A little advice please (675 mx vs 7970m)

A friend of mine is going to buy a laptop with either a 675mx or a 7970m. Both cards seem to cost the same (according to him) and he asked me to advise him on his purchase. I know the 7970m is a lot faster than the 675mx, but it only comes with 2GB compared to the 4GB from nvidia. For the time being the vram is not an issue, I am concerned with PS4 having 8 GB to share with the system and the GPU though. What do you guys think, which one would you pick?

 

7970m hands down.

2GB vs 4GB vRAM doesn't matter a lick. Neither are powerful enough to make full use of that amount of RAM anyhow.

 

I would pick 7970m as you can easily overvolt and overclock it with ati tray tool to make it turbo fast. Or undervolt it to make it cold as ice

 

Is enduro still an issue?

 

Enduro is only an issue if your PC supports it.

If I installed it in the R2 I have, I wouldn't ever hear of Enduro.


But yeah, the 7970M is much faster... at stock that is... If you overclock the 675MX, you'll actually find that it matches and/or beats the 7970M. Both clocked at 1GHz core, 1200mhz memory have shown this since it's essentially the same thing as comparing the GTX 660 to a 7870, to which the former is faster. :3

 

neither, get a 780m jokes aside, 780m will cost your left pinky, so get a 7970m

 

Thank you very much, his laptop will be a Clevo P150 EM if that matters

 

if your in america then good luck on finding a 7970 as they are eol and once the stock has gone, well its gone.
if you find a supplier that has one then get it now before its too late.

 

I am just afraid he might be getting too many issues with the Clevo model. Though I have heard these days it is almost solved. Are people with Clevos still having several problems with the 7970m?

 

Doesn't p150em still suffer from enduro issue? I would tell him to wait few months and get gtx700m series.

 

They have mostly fixed all issues with Enduro. On my AW, I can play games just fine with switchable graphics enabled. However, BF3 was a big trouble and I haven't tried that.

Your friend may not be able to afford a similarly performing 700 series GPU.

 

I believe most issues are indeed fixed. There are still some but he should be able to play games now, without suffering greatly from underutilization crippling his performance.

 

I am also counting that in future patches the new intel drivers will be compatible with the new amd drivers and the throttling will get more and more reduced if not gone completely. Thank you for your advice.

 

I've updated my laptop with a 7970m, great performances, more than i honestly figured out, the amd community is waiting for an upcoming driver release (due for june/july) completely rewrited, in order to further reduce latancies, with a great performance boost.
In you search "amd prototype driver" on youtube you'll find a stunning sequence of performance comparisons, related to the new desktop vga hd7990, but expected (with different percentage) also for mobile gpus...

 

Thanks, those drivers seem to be towards smoothing out framerate though=). Was more commenting about enduro getting more stable in the future, to the point where the gpu is used in games as much as it would in non enduro systems. As far as I am aware it does work like that for some games, especially with newer drivers, but there are still some issues in others.

 

Those improvements seem to be just for crossfire though. I hope it also has noticeable improvements for the 7970m.

 

yes, of course we all hope so, but it's true that, even in a very slowly manner, amd managed to release better drivers everytime for this vga: i've tried every catalyst starting from 12.11 to actual 13.5 and the increase in framerate is quite sensible...but obviously this happened in one year...

 

I have a P150em and I can vouch for the 675mx, play most games on high or ultra.
Running planet side 2 on ultra, the fps drop a bit but its still playable
Random question are the gpu on the clevos upgradable? Could I put a 680mx in it at a later date?

 

probably yes, since p150em was configurable with both gpu (i.e Italian clevo based reseller let you choose between the two gpu, with different price of course).
If you follow clevo/sager thread i wouldn't be surprised to know that maybe it's also possible to upgrade with new 780m...

 

No you cannot use GTX 680MX since it does not come on a MXM card.

If you mean GTX 780M however, then most likely yes

 

were do you buy them from? and what is an MXM card

 

Not true. At 950/1450 in Crysis 3 single player campaign. I hit 1975mb VRAM usage with my 7970M and averaged over a gaming session over 1850mb. The 7970M and 670MX OCed can utilize therefore 2GB of ram in certain memory intensive games.

For now a true high end card ought to be 3-4GB. 2GB while not lacking is clearly not enough.

 

So even in one of the most visually demanding titles available you barely hit the 2GB mark. That doesn't indicate to me that 2 GB is not enough.

 

Who knows if the card could or would have used more at peak if there had been more memory available.

You are right in that it is enough. However even Crysis 3 if fully maxed on a more powerful card would probably claw it's way up to 2.5GB at 1080p.

My point is simply that both cards CAN use all the vram. Not whether they can exceed that amount (cannot be proved with 7970M anyway). As this is the case I would prefer to have a little more headroom.

 

You might prefer to have some headroom, I just took issue with the contention that 2GB is clearly not enough.

 

I posted in this thread to counter the comment that neither 675mx and 7970M were powerful enough to use all their VRAM 2GB. This isn't true.

2GB is enough BUT it can all be utilized. My post was simply originally intended to state this point so that others reading the thread are not misinformed. No offence was meant dude

 

I agree with you, using 2gb or 4gb doesn't depend on vga capabilities but is more related with game programming code: at the moment there are few titles able to squeeze the whole ddr amount, especially at typical laptop screen resolutions (i assume full hd), of course is only a matter of time...new games maybe will use even 4gb.
At the moment 2gb is enough, or better, it's not the wise way to choose between two different card: simply, i'll make the point considering my favourite games, trying to know the way they run on both vga....

 

Just because 2GB is filled doesn't mean it's being fully utilized. If you have 8GB of system RAM filled do you think your CPU can process it all at once? Not really. Same thing applies to vRAM. A GT 630m could have 2GB vRAM populated but that doesn't mean it's being utilized, just that the data is residing there. On the same note, if your GPu only had 1GB vRAM, it would still utilize those 2GB, just 1GB would be cached in system RAM and fed in as allowed. Large amounts of vRAM are only really required for very high AA and/or very high resolutions.

Sent from my YP-G70 using Tapatalk 2