GTX285m SLI vs HD 5870 Crossfire

There was no HM45...it was GM45 as the IGP was in the northbridge and not the CPU package. And PM55 came out 4 months earlier and was the only chipset for any mobile i7 until HM55 came out (Along with all of the arrandale parts).

 

true got mixed but it remain that one is made without igp and the other with

on purpose

 

I agree they did it on purpose. What they should have done however, is included the IGP in both and made the PM55 more expensive as it is the performance chipset whereas the HM55 is the mainstream part. That way you do not have to make a compromise when designing a system (like the M17x no getting the IGP because it needed the dual GFX)

 

What's the ETA on someone from the forum with the 285M in SLI? We are starting to be impatient...

 

My head just exploded reading that.

 

agree switchable gfx is an other thing i'm waiting with to change my laptop but you know how they do it we might get wit with SB

 

Not to get too OT but was the battery life really that much better with IGP? On my R1 I could squeak out an hour and a half at most if I cranked everything way the hell down. I haven't done a good solid battery test on my R2 with stealth mode on but it seems to deplete at around the same rate (albeit with better performance).

-Byshop

 

Yes it is that much better. I get about 1-1.5 hours with the 4870s enabled. With the 9400m I can get 3.5 hours. And that is not idle for 3.5 hours, but using the laptop. I have watched full length blu ray movies and then still had an hour or more to play solitaire when flying (these things are not tray table friendly though haha)

 

I agree with you. IGP was useless. Battery life for a dvd playback on my R1 is roughly the same as my R2 on stealth mode... No need for IGP...

 

Are you serious. I've never had more than 2 hours on my R1. Not sure what I was doing wrong then...

 

Screen brightness all the way down. AlienFX off. Put the laptop into power saver mode. That is all I did haha....and that is 3.5 hours with the qx9300 in it, not a lower power dual core. I do not waste my time with stealth mode personally

 

damn i wish i had a igp i can squeze 2hours our of my m17 i never fully tested with my moded vbios though

 

My whitebook could do 3.5 hours until I put the 2nd 3870 in it.

 

Yeah, that's more than I ever got. Maybe there was an issue with my power saving settings. I fly constantly and the absolute best I ever got was close to 2 hours (movie file playback, no optical drive use) with cpu and brightness turned way down.

My solution was to get an empower adapter. The 75-90w you get out of an empower jack won't run discrete graphics, but it'll keep the battery from draining when running on IGP (although Windows doesn't recognize that you are on AC power).

One thing I like about the R2 is stealth mode doesn't require a reboot. You didn't necessarily have to on the R1 depending on the circumstances, but if you turned on the laptop off of AC power the BIOS flipped you to IGP and you couldn't undo without a reboot -and- changing the setting back in the BIOS.

-Byshop

 

lol WUTTTT what cpu was in there


btw is there a way to shutdown one of the 2 die of a c2q at the hardware level

 

No way that I know of to turn off one of the dies. And I had the P9500 back then, was before I got the qx9300

The P9500 and a single 3870 could go for over 3 hours with that monster 12 cell battery haha

 

yup i put a single 3870 for testing some time ago while i did not have my ac adapter i was like WOA 2h of baterie life no tweaking

that's what i though Lol no way i could do so long with my quad

to bad we can't completely shut down a card it stay on even after we diable CFX

so far it seem like i could get 1h40 detected out of my modded vbios but my bat detect 25% wear while it should not so i could get around 2h20-2h30 if only i could cut power to one mxm port

 

So whats the difference anyway if I overclock my 280M to the clock of 285m?
I don't see any sense in paying extra buck for 285m sli!

 

The Intel chipset instead of the Nvidia one.

 

That's obvios. I was pointing out the performance.

 

No difference. They are the same G92b core.

