GDDR5 = GDDR3 4870 CrossFireX confusion...any contact from Dell regarding this?

Nah see im not seeing it the same way.. AT ALL.. Nvidia is rebranding 2 year old tech as something new and wonderful.. ATI on the other hand adapted there desktop tech to work on mobile machines.. That too me says alot more about ATIs intentions over Nvidias.. Its not a matter of write and wrong to me .. Its a matter of who is atleast trying to innovate and who is just resting on there name alone...

With ATI you are getting there 48xx core .. Nvidia you are not even remotely close to the 2xx series tech period...

 

o.k...o.k......Quad !! you win !

On a side note, did anyone feel JohnBatDell message was satisfying? Blaming on " Invoice error "...? I didn't, it sounded more like backing up dell not making a huge fiasco. I still just cannot get over this. I take it as... " It is what it is..."

 

I think John told us what he could without getting into hot water honestly.. We were never going to hear an apology.. as i have said all along as Dell does not operate that way and nor were we going to hear that they suddenly have GDDR5 cards working etc.. Ill be honest and say im shocked he even commented beyond what he did and its more then 99% of other companys would come here and say..

If it were me and i was so dissapointed about the whole DDR3/DDR5 debacle i would have boxxed it up and returned it no questions asked.. I would not wait for any official word.. It would have been sent back to Dell that day and i would not have looked back...

 

Dell/AW admits that they're the ones who made the decision to go with GDDR3 instead of GDDR5 on their cards....so the only reason to even point a finger at ATI is to ask why they aren't saying anything against it.


What's going on here isn't an issue of rebranding of an older generation card as a newer generation card but a notebook manufacturer advertising a lower spec card as it's higher spec counterpart. It's advertising a GTX 280 and selling you GTX 260. It's advertising a P9700 and selling you a P8700.

If the M17x or W90 listed the cards as 4850s I would never had an issue to raise with either of them.

 

Well they can call there mobile cards what ever they want can they not ?.. Did ATI or Nvidia ever claim there mobile cards to be equals to there desktops ? not that i have seen and i think thats how they get away with what they do..

 

a case of trying to think each card can really do more than what they think it can....then find out the real deal once it hits the playing field(mean us as users) then we shoot back 1001 reasons on why this and that. driver this hardware failure that... they either look on and say "well that didn't go over well or we have a success" everything may look good in the lab, but then those are controlled conditions and not out in the world with 1 million different configs to work with.

but all that is neither here nor there.

its all about...what are people going to do with their purchases...send them back or complain about why they didn't get what was advertised and scream lawsuit this and that..which didn't work the last 2 times we tried it (whitebook & w90) now the m17x

best to enjoy what you have and catch the next best thing when it hits the floor...but don't be a test dummy and go and pre order...till you really know what's going on. usually takes about 6 months to get to the bottom of things..(seems to be a nice round number) (with a few computer enthusiasts involved...about 2 months or so)

 

Just learned yesterday from another thread that the ATI FirePro M7740 (a.k.a. the Mobility HD 4860) in the Dell Precision M6400 uses GDDR5, which if true and not just another Dell misprint would make it the first laptop to do so (been out since August).

 

might be first, but sure isn't helping their case with the m17x....

and it has the crossfire cable slot(speculation of course).... still not helping...

 

It does have GDDR5. It stated in AMD/ATI webby...The only difference would be the clock and speed slightly lower than the 4870s, I believe. While the 4870s performs better.

 

But could you flash the vbios to 4870 then CF it?!

Someone needs to get on this asap

 

you probably can...not sure how well it will go over though...since it's firepro card

 

Don't think you need to flash the cards at all only install the drivers for the Mobility 4860 like some people have done for the Nvidia Quadro cards to get them running as 9800s.


Also I wouldn't assume that AMD reference card is the exact same one in the Precision M6400.

 

Thats why i still think it was more a power issue then just heat.. The M17x could have handled one card with DDR5 im sure without issue but when 2 of them come into play is when the issues probably crept up.. (speculation of course)..

Someone would have to find out what the power requirements are for the 4860 and go from there..

 

The 4860 should perform in between the 4850 and 4870...which would make it very interesting to see how the 4860 would go up against the M17x/W90's 4850+.

 

There wouldn't be a heat or power issue from the RAM. The only place I could imagine there being a heat issue is from the GPU die itself....possibly because the core clocks had to be increased to actually make use of the faster memory speed.

To understand what I mean the original specs for the mobility 4870 had the core clocked at 680Mhz. That I could see causing heat problems. If they had to downclock the core speeds to 550Mhz to get heat down then it may be possible that you lose any significant performance boost to running GDDR5...and only then would that official line about GDDR3 providing the better overall experience might hold water.

But that still doesn't justify calling the card a 4870 when it's no better than a 4850.

 

how many firepro cards are running in xfire?

 

No CF...it's only one card in the M6400. No idea what MXM type either.

Why I said don't go by that pic of AMD's reference board.

 

that's why i use the phrase (speculations of course) to many people around here go jumping the gun about people trying to post opinions as facts..lol

now, just need someone to open one up and see if
A: it has the connector
B: what mxm type
C: will it even boot in a different machine....


anyone up for this challenge....

edit:
also...not meaning the m6400...but any firepro card in the years of them being out...
because: didn't think firepro or quadro's did sli/xfire... (more speculations of course)

 

AFAIK the M6400 uses MxM3.0 so in theory it should work.. Whether the bios will let it work might be a different story since that bios must have been tailored to an extent to even support the 4870/4850 being that that the machine uses an Nvidia chipset and all..

Dont those FireGL cards cost a small fortune as well ? so unless some rich cat is just bored and curious its something we will never see ..

 

sounds like all very good answers to me...

 

Dont suppose anyone could run OCCT GPU tests with shader complexity 0 and 3 and then tell me how hot the ATI cards go do they?

I'd suggest monitoring temperatures very closely as these cards had a tendancy to spiral off with the w90.

http://www.ocbase.com/perestroika_en/index.php?Download

Please do take care when using this app.

I wouldn't have personally mind 4850's in xfire to be fair, the single one im running is very impressive and i would have definately jumped on a xfired 4850 m17x.

 

Has Dell officially accepted their mistakes on DDR3 vs DDR5?

 

yes
http://en.community.dell.com/blogs/...adeon-mobility-hd-4870-with-gddr3-memory.aspx

 

time to put all that to rest and get back to my favorite past time....benchmarking!! so whos up next??

 

Sorry...the ATI in my Thinkpad gets hot fast.

 

for those of us with more than one "get me by till i get a better one" machine...lol

 

I got 3 benchable machines (2 at any given time unless a catastrophe occurs)

 

yeah, i already over clocked the msi and played call of duty 4 on it....

 

Lol

My HTPC plays Crysis, that is as out of the box I have gotten with computers

 

i wont change mine on utnil i get sli with i7

although Gophn stole my thunder on the clevo forums re ATI

 

that's just around the corner..now with the mobile i7's out and about.

 

q2 earliest from my sources

and tbh i wouldnt do it unless 300/5xxx was in it as the i7 wouldnt give alot of performance boost

 

when it comes ....it comes.... and that's when i think ill get another high end laptop.