Why Alienware needs to put the 470m into the M17x...

EDIT: Calculations are off, updated below.

The 470m looks like a vertiable monster of performance at 115% to 125% faster than the 480m!!!

Two of these 1.5gb cards in sli would just be something totally mindblowing in a notebook - all in the thermal and power package of CFX HD5870m

-Ash

 

what am I looking at exactly?

Edit: Nevermind, was confused with the shader count, where it has more shaders and textures than a GTX 480M? If the GTX 470M does (which it won't based on specs), then yeah it'll be faster. Faster than CFX 5870s? In tesselation maybe.

But expect the 470M to sit between the GTX 460M and the GTX 480M (as fast as a MR5870). nVidia isn't kind enough to offer a mobile card that's cheaper and a better performer than its mobile flagship.

 

3dmarks 06 result, estimated for the 470m.

Based on the calculations of 460m performance.

-Ash

 

Ill try clarify a bit.

Every cuda core in the 480m has 2x16 shaders and 4 texture units.

Every cuda core in the 460m and 470m has 3x16 shaders and 8 texture units.

The 470m actually has more shaders than the 480 by 22%, and more texture units by 63%.

Its also clocked 25% higher.

-Ash

 

could have just said 470/460 are GF104 based and 480 is GF100 based, anyone that has been following fermi GF104 architecture will know that's reason enough to pick the 470 over the 480

 

amazing informations guys but that makes our waiting them a bit longer...lol

 

That difference is more than accounted for with the extra memory bandwidth and shader count in the 480M.

Edit: I see nVidia likes to refer to their shaders as "Cuda Cores."

 

Ichime, please read:

Cuda cores are NOT shaders. There is 32 shaders in a cuda core for the 480m, and 48 shaders in a cuda core for the 460m/470m.

Again, Cuda cores are not shaders.

Big difference.

-Ash

Edit:

Clarifying further - the 480m does not have more shaders than the 470m. See above. The only advantage the 480m has over the 470m is memory bandwidth. This accounts for essentially nothing. 192bit GDDR5 is more than a HD5870 desktop card.

The 470m has more shaders than the 480m.
The 470m has more texture units than the 480m.
The 470m has higher core speed than the 480m.
The 470m has higher shader speed than the 480m.
The 470 has lower memory bandwidth than the 480m.
The 470m has higher memory bandwidth than a desktop HD5870.

-Ash

 

Ok I know what happened. You probably got the GTX 470M specs from Notebookcheck.net right? After reading about the GTX 470M on their site, I think they should have worded the sentence regarding the SM (streaming multi-processor) clusters better. It made it seem as if each CUDA Core for the GTX 470M has 48 shaders and each for the GTX 480M has 32. This is NOT the case because you are confusing CUDA Cores with the Streaming Multi-Processor(s).

What they (as well as other sites) are trying to say is that for the GF100, each SM has two clusters of 16 shader units (32 shaders per SM), which ARE the CUDA cores (1 Shader = 1 CUDA Core; they are the same thing). For the GF104, it's three clusters of 16 shader units (48 shaders per SM). HOWEVER, there are more SMs in the GTX 480M (11 activated) than in the GTX 470M (6 activated). If you do the math from this point, things start to make more sense as:

For the GTX 480M:

32 Shaders x 11 SM = 352 Total Shaders/CUDA Cores

For the GTX 470M:

48 Shaders x 6 SM = 288 Total Shaders/CUDA Cores

Anandtech has an informative comparison between GF100 and GF104 here.
Although the GTX 480M has more shaders, the GTX 470M does has more total texture units, hence the higher texture fill rate (only 7% higher than the GTX 480M).

Also, the last two points you made are false.

 

Now I'll bite if they rewrite the BIOS to support said 470M, and support the bigger PSU it will most likely require to keep from throttling under full load. Oh and give us some quality cooling solutions like your mod. Which BTW was done with minor cost. Maybe they would have to spend a tad more on quality thermal paste and make sure that there was proper alignment between heatsink & gpu die/memory. Could be done within totally reasonable and minor costs in production. The question is WILL they do it.
A single card that competes or outdoes the Crossfire 5870's is definitely worth it.
Nice research work Ash.
And thanks for the explanation/clarification - Ichime

 

Ah I see, that makes sense now. I did use notebookcheck for my information, and it does contradict the anandtech info (which i trust more).

