560 SLI Vs 6970 for games

Friend is looking at the Malibal Veda p180hm and is ready but he does not know which cards from the title would fit him best. I have almost no SLI knowledge and don't wanna steer him the wrong way.

Are most of the games coming out make use of the SLI or is it hit or miss on what works.

Looked them up on notebookcheck.net and showed the SLI to be a good bit faster, I just don't want him to run into a game where only one card is being used. As I said, not my area.

He is already set on the other components, i was trying to convince him to get a 6990m but malibal no longer offers it for him.

Thanx guys, I hope to hear from you all and learn something at the same time.

Edit: I forgot to put the m tag, these are mobile.

 

definitely 560m SLi is faster, but I don't know, I would have chosen 6970m and as soon as I have the money, I would have crossfired them

 

I wouldnt go for the p180hm, since its eol.

however, given that usually sli and xfire causes some problems, and drivers to fix those usually come later, I would go for the 6970m

and depends on the games you are looking for example, dirt 3 and bf3 give a higher performance on nvidia cards

 

Sli 560m. Drivers are solid and nvidia keep improving the scaling quite fast.
Also 560m has good clocks, it can easily run at 850mhz without even raising temps, and it performs decently.
When sli works as it should, 2 560m retains same performance as a single 485m/580m, more than enough for 1080p gaming with high details.
All the latest games support sli by driver, and for those without a profile, theres always a work around somewhere.
I had both xfire and sli in the past, with notebooks i had an xps m1730 with 9800m gtx sli and ive had so much fun and pleasure with it.

 

Actually the crossfire drivers are now very stable. The new 12.x drivers are excellent and work without issue pretty much on all games now. I personally would go with the single 6970m and a 300watt ps and pick up another 6970m down the road and Xfire em as stated in a previous post. A pair of 6970m's is blazing fast, and gives true desktop grpahics performance.

 

2x 560m would equate to 580m in gaming performance if they would scale properly - alas, while the drivers are being improved, I would rather get just 1 better gpu than 2 in a laptop (because the latter [2xgpus] would probably generate more heat).

6970m is very close to performance of 6990m... and better than a single 560m... so 2x 6970m if you upgrade down the line would definitely be a better option (should your friend take 1x 6970m).

 

I remember reading there was a 560m that had a gimped version, 128bit instead of 192bit? How would he know if the malibal has the gimped or ungimped version?

 

BestBuy Asus models = gimped 560. Outside of that everything is non-gimped.

 

Its very close indeed, especially if you raise the gpu core clock from 680mhz to 715mhz(which is what the 6990m runs at)on the 6970m........which you can do without any issues since the 6970m is in reality the 6990m with a few less shaders enabled from the factory. When you bring the clock of the 6970m up to the clock of the 6990m the performance difference will actually be somewhere between 0% and 10% maximum. On many games there is actually 0 difference. Games that will take advantage of the few extra shaders enabled in the 6990m will only show a very slight improvement difference.

And example of a program that takes full advantage of the GPU core and shaders is the furmark benchmark program. On the 6970m in crossfire 1080p preset it does 40 frames per second. On the 6990m in crossfire it does 44 frames per second, which is exactly 10% and the largest difference that can be had in reality. Ive noticed though that in most games the actual difference is less than 5%. Again this is assuming the 6970m's gpu core has been raised up 35mhz. Using a single card on the Furmark benchmark is the same too. One 6970m does 20fps, and a 6990m it does 22fps.

So if you have the option of grabbing the laptop with the 6970m by all means do it. Its an excellent video card. And when you add a second one, you will have the performance of an upper tier gaming desktop computer. A pair of 6970m's in crossfire mode is equal to a single Radeon 6950 desktop card. That is serious performance and means you can run most games fully maxed out or close to it at 1080p.