4850's Finally out for the m17

If the M17 has horrible GPU cooling, then GPU cooling in most notebooks must be garbage.

It keeps both cards below 90C, which is well within thermal limits. With mine it stays below 80C in every game except Crysis as well, and that's with stock paste.

Not the best cooling in the world but it gets the job done. I remember that my desktop's 8800GT ran as hot as my 3870s did and that's a desktop card (that is, it ran that hot until I bought a Zalman GPU cooler for it...now it runs cooler than my desktop's processor lol)

 

Did you guys put a copper on top of the northbridge?

 

There are of course hotter running notebooks, but I would not consider them as options. The M17x GTX 280m's never go above 70c for me. My 3870s in my whitebook got over 100c. The cooling is sufficient, but leaves much to be desired (like a much bigger fan and a seperate set of fins and fan for each GPU - like the W850D "M17x" )

 

My 4850's are staying nice and cool Granted it's not like the M17X but it does a pretty good job

 

Thank you very much for posting this.

It will help me alot .

 

has anyone else had luck getting these from alienware or anywhere else?

 

So Alienware is now selling 3870 owners the 4850s?

 

no last time i called ....

 

4850's can be bought here:

http://www.alibaba.com/product-tp/105818249/ATI_HD_4650_M96_M_HD.html

 

those are 512mb cards the ones from alienware was 1gb right ?

 

and will those have the crossfire connectors?

 

There was no price that I could see, and it does specifically mention that they are 512MB VRAM. Was there a 512MB version?

 

Are we counting the ASUS W90 cards?

MSI used 512Mb 4850s.

 

I guess 512MB isn't a huge deal since that's what I've already got. But is this site legit? If so, M17 owners everywhere would be liberated, and we should be spreading the good word! Has anyone ordered cards from them?

 

i think all that is bull.... the pic with all the cards and no price i don't know

 

Anyone know what exactly a previous M17 owner has to do to order the 4850's to be shipped to them?

Also, forgive me if this is in another post, but what is the current USD price of the upgrade?

Thanks!

 

those are both pretty big unknowns

The common answer seems to be to just bug the crap out of alienware, calling over and over until you get someone who will actually let you order them

 

Hi gents,

There is a guy somewhere on this site with those same cards in his M17....according to his signature anyway.

Can anybody with technical knowledge tell me if those 512Mb 4850 cards will be much of an improvement over the 3870s?

If so then I may start by contacting the seller.

I know the site doesnt look great but they have different standards and methods in China.

Cheers guys!

 

You just have to contact them and tell them that you want to upgrade to 4850. It really depens a lot on the tech rep. When I first call them, one guy said out of stock, another said not available for M17. But dont give up keep trying and eventually you will meet one tech rep that is willing to do the order for you. When I bought the 4850 from Alienware, it cost only $225 which is surprisingly cheap for the card. The only reason I had a single card instead of a pair is because I don't game as much lately because of the workload from my university. If not I would have order a pair for sure. And when I want to play, I want to play at high enough settings to enjoy those eye candies. So I guess single card suits my need.

For some who was thinking twice about the performance of the 4850 vs 3870, I will say definately go for 4850 as it's almost as powerful as 3870Xfire. The performance boost in games are 20-30% upped from the single 3870 which is a lot.

 

dual 4850s should about 80% faster than dual 3870s, so ya, it is worth it

 

and 4850 is only slightly downclocked with anything else the same compared to m17x's 4870. Definately get it when you had a chance, single or pair.

 

I can't believe that getting one of these cards is literally all about the tech rep that answers the phone. I don't have $450, but when I do, I'll call them all day long.

 

Ya unfortunately they are that horribly unorganized. This whole 4850 fiasco did cost AW alot of customers

 

ShinJ, do you have a pair, or single? Do you know what your Vantage or 3D'06 score is at 1280x1024 with the 4850s? Thanks in advance for the info.

 

I have just a single 4850 and 3dmark06 score was 9800ish with [email protected]. It is capable to reach 11k with QX9300 in my opinion.

 

i'm at 11k with a q9000 and dual 4850 stock so just dream how hard you can push it with a qx9300

 

So it's $450 for a single card or a pair?

 

They should be $225.00 each..

 

You just have to call begging and pleading?

 

I think its more luck then begging and pleading ...

Many people have called on multiple occasions and AFAIK only 1 or 2 people on these boards have had any luck at all...

If your bound and determined to get them then calling everyday till you speak to every rep they have might get you somewhere..

If you have your machine and some type of service tag thats tied to you directly then give it a shot as they will not speak to anyone who is not the original owner..

 

I won't have it until Monday. It's supposed to come with a 90 warranty so I should be able to call them myself.

 

Yeah since your buying from them directly you should not have a problem..

I bought mine from a member here and the person that was trying to get me the cards i was not going to ask to call 4 times a day 7 days a week till he had an answer for me (though i would have liked that very much)...

 

Well I'll try it once everything checks out on the system.

 

hey mandrake you bought a m17?

 

Scook wrote; dual 4850s should about 80% faster than dual 3870s, so ya, it is worth it....

Hey Scook, Surely these 512Mb 4850s cant compare to 1Gb 4850s? or am I looking at this the wrong way?

Also, Ive been researching Alibaba.com and they are like an Asian E-bay but for traders. Ive sent the seller an E-mail claiming to be a small business saying that I would like to buy a pair of 4850s to test and if successful will purchase more later.
Lets see what happens.

 

they will almost definitely NOT have the crossfire connector...meaning you will not be able to run CF....

Also, the difference in memory will matter alot at higher resolutions (such as 1920x1200)

 

depends of thier clock if they haves the same then it depend on the definition or lvl of aa you use

 

there is of course, still that crossfire issue...but yes, the extra memory mainly matters when AA is being used, as you mentioned

 

At 1920x1200 in most new games your performance will crumble from 512 megs of VRAM ... I have done plenty of testing on my M17 and even the W90 takes a decent hit at 1920x1080 because of the lack of VRAM as i owned one of those as well and in some instance you feel some serious hashing from the lack of VRAM...

 

Yeah cheers guys for the replies!

Just gotta keep looking for an alternative.

 

depend of the card it self also


i had a inspiron 8600 with and ati radeon mobility 9600 (128mb) it had better performances at 1900x1200 then a geforce 7300 (512mb) at 1900x1080

 

yeah, I bought it from Alienware's ebay store.

 

Is it a new one or refurbished? definitely get a pair of 4850s and break some record like you did with your m17x ^^

 

should be able to get nearly the same 3DMark scores at 1280x1024 assuming the 4850s OC as well as the 4870s

 

It refurbished. I'll have 2 procs to test with it initially. A P8400 and a T9900. We'll see how it goes after that.

 

dont be lazy now, throw that QX9300 into the M17 some

 

Definitely post results and come screenshots for us m17's users

 

We'll see how good the T9900 is in both the M17x and M17. Maybe after that someone would be willing to trade.

 

With my X9100, my 4850s were only 350-400-ish GPU score in vantage off the GTX280m SLI (which I have now with the same RAM/CPU etc so have a good basis for comparison). They're good cards. Liked the extra CPU juice though, didnt look so great when run with a weaker CPU.

 

yea but how about single card, will they benefit from the extra juice provided by powerful cpu? always has an idea that p8600 will be bottlenecking 4850 performance.