7970m vs. 980m

Hi everyone.

I have a question. I currently use a Radeon 7970m in my laptop, and am considering upgrading to an Nvidia 980m. It will cost around $1000 to upgrade, and I'm wondering if it's really going to be worth it. What do you guys think? How much more performance exactly should I expect to see? Any tips or pointers greatly appreciated as I try to make up my mind to take the dive of upgrading here. Thanks!

 

60-70% better performance

 

^Agreed. You may see up to 2x the performance depending on game or application. I wouldn't upgrade for $1000 but I'd upgrade for $725 from RJTech and sell the 7970m to gain some cash back.

 

I don't have a Clevo laptop, though. It's an Alienware M17x R4. Can I still upgrade from RJTech and install it myself?

 

Yes, you can. They do sell laptop video cards separately, no questions asked. I did buy a Radeon 7970M for my MSI GX740 from them back in the days.

 

980m is a beast of a card. I mean, 2 780m cards is almost an equivalent of the single 980M card and the 7970M is far weaker than the 780m.

 

The 7970M is not a massive distance away from the 780M but yes the 980M is a significant upgrade.

 

If I can buy the 980m from RJTech, why does the site say it's for Clevo notebooks only? And how am I to figure out which motherboard or laptop model it's asking for to determine the right one for my laptop? Advice welcomed, thanks!

 

Most if not all MXM 980m cards are clevo cards with clevo vbios. I wouldn't fault RJTech for listing it as Clevo only and take responsibility for incompatibility issues with other notebooks. Dell hasn't made their own so some Alienware upgraders(m17xR4, 17,18)are reverting to the Clevo cards. So yes, that would be the card you're looking for.

 

RJ Tech have limited warranty/support for 980M in non-clevo notebooks in fact it's 0.... Look at Powernotebooks.com for the upgrade kit.. They have better warranty/support..

I bought my 970M from hidevolution and although they were more expensive then both of them, for me on the whole, it was the cheapest option at that time.. They also have 1 year parts warranty and give some help when installing the GPU..

 

Powernotebooks.com says this > nVIDIA GeForce GTX 980M 256bit w/8.0GB GDDR5 for Sager NP9377

Is that going to work in an Alienware M17x R4?

 

What exactly does the 7970M not do that the 980M does? Personally my Dual 7970's can handle any game I throw at it. Unless your benchmarking, there's only so much eye candy you are going to gleem as you play

 

OP has single 7970M. 980M is almost twice as fast. There are lots of current and upcoming games (ahem Witcher 3) that benefit from the additional horsepower. The 2GB VRAM is also starting to be a limiting factor as well.

 

Eurocom does also offer the 980m, has kits for Alienware machines that will definitely work fine for you.
http://www.eurocom.com/ec/vgas(1)ec

Seems a little pricey, but worth it for the amount of extra performance you'll get out of it.

 

Oh dear! Why don't you read the thread and OP before posting...since when did the M17x R4 have dual GPUs LOL

Anyways what is worth upgrading and not is in the eye of the beholder. He is simply asking what the difference is. The answer being 980M is practically twice as fast. Easily so with a modest OC.

 

Where did I say his laptop had Dual 7970's. I mentioned mine. I still stand by the fact that a 7970M will handle any game you throw at it. I know as I personally tried running it on a single GPU to see how it performed. If it means turning down some of the setting so be it. It certainly didn't take away from the gaming experience. Also what about some of the latest games than have been released that run only on a single GPU. Again, unless you are benchmarking or just sitting back and going ooooh, aaaah, to the scenes in a game your going to be too busy handling the action to worry to worry about have a certain feature at max.

On another note, what are the specs for the rest of his computer? Memory, CPU, Harddrive? No use have a powerful GPU if you can't feed it fast enough.

 

OP has Alienware 17x R4...Upgrade to 970M/980M is worth it IMO.. Also OP, I'd suggest Hidevolution.. Prices are a bit higher but get it from their website and not ebay and get a quote.. They'll knock $20-30 off and make sure you call them up and ensure they send you everything in the upgrade kit.. They also have 1 year warranty...

