M290x worth the $250 over the GTX 770M for the Alienware 17?

Hi guys, do you guys think the M290X is worth the extra $250? Also, will current Alienware 17's with 770m be able to upgrade to the 880m in the future without issue? (other than a bigger power brick). Thanks

 

I'd personally just go with 770m as the 290x (AKA 7970m) Should perform about the same unless mantle really changes things. As to the upgradablilty in the future, we won't really know till the cards come out and someone tests them.

 

I think it really depends on how important that $250 is to you, and how willing you are to overclock your cards. The M290X aka 8970M is about 35% faster than the 770M, but the 770M is likely to be able to overclock further than the M290X, which would further narrow the gap between the two cards. This is especially true if you are willing to flash a modified VBIOS (from user svl7 on Tech Inferno forums) to the 770M which will remove the +135Mhz overclocking limit on the 770M and also allow you to overvolt. There are dangers to the overvolting & flashing modified VBIOS. Modified VBIOS will invalidate your warranty if Dell find out when you send your machine in for repairs, and overvolting can damage your card. Overclocking without overvolting though is generally completely safe as long as your temperatures aren't stupidly high. Once you push both cards to their limits there's not a great difference between them, and certainly not in relation to which games are playable or not. The M290X will always offer just a little chunk more performance regardless what you do with both cards, but if that's worth $250 that's your call, it won't really affect which games are playable though. In fact, if I were you, I'd wait until the end of this year for when the Maxwell NVidia cards come out, and upgrade then. It's possible they will offer nearly twice the performance of the current GPUs, so that would be better value for you, if you can wait.

EDIT: Upgrading current Alienware 17's with new 800 series GPUs is an unknown quantity as to whether it would work or not. The R3 (mine, and as I've done) and R4 are upgradeable with newer GPUs, but you need to flash a modified BIOS (not VBIOS) to the system, and also use modified NVidia drivers (quite easy to do) to get the cards to work. Otherwise they work with no issues & are great - really pleased with mine. (You also lose Optimus)

 

This is really accurate. We don't know until they come out. Try maxing it out as it is, that way the leap from it to the new series won't be that high and the upgrade won't be strictly necessary.

 

Good points. I just got my Alienware with 770M and it performs nicely. I tried overclocking it like some members here +135mhz on the core and +200 on the mem, but it wouldn't have it. Max I could do was +75 mhz on the core and that got me a 3dmark11 score pf p5306. It's still a respectable score, and I'm not too worried about it so I'll just keep the 770m for now. HOPEFULLY, we'll be able to upgrade to the new 880's coming out this summer. I can only hope! Thanks for the insight.

 

Stick with the 770M. You'll be able to upgrade to the 870M/880M later on.

 

The gap will be larger than that at stock. The 290x will be in most cases a decent amount faster.

 

When I bought my M17xR4 with the 7970m, it was $50 cheaper than the 670m and about $250 cheaper than the 680m aka 770m. Now I find it ridiculous that the exact same card with higher stock clocks costs $500 more relatively.

 

Those cards are different.
770M is slower than 680M.

 

I ordered a new system just today and was a bit torn over this issue myself. However, I did some research and decided to go with the R9 M290X card over the 770M because of some side-by-side comparisons:

AMD Nvidia
Core Speed 850 MHz 811 MHz
Architecture Neptune XT Kepler GK106

GPU Memory

Memory 4096 MB vs 3072 MB
Memory Speed 1200 MHz vs 1000 MHz
Memory Bus 256 Bit vs 192 Bit
Memory Type GDDR5 vs GDDR5
Bandwidth 153.6GB/sec vs 96GB/sec

GPU Display

Shader Processing Units 1280 vs 960
Shader Performance 832 vs 960
Technology 28nm vs 28nm
Texture Mapping Units 80 vs 80
Texture Rate 68 GTexel/s vs 64.9 GTexel/s
Render Output Units 32 vs 24
Pixel Rate 27.2 GPixel/s vs 19.5 GPixel/s

GPU Display Tech

DirectX 11.2 vs 11.1
Shader Model 5.0 vs 5.0
Open GL 4.3 vs 4.3
Max Res 4096x2160 vs 4096x2160

GPU Power Requirements

Max Power 100 Watts vs 75 Watts

Source: AMD Radeon R9 M290X compare Nvidia GeForce GTX 770M GPU

They also had this to say:


In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the AMD Radeon R9 M290X are very slightly better than the Nvidia GeForce GTX 770M.

The Radeon R9 M290X has a 39 MHz higher core clock speed but fewer Texture Mapping Units than the GeForce GTX 770M. The lower TMU count doesn't matter, though, as altogether the Radeon R9 M290X manages to provide 3.1 GTexel/s better texturing performance. This still holds weight but shader performance is generally more relevant, particularly since both of these GPUs support at least DirectX 10.

