ATI 4870s/Crossfire vs. nVidia 280M/SLI in M17x

Can anyone please post brief pros/cons of these two video setups as they apply to the M17x lap(crush)top or point me to a post that does this? I realize some of this is subjective. Helpful categories would be:

price
image quality
gaming performance
work performance (photoshop, video editing)
power consumption
temps/fan cycling
driver flexibility, ease of OC'ing
reliability

Benchmarking, while fun, is not a concern of mine. I also understand that the 4870s are not GDDR5, but are GDDR3 just like the 280Ms.

I'm also interested in how both relate to the power-saving integrated graphics. For instance, can you switch seamlessly/on demand between the ATIs and the integrated graphics, or is a reboot required, or is it not even possible? Are there any other "gotchyas" with the ATIs given the nVidia chipset in the M17x?

Thanks.

 

price - ATI's are more expensive by $100 (in the US)
image quality - I prefer the image quality of the ATIs, but it's personal preference.
gaming performance - Negligible. Some games ATI is better, some games Nvidia is better.
work performance (photoshop, video editing) - Nearly identical.
power consumption - Not sure on that one.
temps/fan cycling - In the past, ATI usually ran hotter. Not sure about now.
driver flexibility, ease of OC'ing - ATI driver support isn't that great. Nvidia *might* be better for OCing. Both would be easy.
reliability - Depends on how much you overclock either of them. Both about the same, but personally I've had better experience with ATI.


Integrated graphics will be the same no matter what graphics cards you choose.

 

im also interested in this topic. which one would you choose if given the choice between the two?

 

Perfect, thanks.

RE: understand about the integrated graphics display will be identical regardless of card chosen, but being able to select and switch back and forth between the ATIs and integrated graphics can be done without rebooting or some other weird operation?

 

The ATI cards have much better driver support right now

Since nvidia supports their notebook products but it never seems to work....

The ATI cards will be easier to OC (as long as you are ok with doing a vbios flash). Both cards run quite cool in the M17x, so no worries there. For both you have to restart the machine to use the 9400m, so that is a non issue for the comparison as well.

Given the much more mature architecture of the ATI cards they would be the logical choice since they have been proven to work fine.

 

It's easier to OC with the nVidia cards but the ATi cards are more stable when OC'ing.

I've owned both system and there is 1 difference that makes me say the ATI system is better and that is the drivers. When I had the nVidia system I would load up the Dox drivers to start benching. When I wanted to game I got spotty performance with the Dox drivers so I loaded the latest drivers from nVidia. A new driver popped up every week and some were good and some had obvious issues. Switching back and forth became time consuming.

With the ATI drivers I've tried 3 so far. The mobility drivers posted on the ATI site, the desktop drivers modded and the drivers posted by Dell. They are all surprisingly similar. I've been benching and playing games (just started) with the drivers provided by Dell. No more switching back and forth and I get top notch performance in gaming AND benchmarking.

 

get ati.

period.

 

Thanks Mandrake for the for the 4870 overclocking tuto !!! It s very cool

 

ATI ATI ATI

D:

Although I don't know why my computer seems to suck at Borderlands

 

Definitely go with ATI, though. Nvidia is a little better for some things, but overall ATI is much better.

I went with ATI as well.

 

You answered your own question: ATI ATI ATI.

 

Any of you M17x guys wanna trade your 280M for a 260M + $200? PM me.

 

So its unoptimized for ATI then? Care to elaborate?

 

Haha 200$ to void your warranty and give up top of the line video cards.. good luck with that.

 

If Borderlands is unoptimized for ATi cards, which seems to be the case, try renaming the executable to bioshock.exe

 

Can anyone confirm though if having Crossfire ATI's really gives you any kind of significant performance increase to warrent the cost? I ask because the last PC I built used 2x 8800GTX's in SLI and I almost never saw any kind of performance increase. If anything my performance would drop, but I'm wondering if it's different for ATI and especially laptops.

 

So far I'm having a much better experience than Nvidia SLI. Most games that dont support it would kind of give crappier performance if its on. every game (except borderlands, but thats with or without crossfire) runs smooth as silk on these ATi's with no slowdowns or hiccups, its pretty great.

 

Anyone notice that the ATI GPU option isn't even offered when buying through Dell's small/med business web portal? It's nVidia or nothing. The ATIs come up only when accessing the Alienware website or Dell's home/home office web portal configurator.

What's up with that?

I work for a tax exempt organization, but I'm not sure I can get the exemption unless I go through the small/med business portal.

 

Question as well, would someone with ATI please be kind enough to post a screen shot of their DPC Latency? I'd like to know if the ATI cards cause the same issues that are prevalent currently in the nVidia graphics cards.

Aedaric

 

Im sure Mandrake would run the DPC checker for you ...

 

Mandrake is doing some Vantage X runs before going to bed.

 

*
don't worry about that ... Just call Dell's Alienware sales team and they will do the ATI based configuration for you. I ran into something similar when was first building my system (i think the EPP portal was not giving me an option to select Blue-Ray burner), but when I called, they had 0 problems configuring that and placing my order along with all the discounts.

