970m soldered vs 970m mxm

So I was told recently that there is a performance difference between a soldered version of a GPU vs it's MXM counterpart. As I have a Sager np8651 on it's way I was a little concerned about this so I started investigated but haven't turned up anything that suggests that there is a difference. Comparing HTWingnuts benchmarks he did of the np8651 he had produced similar results to other benches of 970m from various review sites, and no conspiracy threads on if nvidia pulled a shady on the specs of mobile maxwell as well.

 

There is no performance difference between BGA and MXM versions of 970M.

Only desktop 970 has the weird partially disabled ROP/MC partition.

 

Okay, I thought as much. Nothing online seemed to indicate that there was, the only threads that popped up were people on AW's with a lower wattage power supply. Thanks.

 

You will feel the performance difference in badly optimized games like Shadow of Mordor & Dying Light due to the very high vRam requirements of these games (I run them at high settings and they use up to 6 gigs of vRam) ... This is where the MXM 6 gigs shine

A game like the the witcher 3 where it barely uses 2 gigs of vRam there will be no difference

 

The Clevos don't use them, but there are low vRAM versions of the MXM cards and high vRAM versions of the soldered cards. So it's not a direct "BGA = 3GB" and "MXM = 6GB".

 

MXM all the way!

 

This 100%

It possibly leaves the door open for future upgrades.

 

Yeah MSI I believe have the low memory MXM cards .... My point it is all about the memory other than that I believe both cards should perform identical.

One thing that comes to mind too is the flexibility in tinkering with the chip because bricking a GPU from a bad vBios flash is much worse than bricking a whole MOBO and even very few soldered machines would let flash a vBios.

All that while leaving upgradability aside

 

If you can actually find a new GPU that doesn't cost you an arm and a leg... and a kidney.

They're like gold dust in my part of the world. Thus import is the only option. An expensive option

 

I find it's better for cost of repair than anything. If your GPU dies, then you just replace the GPU. If your CPU dies, then the CPU, same with RAM, etc. If it's all soldered then the dang motherboard has to be replaced likely at a cost three times that of just the GPU.