 5870m but it's also not a 10% difference--again if you're going to state such definitive percentages, back it up with a source.

You will find that lots of "clowns" would jump at the opportunity to have 470M SLi in their M17x-R2. Unfortunately us clowns weren't given the opportunity by Dell.

The 5850m will not bench better than the 460m. Here take a look at this article: GeForce GTX 460M SLI: Mobile Gaming Value From AVADirect? : A Little More ?Less Is More?

The 460M SLi takes out the 5870m xfire setup. Even though the x7200 uses a desktop processor, if you take into account that Tom's used higher resolution tests + 4xAA (thus becoming GPU limited) it clearly demonstrated that nVidia was tops.

The conclusion:

 

The same sort of 'clown' that would want an R2 with 5870 XFire, or 285M SLi, or any of the other enthusiast graphics solutions.

You're basically calling people clowns for wanting a pair of high powered GPUs in their notebook? Clearly you're on the wrong forum, then. Essentially, you're calling any M17x R1/R2 owner with SLi/XFire a clown.

Just because the card requires a high wattage doesn't make it a 'silly' solution. There are companies that can put extreme desktop processors into a notebook. So too can two notebook GPUs be put into a notebook, even with a very high power requirement, given a good PSU and a good cooling system.

And people will pay for that. Yeah, it might be a hell of a lot more expensive than solutions marginally less powerful. So too are Extreme processors, and they seem to sell alright, otherwise they wouldn't be used widely in high performance notebooks.

 

agreed, If I could get a M17 with a pair of 4xx or 5xx GPUs I would be on it in a heart beat

 

Well said. I guess there's enough of us clowns to start our own circus.

 

Until now I can't decide to go with 460M or 6870M. Wish they have released the 6970 and my problems would be resolved...

 

I know I would too. Heck, I'd buy a fully loaded R2 if I had the money. But I don't. That's part of the reason the R3 appeals to much to me.

I've been considering an M15x for a while now anyway. But the R3 would let me keep the bigger screen size, has 2 HDD slots as well as 4 RAM slots, as well as supporting 3D, and hopefully there's the future 6970M. That's more appealing to me than the M15x.

Out of the two available now I'd go for the 460M. It's likely to perform better than the 6870M (unless the Dell 6870M isn't the underclocked 5870M that it's meant to be) although even if so, it'll only perform better by a tiny margin. But you also get the advantage of Optimus, PhysX, CUDA, and 3D compatibility right now.

However...if you're willing to wait, I'd wait and see if the 6970M is around the corner. It could well be a massive performance boost over the 460M/6870M.

 

I would also swap my 5870s for a pair of 460.

Ah! john2000... welcome to the circus...

 

I still have some numbers from my GTX 460M tests compared to the ATi 5870M when I was trying to get two GTX 460Ms in SLi to work in my M17x. I compared about 10 games (AA and no AA) or so and the GTX 460M was faster than the 5870 in just two of them without AA and just one with AA. I couldn't test the dual cards (CfX vs SLi) because apparently Dell doesn't know what an "SLi Cable for an M17x-R1" is.

Either way, since this M17x R3 will only be available with one card, the 6870M will most likely outperform the GTX 460M in most games. But the fact that the M17x-R3 has a 3D screen should make you lean towards the GTX 460M to actually make use of the one thing the M17x R3 has over the R2 and most other systems.

 

So will a pair of 460 GPu's work in a R2 ?

 

From what Ive seen at least on the desktop side, the 5870 and 6870 are more different than clock speeds. The 6870 has fewer transistors and and fewer stream processors. I havent seen the specific numbers for the mobile series but it should follow suite. Anyone seen them?
That makes the GTX 460 a better competitor for the 6870. 5870 pulls ahead of gtx460.

I think spec wise it will, we just need a guinea pig.

 

Thread is now closed due to multiple off topic posts having to be removed
In the future I hope that members here will learn to disagree
Without, calling each other a 'clown' which we all know is not-appropriate