My Nvidia GTX 880M Test Run Review

Before I begin I will say this….This is NOT going to be your standard Mobile GPU review. This is the real look at what was, what is and what can be review. For most of you this should be pretty straight forward. And for those of you that it’s not…Well, lets just hope it's not... . When we first heard about this new GPU everyone quickly jumped on the bandwagon and started bashing it. It’s another NVidia rebrand. It has too much video memory for any game out. It’s too hot. It’s too expensive. Is it really worth the upgrade. Is it really better than the 780M and the list of questions goes on….. Well friends, it’s time to address some of these concerns, but from an over clocker / benchers point of view.

When I first received the 880M I didn’t have any real expectations other than it “better” be better than the 780M. Nothing more. And when I ran this first set of test I get this.

Spoiler

I was in shock! Nvidia, are you serious with this? This is what we can expect from shelling out anywhere between 880.00 to 1200.00 dollars per card for this! Or worse, you just bought a brand new 2000.00 to 4500.00 dollar machine and right out the box you’re playing “Inspector Gadget” Grrrrrrrr! So it’s time to investigate a bit. After a little bit of tinkering, svl7 and I came up with this.

Spoiler

Now we are getting somewhere. As usual, stuff is broken out the gate. So now that we have addressed most of the throttling I decide to go ahead and start running some real benchmarks. What I found out was the new drivers break the card! If you crash one to many times your card will always down clock. Why? I have no clue. I had to use 327.23 drivers which ran perfect the whole time. Including gaming. I’ll get into that part much later. It seems that after a few driver not responding errors or driver crash errors your 900.00 dollar card wants to now run like an intel 4k GPU. Even stock will not work correctly anymore. You have to go through a whole lot to correct this situation (Only to crash again and have to go through the whole process again) or just use an earlier driver to bypass this nonsense altogether. Now who thought this would be a great idea, huh? Double Facepalm! This must be at least one of the reasons why there is no official 880M driver yet. This was tested across at least 2 machines (The M15X and the M18XR2) and all drivers in the 331 and higher class. With people who know what they are doing. So there are no speculations here.

So now let’s get to some real world “bench” testing. And before you start with the synthetics this and that line of thinking, just stop! This is not that type of review. We already have these types of reviews floating around already. This is for the people who want to know possibilities, before making the plunge. What to expect when things are working optimal. That goes for stock, over clocked and heavily over clocked. So let’s start with 3Dmark11 GPU testing. This is a very good way to find out a cards potential pretty quick. Why? Well because it’s not “influenced” by the speed or how many cores a CPU is running. And for this line of beginning testing I will be using
M18xR2
[email protected] Ghz
GTX 880M (Single Card)
2133 Mhz Ram
256 GB OCZ Vertex 4
Drivers used: 331.82 & 327.23 & 320.49
In this test 331.82 was used while it worked. This was to simulate a 780M, but with 8 GB video memory instead of 4 GB.

Spoiler

Here we run our base clock of 954/1250/954 boost disabled. Over 800 point increase. And how does this make sense? We look at the FPS. Almost a 4 fps gain across the board. And no I’m not about to go into the percentages game. LOL.

Spoiler

Now we run its max boost clock with boost disabled. We basically gain another 300 points or in other words 1 FPS from our boost clock. So we are now basically 5 FPS faster than the 780M

Spoiler

But wait, how do you know that? That’s not the same as actually running a 780M under the same conditions. Well I’m sorry to say, I have you there as well. And you can’t get any closer than that.

Spoiler

Now even though the numbers look nice that temp was hovering around 75C max. Now this could be contributed to user error or this GPU is just that HOT. We shall investigate this further later.
Here we run extreme 780M VS 880M. This all seems very standard due to the different core speeds. Considering it’s still the same chip. I’m sure if we over clock the 780M we would get damn near the exact same score. And of course, this goes for all the test ran before this.
780M

Spoiler

880M

Spoiler

Now let’s take a look at 3Dmark Vantage. As we can see, there is about a 6 to 8 FPS increase with higher clocks, but we “all” already new this.

Spoiler

Now let’s have a look at Fire strike.
This test was ran while everything was optimal for stock. Meaning, everything works. I am using NVidia’s 327.23 driver. As you can tell from the first run, everything is perfect. No dips or drops in clocks or voltage. This says a lot!