 

~ 3-6% compared to 280M card for card.


specifically:
9mhz slower on the core
37mhz faster shadder speed
70mhz faster Ram speed
even as far as clock speed updates go, it's pretty mild


However, now they're being paired with a much better PM55 chipset, which has acutal dual channel ram support and i7 processor support, it's probally closer to 5-8% over the 280M's in the R1, *maybe* 10% tops in some synthetics.

 

Do we have a generalisation regarding which is better in the m17x - sli 285 or x/f 5870? - sure i know ati is dx11 and eyefinity, nv is physx cuda but dx10...

Seen this now as an additional option when configuring a system on dell website....

Which one is the best? - the age old question eh?

Personally, I have gone for 5870's (driver issues seem resolved at least thats my impression given the new dell drivers/vbios)

Why are some of you guys opting for 285's instead? - has got me curious....

 

sorry to bring up an old post. however, there is absolutely no reason to wait on an m17x purchase, if amd hard released and shipped 6000 samples tomorrow you would not see a 6000 series m17x until early next year, Dell has proven it takes them a few months after a release to actually get new cards into their laptops and make them availiable for sale.

5870s are better, both perform about the same, but the amd cards just have a feature set that will appeal to more people versus the nvidia cards. besides being the slightly cheaper option as well.

for me it's because FF14 just works better in sli, I prefer nvidia multi gpu implementations and drivers as well. I'm also expecting to upgrade in the future to either 400 or 6000 series cards anyway. most importantly though, because I got them for free.

 

Forgive me for sounding "noobish" but , I presume that if you had 5870's there isnt a reason why you COULDNT upgrade to NV 400 or ati 6000 later on down the line is there?

 

there's no reason we can't besides bios support for up to the gtx470, Dell would need to revise their hsf package for 480s. unless nvidia comes out with a new mxm specification or amd 6000 cards have higher than 75w total board tdps then they should work too, given proper bios support. 6000 should work anyway given that's it's a cooler tuning chip, but amd likes to give core tdps rather than whole board tdps.

 

When are the first guys expecting to receive their M17x's with 285's in SLI fitted? I am really close to putting an order in for one but I want to see how it performs.

 

When my order status changes, I will post it here. It's only been in production for 8 business days.

 

If we can find a Clevo X8100 benchmark we don't even have to wait.

 

you'd want to wait. Even systems with the same chipset can spit back different numbers. It will be even more relevent when someone pairs these with an XM, since the M17X is the only SLi DTR that clock boosts all 4 cores on XM processors, which users of A07 found out real quick changes performance significantly.

It's bad enough we're using 2 different M17x's, without control over a half dozen variables that can change scores by as much as 1-2% or more.

 

Bugga. So I will have to wait another week .... I am not sure I can wait that long But I will wait because I want to know how it performs in the M17x and I want to know if there any " unexpected" side effects So hurry up Lozz and get your computer

 

The only side effect I foresee is psu issues since the GTX 285m's will consume more than the 4870s or 5870s

 

I wish this would give an incentive for Dell to upgrade the PSU to a 300W one.

 

they're all 75W consumption GPUs. They all draw the same amount of power. Infact I know there's a certian review that highlights that the 285 idles lower than the 5870s and only draws 3 W more loaded.

 

That is true, they are rated at that.....but I know that my GTX 280m cards drew ALOT more power than my 4870s......so draw your own conclusion

 

tom disagrees.
Power, Efficiency, And Battery Life : AVADirect's W860CU: Mobility Radeon HD 5870 Vs. GeForce GTX 285M


could probally discredit their findings about the 5870s drawing more idle power, since anandtech suggested their cards were not downclocking at all, and they're about the same laptop. However, Tom saw a 4W difference between the two. That would be 6-8W for us in SLI.

 

I was just speaking from my own personal experiences. I actually have a set of GTX 280m's right now, I will set them to GTX 285 clocks and voltage and compare the power usage for you. I need to do some benching though on the 4870s before I switch them out.