Back to the topic: ATI !!!

 

Purty please Mandrake? = )

 

oh man....gimme a sec.

Keep in mind I'm running Vista 32 bit and that could affect the results.

 

lol haha Thanks, I'll appreciate it. Anyone else who has an ATI who could do this would be awesome as well and I'll give +rep for helping out! = )

 

Looks just as crappy as my old M17x.

 

Thanks,

Yea, that's unfortunate. Mine stays below 5k for the most part except for spikes to a usual 16k and then rarely up to 60k to 120k.

 

Does the latency still exist when you are running only on the integrated GPU?

 

The issue still occurred even when I had zero drivers installed, just the Windows 7 Standard VGA driver, only the spikes were the small ones, not the 16-60k + ones. The small ones I can deal with as they don't cause the stutter or sound cracking/popping.

Aedaric

 

try disabling the sound driver.

 

Yea, I've done that--http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=434691 is basically everything I've done, ranging far across these forums and into www.sevenforums.com as well as other websites like Dell's and overclockers.com.

 

Is Dellienware offering the dual 4870's as an upgrade option to the Nvidia cards yet? I called them last month asking about it, and they said they did not have those as an upgrade option yet. I'm going to call them again sometime this week, AFAIK Alienware is pretty decent with the GPU upgrade being a possibility.

 

Here's mine (Ati system.) Not as bad as drakes.

 

maybe it's because borderlands is nvidia based.

 

Runs fine on Xbox (an ATI based system).

 

I think they are taking the with borderlands. Even if I turn everything to low it is still choppy. I hope they optimize for ATI in a new patch because it's a great game I am just put off by the framerate. There is no reason that call or duty should be playing so much smoother than borderlands

 

When I had my nVidia cards if a game or benchmark wasn't working well all I had to do is rename the exe file to one that matches a game I knew worked or had an SLI profile. Have you guys tried that yet?

There is also ATI Tray Tools which does it for you.

 

there was also a tool that allow you to create custom crossfire profile for games that are yet unsuported maybe it could bring the fix for borderlands

 

price - Depends where you are. ATI 4870 Crossfire is cheaper in Europe, Nvidia GTX 280M SLI in the US. Go with the cheaper one.
image quality - ATi. Better FSAA quality.
gaming performance - Pretty even. Nvidia has a slight edge without FSAA in many games, ATi with FSAA enabled - the higher the FSAA level and resolution, the better it scales. Some games will run better on Nvidia cards, some on ATi cards.
work performance (photoshop, video editing) - pretty even
power consumption - No clue
temps/fan cycling - Don't know
driver flexibility - Nvidia is better hands down, due to driver profiles being saved in an .xml file that can be edited with a tool called nHancer to give even games without proper driver support a working SLI profile and force FSAA and many, many more per application tweaks. ATi has a similar tool available, called ATI Crossfire Xtension but it only allows to force Crossfire compatibility, not FSAA compatibility so far. But it isn't nearly as flexible as nHancer is for Nvidia cards.
ease of OC'ing - Not sure about the 4870s, doesn't make a whole lot of difference on 280Ms. 280Ms can only overclock through Nvidia System tools, which can seriously mess up your system, or overclocking through a modified BIOS.
reliability - I'd give ATi the edge from my experience here, as many nvidia cards, both Desktop and Laptop have died on me in the past while any ATi card I've had runs perfectly fine to this day.

All in all, I'd suggest to go with whatever is cheaper for you.

 

http://epichardware.com/index.php?topic=12.0

this is the ati equivalent of nhancer .......

 

Yes I posted that a while back

And I do use it - but it has no effect. Borderlands just runs like "£)*$ on the ATI system. Unless someone can prove differently.

 

The game looks like a comic book. Surprised it even pushes the cards.

 

kk you didn't posted the updates on what hapened after trying

ima try to make celestia run better on my m17 cfx to see if it has any effect



EDIT borderland requirement make me WT** it's a bit debalanced
Graphics: 256mb video ram or better (GeForce 8 series or higher/Radeon R8xx series

 

Since this thread is about graphic cards I thought it would be good to ask here.

We know that within the next 3 to 6 months Nvidia is coming out with the GT300M cards which are expected to be based on the Fermi architecture.

What about ATI? Which cards are supposed to replace the 4870's?

 

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=404329

 

Ummmm, I believe that would be the ATI Mobility Radeon 5xxx series.

ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5000 details leak

Acer Aspire 5942 and 8942 – first notebooks with ATI Mobility Radeon HD5650

ATI Radeon HD5xxx shortage leads to delay of HD5650-based notebooks

 

Great so it seems that we won't get the 5870 before the GT300M...

We have an idea of the performance of the 5870 but no one has seen anything on the GT300M. Heck we don't even really know what the architecture will look like.

I say we would need a third player in mobile graphic cards...

 

hell ya we need a 3 player

i tryed modding the app to run celestion smother and obtained mitigated result it's obtimised but sometime it juste fail to load

 

I thought Intel was going to get into the discrete card business.

 

Larrabee has failed us!! ^^