Spoiler

Now we test Catzilla, which is one of the newer benchmark programs for testing. These test are all perfect for anyone to run some side by side comparisons on their own. Starting from the top of the page and work your way down. So feel free to compare and post.
720P

Spoiler

1080P

1440P

As you can see, with a working stock Vbios your factory clocked card is capable of some nice runs. Although the temps could use some work. (Could be user error on my part) Now to the really fun part. The part where everyone ask. How well does it over clock. Does it over clock better than the 780M? Does it run Cooler when over clocked? What can we expect under optimal conditions? Well I’m glad you asked. Because I’m just the guy who can show you this. If you are like me when it comes to buying new tech you want to know if it works & more importantly. How high can I over clock it. So we tested it to see if it was in fact better than a 780M since this is the “only” way you are going to know. Because stock for stock. They’re the same. And that goes for over clocking on the high end for the 780M and the mid-range level for the 880M. At the time of this the current world record for 3dmark11 Performance (Single card) is held by the 780M.

Spoiler

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780M video card benchmark result - Intel Core i7-3940XM,Alienware M18xR2
vs

3dmark Vantage

Spoiler

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780M video card benchmark result - Intel Core i7-3940XM,Alienware M18xR2
vs

Fire Strike
Direct compare. And you will get a kick out of this one. One is ran on Windows 7 and the other Windows 8.1.
780M vs 880M
All other benchmarks can be found on hwbot.org under 880M

Now on to some gaming and gaming benchmarks. This part will consist of mostly of 15 to 60 second video clips to show what happens when you do more than just stare at the sky for a gazillion fps. LOL. While playing most of these games. They tended to all crash at some point or another. I think it may have to do with me running the osd, but that is not 100 percent confirmed. All Games are set to the highest they can go. Laptop is sitting on a standard cooler running max fans.
Batman Arkham City Physics Enabled
BatmanAC o 2014 02 24 02 30 44 825 - YouTube
BatmanAC o 2014 02 24 02 52 29 363 - YouTube
Metro 2033
metro2033 2014 02 23 23 08 56 245 - YouTube
Dead Island
deadislandgame 2014 02 23 23 24 31 787 - YouTube
Skyrim
TESV 2014 02 23 23 18 50 870 - YouTube
The Witcher 2
witcher2 2014 02 24 00 58 01 817 - YouTube
Borderlands 2
Borderlands2 2014 02 24 02 01 19 235 - YouTube

In closing. What we do know for sure is the 880M is only a slight upgrade to some and appears to perform pretty much just like the 780M. Is this the 780M killer? HAHA, that's a good one. Not even close! Did they use better memory chips? Yes they did. And it would appear that they may have upped the voltage for it as well. (Pure speculation at this point) The card appears to draw around the same watts as the 780M. I was able to get about 324 max watts. Total system draw on a 3dmark11 and vantage run. This card will give a 240W psu a run for it's money if you're numbers chasing. If you're not, then you should be fine. And that's with a better than average moderate over clock. Now, do not think you are going to just get high scaled numbers like this by having your laptop sitting on the desk and fans on normal. It's just not going to end well over time. All my high end test I used an A/C unit. From just using normal fans and sitting on the desk, temps stayed around 75C to 77C. I don't care about "Hey look at me on my desk" (And a week later you're trying to RMA you're video card because of trying to brag. That's your fault!. So take heed.) responses when it comes to taking care of your 900 dollar card. You are more than welcome to run yours anyway you see fit. And as of today's date no one knows what damages it could have or not have in the long run. I kept temps below 80C for safety concerns (Heavy Over Clocking). At stock it hovered around 75C. With max fans it hovered around 70C. And gaming, max was 70C. And averaging around 58 to 65 most of the time (Max Fans). This card can run as high as 1.2V if unlocked (As far as we can tell). And no it will not go higher. (So don't ask later) It's factory unlocked to 1.137V now. Work with that first before going off the reservation and looking for a max voltage increase. And last but not lease...Yes friends you can under volt this GPU, but of course you'll need to adjust for your own needs.

I would like to thank Upgrademonkey.com (Lee) for allowing me to review this card. It has been a pleasure.
And of course special thanks to Marco. (svl7)
Thanks to Mr Fox for...well....Just being Mr Fox.
And Brother DumbDumb for pointing me in the 880M direction in the first place.

Thanks for reading.:hi2:

 

Nice and detailed analysis bro. I'd just like to take a second to stoke the fires of fanboy-ism and notice how glad it makes me to see that the whole "nvidia can do no wrong" rhetoric certainly doesn't apply. Seems like a decent card (although ridiculously priced), OC's nicely, but sad to hear about the instability and driver support in the beginning.
+rep.

 

Thanks Sangemaru.

 

Well there goes my intention to my upgrade from my current setup (in sig).