 

Yep, even if amd releases the 6xxx series in November as is likely, it will very likely another 2-3 months before the mobility version is released, then another 2-3 months before they show up in actual machines. My bet is we won't see a 6xxx series in an AW until late spring or later. There's really no reason to hold out.

 

we're assuming 4870's and 5870s draw the same amount of power though. I'm not sure they do. I believe you that 4870's draw less than 280M's, given that both are on 55nm and R770 generally draws less power than G92b but 5870s bring different items to the table, so I couldn't speculate if they're comparable or not.

 

The 5870m should be less than the 4870m

I have heard nothing to contradict this. The higher temps have been due to the poor application of the heatsink and the GDDR5 ram I thought?

 

True. If that's the case though, Tom's conclusions for power draw should have been a lot more clear cut however, and AMD is never clear whether their power draw figures are for the whole MXM board or for the chip alone.

 

AMD tends to quote the GPU itself where nvidia does the whole board. Which considerably muddies up the comparisons

 

exactly, so 50-65W for the chips alone, and add some more for the rest of the board..

 

Well, I'll be damned. I should have followed this thread more closely....

So I finally had my R1 replaced due to ridiculous technical issues, and the replacement order went through on the 28th. I got the Order number today to track it, and was stunned when I saw my GPU's were "285's SLI". I didn't think Alienware offered those! So I came right over here to see what everyone is saying, and am also curious as to how they'll perform. My machine should be getting here next week, so if everyone is still waiting for results, will try to oblige if nobody else has gotten one with those cards earlier.

That is, unless I cave and see if they can switch the cards to 5870's instead...

 

What I would like to know is if they are equipping R2's with 285m's, then will the bios be able to support both ATI & Nvidia cards?

If this is the case then can we (ATI owners) expect a bios update supporting Nvidia cards as well? Cuz right now I'm severely missing my late R1 with the greens..... well, minus the defunct mobo.

 

The bios support has been there for a very long time. The cards and any fixes via a special dell vbios or dell drivers have not however. Which is why 280M's didn't work in the R2 previously.

 

So, if you were configuring a new system, what would you opt fro...285's or 5870's?

 

Depends on the games/apps you'll be using.

 

If both cards had similar performance I would take the 285's everytime.

I had an ATI card once and since then I have always had Nvidia. Admittedly it was quite a few years ago I had the ATI powered computer and at the time it had better benchmarks than the then current Nvidia card but in real life, actual gaming performance it was nowhere near as good. I had so many crashes due to poor drivers and other problems that eventually I got rid of the computer and went back to an Nvidia and I have been smiling ever since.

Was mine just a lemon.... maybe. But nearly every blog I read that compares the two manufacturers they almost always agree that:
1. ATI may have better benchmarks but in real world performance there is not that much between them;
2. Nvidia has always had better driver support; and
3. Nvidia works with game developers to either tailor the game or their drivers to optimise the performance. On how many games do you see the splash screen "works better with Nvidia"..... I think that is what it says I usually just press escape or go and get a beer while it's loading.

Has ATI changed their practices, maybe, but Nvidia hasn't. So for me if there is a choice I will take the Nvidia everytime.

 

Many games seem to show off the green team logo nowadays...but from what I have read the cards are kind of similar.

I think technically the 5870 is 10-15% faster...but that difference seems to less apparent in games that make heavy use of PhysX.

But then again, the i7's in the R2's are more than beefy enough to handle those PhysX calculations. Not to mention both the big PhysX games I have (Batman Arkham Asylum and Metro 2033) seem to run fine. 60fps for AA on max and 40 to 55 for Metro on high settings.

So I guess what I am saying is that I dont think you're missing much performance wise either way (both cards have their pros and cons). I think the difference maker is drivers! I mean, I never had the driver issues with my 9800m GTS that I have had with the 5870's in my R2.

If I have one more technical difficulty in the next 2 weeks I am calling up dell and DEMANDING they switch my r2 out for the nvidia option. I am tired of doing a repair every other week.