Buying an R4 but not sure which card to go with.....

As the title says,

I've decided to buy an M17x-R4 but am having a hard time deciding which card to go with. Does anyone know if the Nvidia throttle issue is present with the 680m? Are the AMD drivers still junk?

I have a 6990m R3 right now and driver issues have really given me a bad taste for AMD but I'm hesitant to trust that Alienware / Dell hasn't crippled the 680 like the did the 580.

Anyone with real world experience with either cards please chime in. Please leave out the fan boy biases or the "my sisters ex boyfriends third cousin thrice removed" statements, only interested in real world experiences.

Thanks!

 

Not a lot of owners with the 680m yet but 7970m owners seem happy. 350 is a big price to pay for slightly better drivers especially in the beginning of a cards lifecycle. If money is no object id say 680m but if you would rather put that 350 towards a nice SSD then that would be my pick.

 

Like Oblast said, there are not many 680ms in NBR users' hands right now. In fact, I have only seen two. I would wait just a bit until some R4s get tested. I believe Widezu is expecting his replacement to arrive tomorrow.

From what I have seen, the 680m does seem to run cooler. Do you intend on overclocking? I had no issues with the 580m/675m at stock.

 

No, no intentions of overclocking or anything of that nature. Computer will primarliy be used for movie watching out here in sand land, gaming when I can find games that don't require a constant network connection and music organizing.

Back home the computer will primarily be a gaming rig that won't leave the desk it sits on.

 

I personally would wait and see if the 680m is bottlenecked or not. Once that is figured out, you can personally decide if the better driver support and such is worth the extra cash over the 7970m.

 

Movies as in movies on disc? If yes, then you will want to go cheap on the stock optical drive and buy a Sony or Panasonic Blu-Ray drive online. Of course, you'll have to install yourself. So the choice is yours if you don't want to fiddle with a brand new machine...but the optical drives that are being put into these machines still aren't very durable.

 

I have an external DVD, won't waste money on Blu Ray for a computer screen, not worth it to me. Aside from that, I have about 3TB worth of movies and TV shows on external drives.

 

Good deal, good deal. In doing a quick search, some users in the Clevo sub-forum ran into some throttling issues with the 680M. You can ask if they found a way around the throttling. http://forum.notebookreview.com/sager-clevo/673583-p150em-upgrading-675m-680m-17.html

 

680m is better according to the benchmarks but the 7970m is slightly behind it so I'll just go for the 7970m to save the money, but that's just my personal saver opinion