Although, with my 680m hitting 87 degrees yesterday while running at 99% load in Metro: Last Light, at least the cooling seems vaguely better here, even if not great. Sounds like drivers are an issue for now but, even then, I guess waiting for the next refresh is probably a smart move for most.

 

It was exactly as everyone thought an nvidia rebrand with more ram. With better memory but same clock capabilities. The average Joe won't care about the 8GB ram. Just my 2cents. Anyway since that is the case of course, users only need to go with the 880M if the extra VRAM will benefit them.

 

Bravo!! Great and insightful read Brother Johnksss. Thanks for your hard work buddy

 

Yep same core so this was always going to happen. Slight vram differences of course not worth the price tag.

Will be interesting which brands of vram we will see used by each manufacturer.

 

GTX-880MX GM204, we're waiting for ye.

 

Nice work, Brother John. Looks like 880M is going to be even more of an overclocking beast than 780M is capable of. I don't really give a rat's butt about stock performance because I don't run my GPUs stock. So for guys like us the only thing that truly matters is what it can do and how far it can go when push beyond the limits NVIDIA intended. In that regard it seems like another extreme performance winner.

Since the card is not official yet I don't expect full-fledged driver optimization. Even with 780M it seems like the latest NVIDIA drivers have a secret ingredient to try to undo what has been accomplished with the vBIOS tweaks. I suppose they don't appreciate the fact that we are getting 780 Ti results from 780M.

 

wow i feel so special.. i got a credits mention !

 

Great video +1 rep for you sir.

 

Thank you very much john for this review

Great work

 

Thanks sir!

Indeed. To think it got there with nothing exactly working great. Guess we find out later if it's got some more juice in her. LOL

You should. You pointed me to it. Thanks buddy!

Thanks sir!

You're welcome. And thank you!

The 880M is a great upgrade to the 580M/680M/680MX.
Not so much to those of us already running 780M's.

 

Great work, John! Thank you for the write-up, I enjoyed reading it. :thumbsup:

 

Thanks allot Optimistic Prime!

 

Very nice and detailed! +1

 

Thanks sir!

 

I don't think I would call it a great upgrade over the 680M, it's not going to give an amazing difference, it would be far better to wait for maxwell for a 680M user.

 

And just what would you call it?

 

Wrong?! The 680MX is the 780M. Anyway all the rest was right. And the 680MX was iMac only.

 

great job brother johnksss.

 

Yep, that I know. it's macs only.
Example: Using 3d11 Test 1
But the best mac run is 9.6 gpu or 44 fps or an average of lets say 41. (Meaning a more realistic every day over clock)
A 780M can hit so far, 10.7k gpu or 48 fps or an average of 45 fps. (Meaning a more realistic every day over clock)
A 880M can hit so far, 11.5k gpu or 54 fps or average of 51 fps.(Meaning a more realistic every day over clock)

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680MX - NotebookCheck.net Tech
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780M - NotebookCheck.net Tech
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 880M - NotebookCheck.net Tech

Not really sure what percentages that might come out too..

So this tells me that as much as we would like them to be exactly the same, they do in fact have some difference that allow one to run better than the other. right?
So...if we use this...
iMac 2013 - Games, gaming, gamer
How much more faster would a 880M be...

Thanks Sir!

 

A minor upgrade that's not worth the investment.

 

I call 10 to 20 fps a bit more than a "minor" upgrade.



Edit:
And in other news....So it begins...
http://uk.hardware.info/reviews/522...-the-first-maxwell-generation-gpus-conclusion

 

For the investment yes I do, any game/settings that the 680m struggles in the 780m is not going to be great in without tweaking and the gap will only close with that.

It's like going from a gtx780 to titan black only that would be cheaper in the case of sli 680m to 780m.

better off waiting for the double jump in performance maxwell will likely offer over the 680m.

 

As of today, that "double jump" is no where insight.

Read it for yourself. Already talking about second generation and we havent even went through the first one yet. Too funny.
Nvidia GeForce GTX 750 / 750 Ti review: the first Maxwell Generation GPUs | Hardware.Info United Kingdom

 

Yes maxwell is coming, if you have a 680m setup now then waiting is the best. Your setup is going to handle game between then and now. That's what I say as a reseller.

The 780/880 (I equate the two) are not good upgrades for 680m users, they were never meant to be.

There are times to wait and times to buy (if you like high end), new arch + new process is that time to wait if you can because that chip will likely last you as long as the 680m already has.

imagine buying a 580m a few months before the 680m launched. It was worth the wait for those users who had the 570m.

 

Then why did you upgrade?