Still, even with the 480m having 19% more shader cores, the 470m has higher theoretical performance then (in line with the 460m's effective calculations.)

It looks to be about 115%-125% of the performance of the 480m.

That is still waaaay higher.


I would have to go further into the maths, but I would say that nvidia is going to quietly bury the 480m, and resurrect it as a 485m with a gf104 core.

-Ash

 

2 things

I have every confidence that 470M SLI will come for the M17x. I think 460/470 will hit two price points and that's what will cause both to be available. However, I would expect, either now, or by Sandy Bridge update, for there to be a 485M. The name has already been referenced and the base chip for the 470 has the ability to have more activated shaders. I think 3 chips, 3 price points will actually provide a lot of choice.

I don't think at least the first steps 460/470 are far off timewise. I'm sure we just have to be patient And we are sooo good at that around here LOL.

 

I just don't understand why Alienware is making a delay in releasing a new R series? When it was just Alienware, it used to offer and give best config found anywhere but since it's venture with Dell, it is being lazy. Alienware really needs 5 hours energy drink.

 

I'd like to see the 470m, if for no other reason, I like having options. As it is, only AMD GPUs are available for the R2.

More choices are usually better...usually.

 

That is actually not true anymore, check the configurator for Graphic Cards on Alienware US:
The Dell Online Store: Build Your System

1GB GDDR5 ATI Radeon™ Mobility HD 5870 [Included in Price]
1GB GDDR3 NVIDIA® GeForce® GTX 285M [Add $75.00 or $3.00/month]
CrossfireX™ 1GB GDDR5 ATI Radeon™ Mobility HD 5870 [Add $375.00 or $12.00/month]
SLI® 1GB GDDR3 NVIDIA® GeForce® GTX 285M [Add $425.00 or $13.00/month]

I want a SLI/CFX hybrid

 

Have to agree with you there. Just look at the price of the older 285M. *Putting on flame suit* I'm not bashing the price or the cards or their performance, just repeating the obvious.
I have every bit of confidence that the current M17X R2 could handle one 470M if not two in SLI with some modifications to the BIOS, cooling and PSU upgrade. What I fear is that they will simply not offer them in anything but the next M17 Revision and since we can't modify the BIOS to recognize a slightly larger PSU... well no upgrade for the R2's. Not that I'll be doing it anytime soon or have the money to do so. I just prefer options and like my laptops to be upgradable. We have the option for upgrading: hard drives, RAM, even CPU... these hard coded customized gpu's ... are the last holdout on the easy upgrades. Well the PSU too. Just my 2Cents and with inflation that it isn't worth much.

 

470M is a 75W TDP package. All Dell would need to do is add BIOS support.

There are quite a few non-dell cards that work just fine.

 

I have it performing at the same level as the GTX 480M at Vantage in stock form, and within 90-95% of the GTX 480M in games. The latter is based on a desktop GTX 460 review at tomshardware.com, found here, where although the GTX 465 scores the same as the GTX 460 768mb in Vantage GPU (11600), the GTX 465 is 5-10% faster in games over the 768mb version on average.

Now regarding the calculations, let's take the GTX 460 768mb, which is 192 bit GF104. It scores 11.6k in Vantage GPU. The GTX 460M is pretty much the same as the 192 bit desktop version with lower memory clocks (core and shader clocks are the same) with the exception of the 460M having 3 of the 7 GF104 SM units disabled leaving 4 functional. So basically the GTX 460M is 4/7th of the 192 bit GTX 460. If we take 4/7th of the Vantage GPU score of the desktop version, we get:

11600 Vantage GPU x (4/7) SM units = 11600 x .571 = 6628

This is somewhat verified as the GTX 460M in the Asus G73JW scores around 6700 Vantage GPU at stock clocks.