The Radeon R9 M290X has a 39 MHz higher core clock speed and 8 more Render Output Units than the GeForce GTX 770M. This results in the Radeon R9 M290X providing 7.7 GPixel/s better pixeling performance. However, both GPUs support DirectX 9 or above, and pixeling performance is only really relevant when comparing older cards.

The Radeon R9 M290X was released less than a year after the GeForce GTX 770M, and so they are likely to have similar driver support for optimizing performance when running the latest games.

The Radeon R9 M290X has 1024 MB more video memory than the GeForce GTX 770M, so is likely to be much better at displaying game textures at higher resolutions. This is supported by the fact that the Radeon R9 M290X also has superior memory performance overall.

The Radeon R9 M290X has 57.6 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the GeForce GTX 770M, which means that the memory performance of the Radeon R9 M290X is much better than the GeForce GTX 770M.

The Radeon R9 M290X has 1280 Shader Processing Units and the GeForce GTX 770M has 960. However, the actual shader performance of the Radeon R9 M290X is 832. The GeForce GTX 770M having 128 better shader performance is not particularly notable, as altogether the Radeon R9 M290X performs better when taking into account other relevant data.

The Radeon R9 M290X requires 100 Watts to run and the GeForce GTX 770M requires 75 Watts. The Radeon R9 M290X requires 25 Watts more than the GeForce GTX 770M to run. The difference is not significant enough for the Radeon R9 M290X to have a noticeably larger impact on your yearly electricity bills than the GeForce GTX 770M.

Also, at another side I found this: AMD vs. Nvidia comparison

Higher clock speed 850 MHz vs 706 MHz More than 20% higher clock speed
Significantly better floating-point performance 2,176 GFLOPS vs 1,356 GFLOPS More than 60% better floating-point performance
Significantly higher pixel rate 27.2 GPixel/s vs 14.1 GPixel/s Around 95% higher pixel rate
More memory 4,096 MB vs 3,072 MB Around 35% more memory
Higher effective memory clock speed 4,800 MHz vs 4,008 MHz Around 20% higher effective memory clock speed
Higher turbo clock speed 900 MHz vs 797 MHz Around 15% higher turbo clock speed
Higher texture rate 68 GTexel/s vs 56.5 GTexel/s More than 20% higher texture rate
More render output processors 32 vs 24 8 more render output processors
More shading units 1,280 vs 960 320 more shading units
Wider memory bus 256 bit vs 192 bit Around 35% wider memory bus
Higher memory clock speed 1,200 MHz vs 1,002 MHz Around 20% higher memory clock speed

Source: Radeon R9 M290X vs GeForce GTX 770M

Finally, I have the desktop version in my desktop and am quite pleased with how well it works - pumps out over 120 fps in WoW with all settings maxed out and pulls a good 30-40 fps in Battlefield 4 with settings on high.

It won't outperform a 780M, but it will the 770M. I opted to order my new system with the AMD video card so I had the cash to spare to upgrade the drives to a 256 Gig SSD boot and a 1 TB HDD storage drive setup

 

The M290x is LITERALLY another rebrand of the 7970M. a.k.a. A rebrand of the 8970M; a rebrand of a rebranded GPU.

Confused yet?

The only thing I have to ask is... WHY!?

 

in my case Alienware Canada is not offering the 770M for the alienware 17 any more (and no idea why either) but are only offering the 765M, 780M, or the R9 M290X (on specific models) at the moment.

the 765M is too underpowered for a 17.3-inch 1080p display and that means a lot of sacrifice in a game's settings to get a reasonable 69fps.
the 780M has the power but is too costly.
the 770M is a good balance between the 765M and the 780M but, as said, is not available as an option.
the R9 M290X has better performance than the 770M (for what is essentially a rebrand 8970M with updated DirectX hardware support - R9 M290X is DX11.2 while the 8970M is DX11.1).

I have been tossing between the 780M or the R9 M290X and the following things are holding my decision:

1) the 780M has official driver support from NVIDIA while the R9 M290X does not from AMD.
2) the R9 M290X has not been benchmarked / tested / reviewed by anyone yet so performance is also questionable.
3) Mantle for the R9 M290X - will it be supported? the product page says yes but needs driver support....which there is none.

I am hoping there would be more news by mid-March in regards to all 3 points....especially 1 & 3.

 

I will post my benchmarks as soon as I get the system in and can do them. system is due to be delivered around the 20th.

 

Have you received your laptop yet and test out the R9 ?

 

This is precisely why I got the M17x R4 second hand with a 7970M as there really was not point spending 2 times the amount to get a R5 with 770M/780M new...