 

That was my thinking. I only tend to upgrade once I'm guaranteed a jump in performance of over 50%. Going from a 680m to an 880m doesn't seem to necessarily guarantee that without flashing the vbios, something I've never done. Then again, my performance on my 680m has never reached the levels that most benchmarks pegged it at. Flashing that vbios is getting more and more tempting. Although, as I said before, getting temps of 87 degrees already while at 99% load makes me somewhat wary of pushing it too far.

 

I moved to two cards.

 

As to temps, sounds like it's time for a repaste
As to performance it sounds like a vbios flash.
The last better than 50 percent Jump in performance was going from 580M SLI to 780M.

Interesting. ok.

In other news..
So the wait continues. And first sightings prove it's not 50 percent better. Sure hope we don't have to wait till 2015 for this double the performance though. For those of us with 780m's that is.

 

Or, even worse... maybe longer than 2015. Since the trend in tech seems to be moving toward stupid (power-saving, "efficiency" garbage) instead of awesomeness, it could be a long wait.

 

Yeah I have a bad feeling we are going to get real performance gains fed on a drip. Folks seem to be getting real excited over efficiently rather than actual performance increases.

 

i wonder if it's because we're close to the limits of silicon?

 

Actually if you look at power consumption, and if Nvidia built a Maxwell GPU that used the same power as GTX 650 Ti, and it was just as efficent as GTX 750 Ti, it would be 56% faster than GTX 650 Ti. Source.(100/64)
But that was not the point of the first generation Maxwell (GM107 and GM108). They were designed to run in HTPC`s without hooked up the the PSU like normal GPUs. Plus they are intended for notebooks.

So when Nvidia concentrate on building performance chips, they can increase that power consumption to match Kepler`s wattage and have huge performance advantages.
But Nvidia will wait until 20nm is here, not just to squeeze out some more performance to match the 2x/watt a new node brings (20nm use 25% less power than 28nm), but also to have room for that Denver ARM on the same PCB

We are not really that far away from a GTX 880MX beating the crap out of a GTX 780M. All they need is 20nm wafers from TSMC to go down in transistors size to fit the extra cores on a die of the same size as GTX 780M. TSMC have now been mass producing 20nm wafers for 1.5 month. I`d say we will hear about the high end Maxwell in June at Computex in Taipei

 

With 28nm maxwell looking to have nice architecture improvement then we are right on track to have a similar jump in performance from the 580M to 680M.

 

Absolutely, we should reach 80%++ when 20nm high end is here.
I would actually be satisfied with a 50% jump with 28nm too but I don`t think its possible to build them with 28nm

 

They would be large and expensive to produce. Worth waiting for though IMO.

 

You are getting closer to what I was first talking about. Im from the performance crowd. Could really care less about all this power saving stuff. And just like Fermi and Kepler, all the power saving chips came out first. Then the performance stuff followed. Anywhere from 3 to 12 months later. And all this hype is about first gen stuff. Which I'm pretty sure you won't be upgrading to since it would not really beneficial or from an "investment" stand point. We know the power per watt is there on low end stuff, but the performance per watt is not. Im from the enthusiast crowd so we want the top end stuff to hit. And that, is not going to happen for a while. So waiting maybe 1 year...might not be in everyone best interest.


@Meaker
Is this what you tell the people that come into your job? Wait on Maxwell for everything? Dude you would have been got fired like last year. LOL. Because those computers that are in you place of work now do not have Maxwell GPU's. And that's coming from a "Re seller/Retail Seller's point of view not a consumer.
From the consumer entusisast point of yes. Yes, wait till the come with 10nm. From a realistic and better than 85 percent of the market point of view. They could care less. They want something today not 6 months from today.

 

I don`t know. If a product is launching 3-4 months down the road and its so much better in all aspects than the current product, he is actually a good reseller in my eyes. He cant force people to do stuff, only give advice.
I`m with Meaker. GTX 780M was a small increase in performance, GTX 880M is useless. It may have a tiny bit better silicon than GTX 780M due to matured 28nm process, but the GPUs are 100% identical.

Dishing out for GTX 870M or GTX 880M is a bad choice now that Maxwell is so near. We have already the first launch in about 10 days, then the other will follow later. Not in 1 year, we are talking less than 6 months for sure. Buy 20nm Maxwell and you are settled for years. Buy GTX 870M and GTX 880M now and you are already buying a factory overclocked Kepler with little potentital left. Not to mention you are buying a GPU that will run hot,

You gonna sit there and regret buying that GTX 880M when a cooler and much more powerful GTX 880MX launch in the summer that also have huge overclocking potential.

imo

 

This whole thing is about choices and not any one persons personal opinion. Nothing wrong with waiting, but it's not always everyone's preference to wait. That is here on NBR not in real life sales.