The GTX 470M is a bit different; it has only 1 of the 7 GF104 SM units disabled, leaving 6 in tact. If the GTX 470M were overclocked to GTX 460M/192 bit GTX 460 clocks, the Vantage score would look something like:

11600 x (6/7) SM units = 11600 x .857 = 9943 (let's just say 10k)

But because the GTX 470M is clocked at 80% of the 460M/192 bit 460, it should score around 80% of 10k, which = 8000 Vantage GPU, which is the same as the ATi 5870 and the GTX 480M.

As I suggested before, a GF100 would perform 5-10% better than a GF104 with the same vantage score. So yeah, the GTX 470M should be between the GTX 460M and the 480M, but closer to the 480M. This is just like the whole 9800M GTS, GT and GTX family in DX11 trim.

 

Nonetheless Ash, it would be better to have 470M in SLI rather than the 285M SLI that just came out on the M17X that have been available for a while on many other PCs and that uses and architecture that is 4 years old.

 

True if it were just a single card but dual in SLI would need more power or throttle under load. Joker already proved that at 100%cpu and 100% gpu load the current crossfire config will throttle. And though at this point in time it is not an issue since we won't see anything that would load both at 100% as he did in the test. However, in the future it is totally foreseeable for that to happen as the hardware ages. I know the 50W 5870 is probably more like 60W but still you are talking about a 75W now and in a dual config it would push the PSU to the limit. I'll probably end up putting my foot in my mouth for that one later on. I usually do.
And I learned something today because I had no clue you could get anything but the Dell cards to be recognized. Thx for the info/education.

 

5870s do not pull 50W per card loaded. They're ~70-75W cards full load. They're 60-75WTDP cards, which is just how much heat they give off. That's what TDP is, it's not power draw.

The PSU works well beyond 240W, There's no way 470s will not work on our system. They're fully MXM3.0B compatible. The only reason 480M's are in question is because they have 100W TDP figures, not really so much because they draw too much power, because they only 'draw' ~ 75W of power themselves. If Dell used the heatsink mods and learned that they're installing them incorrectly, We'd have no issues running 480Ms in SLI on the M17X R2

http://hothardware.com/Articles/NVIDIA-GeForce-GTX-480M-Fastest-Notebook-GPU-Yet/?page=9
200-135 = 65W, we'll say for the sake of argument that 'a little over' is ~ 10Ws, 65+10=75W, or the maximum MXM3.0B allows. The fact that a G73 only manages 9 more minuites on battery power with a 5870 perpetuates this.

 

I get the tdp numbers, as in I get that it's the thermal design power which is the heat it has to dissipate. What I was missing was the power/current consumption numbers. That's why I said the 5870 was a 50Watt since the specs say that's the current consumption of the card. In fact the 480GTX is supposedly drawing 100Watts of current. So I guess I just assumed that was the draw of power and not the tdp. It was sound reasoning but without the proper research.
Darn it I knew I'd be putting my foot in my mouth. Well without correction I'd learn nothing. Thx for the info

 

The 470M seems nice but it seems it is less powerfull than the 285M according to the Nvidia website in terms of Gigaflops and pixel fill rate.

 

I don't get this whole PSU issue other SLI/ crossfire systems ship with a 220 Watt PSU. I haven't seen any issues about power consumption. why is it that the Alienwares suck so much power? Has anyone ever tested with a Kill a watt meter? Is there pics?

 

At low useage, the same machine with a 5870 uses more power than 480. It is only when running the GPU flat out that the 480 exceeds. So there is more to the overall power useagle puzzle than meets the eye.

Now if only they'd get to work and bring the 485M, I suspect we might see real GF106 improvements to even this comparison.

Power, Efficiency, And Battery Life : GeForce GTX 480M: AVADirect?s W880CU Is Packing The Heat

 

Any word when the 485M will surface?

 

well that's a start lol...still would like a more current NVidia GPU than one that was made like 4 years ago hehehe...

 

nvidia's power management system is a lot better than AMD's. Running the card @ 50/100 helps lol.

 

So, I am just going to assume that no one has done it then since no one would like to reply.

 

plenty have, in the benchmarking thread. A few have had it pull 300W+ overclocked iirc.

 

Are 470M available yet?

Edit: Yes They Are! But not for the M17X Yet.