Is it worth upgrading from 7970M Crossfire to GTX 980M?

Hey all,

Always found this forum to be very useful in the past, hoping it will prove to be again with regards to my first question.

So I was very fortunate to be given an Alienware m18x R2 free of charge by a retiring work colleague who has more money than sense and always has to have the latest and greatest gadgets. He'd got bored of playing Warcraft and offered me his m18x as part of a bonus for a ton of overtime work which worked out pretty well.

Anyway the system came with an i7-3630QM, 16GB RAM and dual AMD 7970M cards. I haven't really kept up to date with PC gaming hardware since I stopped building PCs with my dad back in the early 2000s so upgrades seem alien (no pun intended) to me at this stage.

After acquiring the machine for nothing I started to dabble again with a few games and came across a frustrating thing with this crossfire setup. Whenever crossfire is enabled I'm unable to play pretty much any game in full screen mode without a ton of flashing lines across the screen making it unplayable. As soon as I switch to windowed mode the games display perfectly but it's a bit of a pain in the butt to have to do so. I've found this to be the case on both Windows 7 and Windows 10 and no matter what driver version I run and whether I use the built in screen or the hdmi and display port outputs to another monitor.

So I recently started to look and see if the m18x is upgradable and thanks to some reading on here it seems to be the case. What I really wanted to know however is do you guys think it's worth upgrading the dual 7970M cards to a single 980M considering the cost? I don't have the budget to go for a 980M SLI setup but would I really notice a considerable difference in graphics performance by just upgrading to a single 980M? It has twice the graphics memory of the dual 7970s but I assume there's far more to it than that?

I've read some bad stories about the 980s dying after a very short time and I'm not enough of a hardcore PC gamer to justify replacing cards every time they fail. The issues I have with crossfire and full screen mode are annoying to say the least but I'm really more interested to know if you guys think I'd be wasting my time and money upgrading to a single 980M setup or just stick with what I have from purely a graphical/performance point of view.

Thanks in advance

 

I've had 7970Ms, 780Ms, and 980Ms. I can easily say that the 7970M issue you are having sounds like either the cable or the actual 7970M may be on its way out soon. That being said, I would definitely move to a 980M single and add a second 980M later on when budget allows. 980M single is just about as good as your 7970M Crossfire setup, but with none of the crossfire/SLI headaches.

 

I say it depends.

If youre using the unit mostly at home I would go the e-GPU route, and put that $500 or so you would spend on 980M to a GTX 1070, which is essentially faster than 980M SLI.

980M is a great card, but youre only going to appreciate it if your sole usage with the unit is away from home.

Oh I think you also need an external display for e-GPU to work so in the end it's a toss up. 980M SLI will need Swicks modified BIOS, Prema's modified vbios, and youre going to need to make a few adjustments in BIOS upon each and every restart (or just perpetually use sleep) and even then youre really going to need two PSU's connected together to get the most out of 980M SLI, which will be difficult to transport.

I would hold on to the 7970's unless / until you get a good deal on 980M now that the mobile 10 series units and cards are in circulation.

I got mine for $500, which was a great deal as they were going for $700. That's a lot for what is in the end a card slower than a GTX 1060 ($250).