 

I do not disagree with you johnksss. But you kinda slammed Meaker based on the thought that he doesn`t tell people to get GTX 880M or GTX 680M if they can`t wait. I`m sure he knows how to be a good support for those who dont know what to do

Most resellers would just say "naah, Maxwell is probably not coming this year. You should buy this notebook now just to be safe" to get their cheap quick cash from the customer. If I had no idea, I would very much appriciate a reseller giving me sound advice on how to pick the greatest time to buy new hardware.

 

No. I did not. And you are taking it out of context as usual. You guys see your own thoughts instead of the subject at hand. So we are going to stop here.
PS: That's what the LOL is for.
[line quote]
Is this what you tell the people that come into your job? Wait on Maxwell for everything? Dude you would have been got fired like last year. LOL.

 

You sounded very serious johnksss.
Anyhow, stupid discussion. Meaker do what he do, you do what you do, and I`ll just sit here and wait for Maxwell.
PS: I might switch out my 770M`s to GTX 860M if they come on MXM cards just to have something to play with in the meantime

 

Cloudfire. Most of the time I'm joking because that's how I talk. But over time I kind of get tired of explaining that to people. Because most like to come on forums and be this type of person that takes everything seriously all the time.
If you hear me talk in person then this whole thing would make more sense.

I'm waiting on "any" new tech to show up. And that includes anything from amd. lol

 

No worries mate

Will be interesting to see what AMD will do.
The thing is that nobody have heard anything regarding their GPUs and even if and when there will be a new architecture.
AMD was first out with 28nm GPUs in 2012 and we heard about that architecture long before that. Really strange.

And in addition, their upcoming CPUs will all be in 28nm. They won`t do 28nm. Intel will be at 14nm. Think about that for a minute. So maybe they are ditching 20nm on GPUs too, who knows...

Maxwell is extremely efficient so AMD have a lot to prove. Especially since that efficiency will be everything in notebooks this year, The dead silence from AMD regarding the future of GPUs is not very positive really. Competition is a must, it drives tech forward.

 

This is true. Makes me wonder what is going on over there. When there is no AMD counterpart, nvidia likes to try to make up for lost revenue over the years. And with the coming of Max, that just makes it that more challenging for them to produce something if they don't have something ready. But just like anything else...we wait and see...

 

Johnksss, you made my Saturday. As you and a few of the NBR's know, I am in the market for a system. I spent some time on the phone with XoticPC on Friday on the drive home from work to review the current state of some of the systems. It seems that a number of manufacturers are putting systems into a "Back Ordered" status, and the skuttlebutt is that upgrades are coming but nothing is confirmed (something I surmised, NOT something I got from Xotic. Nice fellows over there though.)

I happen to be really good friends with one of my coworkers, and we're ordering systems at the same time for fun. We both decided to wait for the 880M SLI because...why wouldn't you? So your numbers here were something I studied over very carefully in this thread, because at this point I feel like I've memorized more Vantage/3DMark11/FireStrike numbers based on hardware spec then I care to know. They tell me that waiting is smart because there WILL be a difference.

Honestly I would love to see these in a Sager 9570 with a 4930k CPU bringing the pain on dual power supplies. Heaven knows what we could pull out of them. I'm just not sure I can put something that "brickish" into my bag lol. The 18 may be power crunched by Haswell/bios issues, but damn is it sexy. Gotta give it to AW on the fit and finish.

I'm still on the fence between the two machines. The Sagers are backordered until mid march, but might be getting the 120hz screens back. The 18 is supposed to be getting a screen upgrade too. I'm staying on the fence until the refresh comes, but if I get a 9750 we gotta see where the ceiling on the 880M is.

Absolutely fantastic stats here, what we expect from the forum leadership. <Hi Five>

 

Thanks!
That is basically why this review was done this way. In the history of these, we have never actually had one where we could see the potential max right out of the gate vs waiting for months at a time to find out if it''s any good or not. Had everyone been going off the very first set of numbers, this card wouldn't even beat a 580M. And we debated letting it go this course to see if nvidia would speak up on it. . Since at that point no one would buy into it at all.

But there is something coming down the pipe and at this point it does not look like something people will like. Not at all. Mr Fox just got a taste of this just last week and it's not fun. Lets hope this not going to be a new thing... More and more people will find out and report it, so we will start waiting for that to happen. Hopefully it does not!

 

Is it something to do with countering unlocked performance via drivers ?

God help us