 

Well, I'd like to really max out old games with mods, such as Morrowind, Oblivion and Skyrim. Believe it or not, I have Morrowind's graphics turned up so high that I only get 20-30 FPS right now in busy towns, due to a lot of graphical mods. If I get the 980m, I'm sure I'll be able to load a lot more mods and it will really increase performance quite a bit. Same with Oblivion, Skyrim, and other games I plan on playing.

The 7970m is nice and has served me well, but an upgrade would be great at this point. I think I'll buy from hidevolution and install it myself.

Thanks for the responses all!

P.S. I have an i7 3630qm processor, 8 gb ram and a 256 gb ssd + 750 gb hdd. Will anything be holding me back from the full power of the 980m with this setup?

 

Maybe the CPU in certain games.

 

I would look at upgrading your CPU to a 3940XM and run it at 4.4Ghz on all 4 cores. You can pick one up on Ebay right now for $400

 

I can't really afford a CPU upgrade yet. Would you guys suggesting upgrading that instead of the 980m? I will have approximately $1000 to spend, so I'm hoping to get the 980m now and possibly a CPU in the future, but if you think the CPU is more important, maybe I will get that and then a $600 Nvidia card? Which would be best for modding games and playing at high framerates?

P.S. I'm still not sure if I can purchase the 980m from powernotebooks.com. Can someone explain this > Powernotebooks.com says this > nVIDIA GeForce GTX 980M 256bit w/8.0GB GDDR5 for Sager NP9377

I obviously have an Alienware. Will this specific card work for me?

 

Get the 980M first, for sure.

 

Thanks for the response! It's settled, then. I will get the 980m first and worry about CPU later!

This will be my first ever Nvidia GPU. I'm hoping it does a fast job of encoding videos that I capture with FRAPS. Is that a strength of the card or am I looking at my CPU again for that task?

 

FRAPS has an enormous performance hit. If you don't need lossless, like if you're uploading to YouTube, you can use ShadowPlay to record with almost no FPS loss. Although I'm sure you already knew that since you could've already done it with your 7970M in any VCE recording app such as Raptr or AMD GE GVR.

Nvidia recently deprecated CUDA in favor of NVENC in third-party apps, so if you want to use your GPU for video encoding, you would either need to mod your driver to bring back CUDA or use a program that supports NVENC.

 

Oh my god, octiceps. YOU, are amazing! I never knew Raptr could record my footage and not impact my FPS like FRAPS!!! What a revelation this is! I will now start recording all my footage with Raptr. Thanks a LOT, friend!!

I'm worried about not being able to use CUDA, though. I am using Freemake Video Converter to convert my videos, and it takes a long time to work. I regularly encode 1:30 videos (that's 1 hour, 30 minute), and it takes over 2 hours to encode. I'm hoping that the 980m is powerful enough to cut that time down a bit, but I'm not aware of any freeware that uses this new NVENC thing. Is there any free program you would suggest that this would work fast in?

 

Sorry, it's NVCUVENC that was deprecated after R337 GeForce drivers, not CUDA. It's a pretty easy fix to get it back in later drivers, see here.

 

Thanks!

 

A 7970M is more a rival for the 680M. From a desktop point of view think of a 270/270X.

The 980M is between the 280x and 290.

Edit:
Get a 980M 8GB if you plan on playing top games released in 2015.

 

CPU won't help much in most cases, and would be one of your least performance/$ upgrades you could get. The i7-3630QM should be more than adequate, with minimal impact on gaming performance.

 

I`m running my CPU @ 36x/35x/34x and its running my 970Ms just fine

 

Maybe im mistaken, but at these prices you might be better off selling your current laptop and buying a new one that comes with the 980m.

http://www.xoticpc.com/alienware-980m-p-7898.html

http://www.xoticpc.com/sager-np9377-clevo-p377sma-p-6982.html

 

Yeah sure, great idea! The R4 still has plenty of life in it and 970M/980M works perfectly in Optimus mode so if he wants to upgrade it, no harm done.. I've done that and my R4 runs everything on Ultra...

 

Yeah, but its looking like the card alone is nearly going to cost him $1000, AND he's also talking about upgrading the cpu which will be another $300-400, on top of that if he were to sell his current notebook as it is im sure he could get at-least $800 fairly easy. I dont see the point of spending $1400 on a 2-3 year old laptop when you can buy a new one with the parts he's wanting for $1500-$2k ($700-$1200 if u were to subtract what he would get from selling his current notebook).

