7970m vs 675m; heat, power consumption, stability, drivers, etc non gaming stuff

To me both of these cards are reaching the level of power where I start to get more concerned about other differences than the graphics performance. I'll start caring more when the true next gen graphics come out. The price is about the same with 7970m being a bit higher, but at this price range the difference is somewhat negligible.

So what are the differences? I've only had nVidia cards, first some lame one when I didn't even know about these things, and afterwards the 285m gtx. So I don't know much about ATI cards besides what I've heard. The fact that 675 is based on an old architecture is absolutely irrelevant to me. What matters is the actual real world differences.

All I can find are "X is much more powerful than Y so Y is obsolete", but you can't tell if said X card explodes after 5 minutes of gameplay and is highly radioactive on idle. (and in case it wasn't obvious, those were stupidly exaggerated examples)

So, some examples of what I would like to know:
- Heat difference
- Power consumption (I think nvidia has some technology[optimus?] that is currently superior to ATI's equivalent)
- How stable and smooth the cards work
- How easy the drivers are to install, update, and to generally work with (I'm pretty sure nvidia still comes out on top with this one)
- Performance in non-gaming tasks like photoshop (I've heard ATI cards tends to work better for 3D modeling than non-quadro nvidias)

I also do some video editing/recording, a bit of music, graphics things with adobe software, and a lot of multitasking which often involves a game on the side. I don't care about 3d, but using an external monitor/projector of some sort does matter.

 

the 7970M will obviously outperform the GTX675M

 

I don't own either so I can only speak generally about them.

First of all they are not same generation cards, 675M is a last gen card and the 7970M blows it out of the water.

I heard about some Enduro problems on the 7970M but I'm not sure about those.

Also 7970M runs cool and I also believe consumes less power.

7970M drivers are kind of crappy but the performance difference is huge.

 

i have the 7970M and its a beast. i believe its double the performance of the 675M, or at least close to that. but drivers hinder that statistic for now

depending on wether you have an alienware or clevo the driver situation is different. if you have an AW, no worries. if you go clevo you are stuck with enduro(the equivalent to optimus), you have to use it at all times, there is no bypassing it. Nevertheless even with the unstable enduro driver the 7970M still beats the 675 by alot. The only unstable game i have encountered is BF3 multiplayer, but the lowest fps dip still beats the 675 overall fps. performance can be partially fixed, with an overclock

conclusion: temp is lower on the 7970, it draws less power, non-gaming applications run much better(better than the 680m even), driver updates are as easy as nvidias to install and you only get a minor hiccup in terms of bf3 mp performance

-->7970M

 

Since when did this forum turn into * too?

By reading the OP, or if you're lazy, the title, you'll find out that I am not looking for performance or release date comparison. In fact, you'll find out that the whole point was to compare things OTHER than performance.

I am not going to use reseller drivers as it's likely they will not give out a lot of updates, specially after some time.

Any source for tests or something on these aspects?

 

Well if you don't care about performance why choose between a 7970M and a 675M? Go buy a cheaper card like the 650M.

 

agh me thinks 650 has too little performance actually i was gonna go for the asus n56 which has 650, but after spending too much time on NBR and sites like xoticpc, prostar i am now gonna get a clevo with 7970.

Anyways, from what i have heard and read (like on notebookcheck), the power consumption of the 7970 is same as 675, i think 100W (from notebookcheck: Power consumption of the 7970M is in the same ballpark as the GeForce GTX 675M)

as for stability, i havent heard or read anything malicious about it. it might have a few frame drops during multiplayer in a specific map, but it will still probably be completely playable at around 30 fps at ultra settings, so i dont think stability is a problem

Lastly, i think the drivers are having a problem with enduro, but hopefully AMD will fix that soon

 

Read the OP and you'll find out. Funny how that works eh?

I've heard that Nvidia and ATI measure their power consumption differently, but I'm not sure about that. Thanks for pointing out though, I seemed to miss that.

What I mean by stability, is freezes (whether only for 1/10 of a second or longer), crashes, glitches or any other noticeable problems.

I've heard something about problems with enduro too. I'd like to know what kind of problems it causes exactly though.

 

i dont think they have any glaring outstanding problems, just isolated incidents, which i think can be fixed if you play around with the driver software and/or the in game settings. Plus AMD will have to fix it sooner or later for the company to progress and remain a competitor right? so i dont think it should be a problem. dont think they have any hardware problems, just mainly software and driver

 

the 7970m takes around 55-60w power consumption less then a 675m and the 7970m is 60-80% faster then the 675m. The 7970m can oc and be 100% faster then the 675m and still take less power consumption.

See this power consumption if you don't believe me.
http://www.hardwareluxx.de/images/stories/galleries/reviews/gtx_680m/bench_strom_load.jpg

 

Well the 7970m does draw less power. As for running cooler, not really.

 

This should be between the 7970 and 680m if anything. The 675 isnt even in the same league as the 7970m. The 7970m is the newest tech, a flagship card, 1 of 2 most powerful mobile GPU's ever and within the same price of the 675m. It also excels in more than just gaming.

 

675m <<<<< 7970m

 

"Power consumption of the 7970M is in the same ballpark as the GeForce GTX 675M. According to Dell, users can expect a 100 Watt TDP from the AMD GPU. The subsequently large heat output suits the 7970M as an option only for large laptops or DTRs (desktop replacements) that have relatively powerful cooling solutions."

As for performance, from what I've read on these forums, there are some lingering problems with the 7970 that will probably be fixed with driver updates in the future. Because the 675m is a 580m with higher clocks, it is more stable.

I'll let you know how my 675 performs when I get it if you are still interested.

 

This is power consumption in load:
http://www.hardwareluxx.de/images/stories/galleries/reviews/gtx_680m/bench_strom_load.jpg

tdp is just heat given out. Power consumption is different for each architecture and process technology hence why theres a massive difference in power consumption.

The 7970m and 680m oc well as in effect they are 100w tdp cards with unified shaders but very downclocked. Theres like a 50w difference between 7970m and 675m. I was suprised nvidia usually the power hungry king for mobile devices that the 680m took 13w less then the 7970m or the 680m took 62.9 watt less then the 675m.

I think 28nm is great as there is a lot of room for improvement in next revision once the low end rebadged cards get out the way then we will see kepler have a very good 700m series of gpus.

Theres a reason why 7970m and 680m are reaching 7000-8000 3dmark11 scores as amd and nvidia want to get lets say an amd 8990m or nvidia 785m that scores 8000 3dmark11 with a 100w tdp and woo buyers to get it.

Also the mid range-high end of the amd and nvidia cards took a big hit by rebadged cards.

 

Although the support at the moment really sucks, the cooling is more of an issue with Clevo's design. They put weak flexible heatsink hardware on the 7970M that doesn't put enough pressure on the GPU.

http://forum.notebookreview.com/sag...solutions-here-please-sticky.html#post8694123

 

What I meant was when comparing both cards. Although it does draw a bit less power, a 7970M doesn't exactly run cooler than a 675/580M.

 

Cool enough. AW and Clevo users have been able to have it run mid 60C's. So it's not the fault of the 7970M for running hot if the cooling system isn't up to snuff.