M17x Graphics 4870's or 280m sli

Hello all, I am just about ready to buy an M17x and have a question about the ATI 4870's and Nvidia gtx 280m SLI. If you could pick one of them for free which one would it be? Dell's website says the 4870's are better and cost more but the notebookcheck website says the gtx 280m's are better, so im a little confused. Has anyone here compared the two cards? Also Nvidia has hybridpower, purevideo HD, CUDA and stuff like that. Do the ATI 4870's have anything like that to help the pc in other ways? Thanks for any help.

 

I don't really know, some people might say the 4870 performs better, but check here http://www.notebookcheck.net/Mobile-Graphics-Cards-Benchmark-List.844.0.html

 

They're very comparable in performance. ATI cards require more CPU. That means the better your CPU, the more performance you'll gain. As far as I know, Nvidia GPUs don't have this dependency. I own ATIs, but I like the Nvidia control panel much better. As you can see, there's a lot of personal opinion here.

 

go to the benchmark topic, you will see the results of benchs. ATI crossfireX clearly wins. Don't look at the notebookcheck site, their ATI 4870 are 512 Mb, and Alienware M17x have 1GB 4870. They won't have the same result.

Also ATI 4870 supports directx 10.1, and offers better quality display. They have also new technology, whereas Nvidia still has their old technology.

 

Its a matter of opinion, I personally like ATI as you can see in my sig. I do believe the 4870's preform slightly better, as said though, the better CPU the better preformance with ATI.

 

they probably about the same but ATI has better driver support and for the hybrid you not going to be missing to much for me hybrid just slows down your graphics

 

hybrid = very confusing for the everyday user. That's why we have 15 or so threads titled "My M17x has come to a crawl!".

 

Get the 4870s. ATi cards have better driver support now, and they have more power overall. Plus no annoying screeching issue that the 260Ms and 280Ms seem to have.

 

It still screeches. The amount of screeching will vary but my ATI cards do screech less than the nVidia ones I had. YMMV!

 

ATI will be faster nuff said

 

You should wait and see if the 5xxxx series of the ATI will be offered...then buy it!!! DX11 and also better performance over 4xxxx

 

The only thing that speaks for the Nvidia cards is the flexibility of their driver profile management - by third party applications (i.e. nHancer). If you play games that require nHancer to enable FSAA (or even games that are only optimized for Nvidia cards and run comparably poorly on AMD/ATi cards), it would be a reason to go for the Nvidia cards.
Otherwise, go with AMD/ATi. They are better in every other aspect.
Of course, if pricing is an issue, go with whatever is cheaper at the moment.

 

There are comparable ATI apps.

 

Unfortunately, I haven't found any that allow you to set FSAA compatibility flags for game profiles to get FSAA working in games that usually don't support it like nHancer does for Nvidia cards. Could you perhaps elaborate which application can do this for AMD/ATi cards?

 

Take a look at ati tray tools. When I was playing with nhancer it looked like all it did was manipulate your 3D settings within NST and set you up with profiles. ATI tray tools did the same thing with the limited testing it did with it.

 

Unfortunately, ATi Tray Tools doesn't offer this functionality.
Yes, you can set FSAA modes per application (you can do that with most tools), but you can't set compatibility flags to actually make FSAA work in games that don't normally work with it.

 

It's still allows gamer profile management like you mentioned.

 

Yeah, but it's nowhere near as flexible or functional, due to the way the ATi drivers handle compatibility profiles for various applications. You'll be at the mercy of AMD to include compatibility flags for the games you play in their drivers and won't be able to do anything if they decide not to do it for the game(s) you play. This can very well be a deal breaker for some (it is for me).

 

This argument would have been easy-peazy if Dell would have supplied GDDR5

 

Dell themselves posted on their direct2dell blog that the ATI's are faster.

 

that means the profit margin is higher with the ATIs.

 

hehe bad news here. The ATIs are not bulletproof as I hoped. I'm having a hardware problem with them. Out of nowhere I'm getting jittery frames almost unstable. In borderlands, despite my maxed out settings the game only displays low quality textures and it's very choppy. This occurred out of nowhere and is still happening after a fresh reformat. Alienware have agreed to replace my gpus, but the atis are out of stock so they might need to get me some 280m slis :-(

I don't think it's a big downgrade but I would rather have atis especially for Hdmi audio support and directx 10.1. They might put me into 280ms and send out atis when there in stock.

1 month later, thr m1730 nightmares are back!

 

BTW, have you tried reapplying thermal paste, reseating the cards and crossfire cable?

 

Im not too keen on thermal paste application but no I haven't yet tried to reseat the cards or cable. You think I should give it a go then.. Maybe I will tonight

 

I would before having Dell touching it.

 

Oh trust me, I will be doing the installation. Whatever day they choose to service me I will have the cards ready for a handoff with the tech, that's the most interaction he will have with my machine.

I will reseat everything tonight.

 

This is for all the ati backers

now I am not sure if the nvidia would be any better because I do not have those cards installed in my NEW m17x

I do know one thing ... I installed left 4 dead 2 on my old laptop ...an XPS that is 6YEARS old
Steam complained that it might not run on it on install but it runs fine although the graphics are not up to par with my desktop ...as it should be...its 6 years old my desktop is basically new core i7 965 with gtx 295 so .

Any way I get my brand new dual sli with every option that was available even the ssd as primary and will add a 640 gig secondary(odd dell/alienware does not let you add second drive without raid) so performance should be on par with my desktop

But it WASNT ...i soon realized stealth was active ... could not shut it off and had to remove battery and power and reboot.
Then I tried l4d2 again and it worked great for a bit then became choopy at times

Now I hope I am missing something and will get to the bottom of it soon but the game runs better on my old laptop so far
and I believe spending 5000 dollars on something should not require "tweaks" for me to just play games

My desktop I built myself plays all the games on high without any tweaks on my part other than setting the game to high
I went with the ATI against my instincts because it looked better, I hope I do not regret my decision

 

If you got all of the bells 'n' whistles, I'm guessing you have a QX9300. You may be suffering from the quad stutter.

You shouldn't compare a laptop and a desktop computer. Ever.

You could have spent ten grand, Dell's quality assurance process is not what I'd call 'Top Notch'. There are folks who haven't gotten any relief from the gremlins until they've reinstalled the OS and drivers several times. Some folks have to apply new thermal paste their CPU/GPU cores. I had to obtain a new processor to get the performance I wanted. My M17 runs like a bat out of hell, and I love it.