New School 7970m vs gtx 680 questions for my R4.

Ok so I know it was asked a million times when both of these gpus came out. But I just had my 7970m crap the bed... so the questions now lies:
7970m or 680m with all the current driver optimizations taken into account etc.
Now that the drivers are better optimized, at stock clocks, before I blew my GPU up I could achieve this:
AMD Radeon HD 7970M video card benchmark result - Intel Core i7-3820QM Processor,Alienware M17xR4 With a basic overclock my scores were around 7300.

It will cost me about $450 canadian to replace the 7970m but I have the heatsink and upgraded thermal pads all there ready to go
OR
Do I spend About $500 canadian and buy a 680m and a 675m heatsink (all i can find reasonable on eBay is the 675m heatsink)

So here's the big questions.
1. Is the 680m faster/cooler?
2. Will my laptop be worth more for re-sale with the 680m?
3. Overclocked vs Overclocked are they still close? (if I get the 680m I would probably flash SVL7's vbios to squeeze the 680m a bit more)

Thanks in advance!

 

680m should be better, it arguably has a higher overclock potential. Perceived value would be 680m being better value, especially if you can buy them at the same price.

Note you DO NOT need a new heatsink just new xbracket and pads will be fine. Hopefully the upgrade kit usually comes with a xbracket depending on who you buy from.

 

680m oc's better.
I feel that 7970m is a better card overall. These days @ stock it beats the 680m pretty convincingly, it OC's decently as well and it has better compute performance, and I can't wait to see AMD Mantle start ripping into the market.
Currently though i'm using a 670mx overclocked without overvolt, can do this: Generic VGA video card benchmark result - Intel Core i7-3840QM,Dell Inc. 096J9P
I spent like 90 EUR for it.

There's no shortage of interesting chips for you to try to play with.

 

am i missing something ?
where is your R2 ?

 

If i went for something in the 770m/780m line it would appear that I lose the hybrid graphics capability. i do use the laptop as a portable and enjoy the 5-6 hour batterylife i get by running off the intel GPU. Every post I read says you need the unlocked M17x bios to turn off the hybrid GPU stuff so my battery life would suffer. Has anyone tried this?

 

Yes you would need to stay in dedicated mode.

 

The battery life will be decreased if you do this. There are some unlocked BIOS's available for download at the TechInferno forums.

 

Wanted to thank everyone for input. I didnt want to modify my heatsink/thermal pads, and the 7970m is a better performer than the 680m so I found a 7970m for cheap and scooped it. Someone needs to make a hacked bios that supports hybrid graphics then I would be happy!

 

Heh, it's not quite so simple I think. But glad you are happy