 

I dont like the soldered CPUs the new Alienware machines come with or the fact that its a soldered GPU but I do think Katagon make a great point.

Nothing like a brand new machine

 

As others have said, no comparison. 980M is a huge performance increase.

 

Well, thanks to your guys' awesome responses that got the wheels turning a bit, and I've decided to do this.

$2000 budget for a new, desktop PC with the desktop 980.
$800 or so budget on a client laptop for streaming from the desktop at 1080p.

Seems like I'll get more bang for my buck by going the desktop route, but an $800 laptop should still get me something nice I can play with in full HD (hopefully!).

 

Make it 900 and look for the Acer V Nitro series with 860M.. Bit of a downgrade compared to 7970M but not too bad if you OC the 860M..

 

Tom, thanks for the suggestion. All I really need is a client laptop for Steam streaming. My idea is, Steam stream all my game collection on a nice 1080p, 17" screen at 60 FPS. I need a laptop capable of streaming at 1080p 60 FPS, so maybe the suggestion you gave me is a good place to start. I may not even need something that dynamic, though, we'll see.

Would you suggest this laptop knowing what my intentions are, or do you think it's a bit of overkill?

 

I don't think it's overkill but what steam games will you be streaming again? I think the 860M is the minimum for your needs tbh..

 

I'll be streaming any and all Steam games. The only real requirement I need is something that is capable of using the GPU to accelerate the decoding process.

I have an old Dell XPS M1710 from '06, and it's nearly good enough, but it can't really display fluid 1080p video. The end result is a bit choppy in video, although it does stream some demanding games fairly well. I'm looking for something that will stream at 60 FPS with no issue, so I just need a basic laptop that has a decent GPU capable of streaming 1080p video at 60 FPS. Basically, an 860m might be overkill, and I just need something capable of doing most 1080p video at 60 FPS.

Maybe the 860m isn't overkill, though. I'm not sure. But I only have less than $1000 to spend on this, so it's going to be tight. I guess I'll just keep researching and figuring out what I need.

Thanks for the advice once again. Appreciate it!

 

An 860M is definitely overkill, that's getting into native 1080p60 rendering territory.

What hardware decode methods does Steam In-Home Streaming support again? Haven't kept up in a while, maybe they added new ones or improved the existing implementations. A modern iGPU would probably work perfectly fine, but a 17" 1080p screen (esp. a nice IPS one) will raise the price no matter the rest of the hardware.

 

I also agree with this. Every time I've chosen to get a GPU upgrade in a laptop, I've always just sold the old one and bought a new one. It's crazy how much you can get for laptops with decent mobile gaming GPUs on places such as ebay. I've always found that easier and cheaper than upgrading components individually.

This makes even more sense when you're considering swapping out two of the major pieces. At that point, just get a new one.

 

Yeah, very true. I'm not sure what decode methods Steam Streaming uses, I forget, but I remember that I need a GPU that allows hardware acceleration. The Nvidia Geforce Go 7950 was not enough. I'm thinking an Nvidia 6xxm should do the trick.

 

Don't get me wrong, the Geforce Go 7950 was actually close, but it didn't generally handle 1080p video too well. 720p, a little better, but it was most comfortable in standard def. I was, however, able to stream Wasteland 2 and The Last Remnant comfortably to it, in full 1080p. It was very playable, and in some cases didn't skip a beat from my laptop with the 7970m in it! There was an ever so slight amount of jitteriness with The Last Remnant, so I figure that something a few rungs up the GPU ladder should do exactly what I need it to do. The 7950 is close, though, but not perfect.

 

All in all, $1100 for 980m is simply too much. I would wait till the 14nm MXM GPU.

 

Since 7970m is quite OK to handle most of most of present games (depends on what games you are playing), keep beating it for another 2 years, minimize the residual value then step into 14nm mxm card.

 

I had both and can easily say both in benchmarks and games you will see kind of 2x performance.

 

the qweschun still remains .. will the 7970M be able to play GTA5

 

Do I look like I can predict the future?

 

all you can do is buy it when it comes out to find out for sure!

theoretically the specs for it are quite low but we'll have to see once it comes out and into our hands.