ATI Mobility Radeon 4870x2 (Crossfire) VS Nvidia GeForce GTX 280M (Single)

I'm assuming the latter would perform better, but I'm just curious as to which one outdoes the other? :]

 

2 powerful cards vs 1 powerful card. Hmm...

Even SLI 9800M GTS will murder a single 4870 or 280M.

 

The indicated results coming out of the W90 thread aren't even correct so I wouldn't go all crazy yet assuming things. Let's get a good working W90 first with some decent drivers before we start jumping to conclusions.


Or some GDDR5 versions of the cards. That'd make it really interesting

 

Oviously 4870 will be the king. 88m SLI will beat the heck out of 280m.So 4870 will be in the top chart. After there is 280m SLI then the story will different.

 

I assume this is in regards to the W90, like said above you cant rate the 4870 crossfire yet.

Its brand new and drivers have to mature.

Dual cards are always hit & miss with drivers and what games they support. I would prefer a single high end card for this reason, as it just works.

In terms of raw power alone though the 4870 x2 setup is currently the highest thing out I believe.

Heck its been awhile since ATI has been in the spotlight on the mobile market, its gonna take some adjusting to get all our drivers & data going. We have a ton of Nvidia modified drivers, overclocking software, bios flash guides ect.

ATI does not have this stuff (yet)

 

though two powerful cards are better, it isn't so much of a difference as one would think it wold be in real games. In synthetic benchmarks dual cards own, but in actual games (even ones that support SLI and CrossfireX, the difference is not too substantial if the single card is more powerful than the cards in dual config)

somehow the guy who got 20k+ with the Mobility HD 4870x2 overclocked the GPUs like crazy (plus an awesome CPU), far more than ATI overdrive would let you, did he use some sort of personal overclocking software?

 

Quick question, 4870x2 as dual core on one card? That's one big step for notebook GPU!

 

Probably fetfsb or clockgen for the cpu, for gpu probably rivatuner.

As far as dual card scaling... It used to be total crap but these days its pretty good. There are many games that get almost 100% scaling from the 2nd card and very few games that no support at all.

In that thought I found ATI in general had more & better scaling than Nvidia for the desktop cards, so I wonder if that trend will continue for notebooks.

To this day the only game that did not give me great scaling on my dual 4850s on my desktop was Crysis. Since thats a Nvidia sponsored game I am not too surprised.

 

I believe cross fire is not just dual core but 2 different identical GPUs.

 

No two 4870's hooked up to work together in CrossfireX (same as SLI for Nvidia cards)

There is a desktop card called the 4870X2 and thats a single card with two gpu dies on a single PCB.

 

It's odd. If you look at the internal pictures of the Asus W90vp, the cards are separated and even Asus mentions they are in CrossfireX so they are not dual core. However they still retain the name "4870x2".

 

I think its 4870 x2 meaning "times 2"

 

Crossfire of Dual Core means 2 different GPUS in a single card. Its not like a processor Core2Duo or Core2Quad with single CPU with multiple core. As you can see in the picture taken from 8800m GTX SLI, there are different GPUs.

 

yea, however I think he meant if the Mobility HD 4870x2 was similar to the desktop version HD 4870x2 (to chips on one board), however they are completely different, the Mobility version being CrossfireX connected while the desktop chips both being on the same card.

 

That's where I got confused. 4870X2 should refer to dual core on one card, and Crossfire 4870 should mean two separate 4870s.

 

Yep, its actually CrossFireX for 4870's if you wanted to be technical CrossFire is the older version for the 3000 series.

The only page specs I have paid attention too are those on Gentech' site: http://1toppc.com/Merchant2/merchant.mv?Screen=PROD&Product_Code=W90Vp-A1&Category_Code=

They properly have it listed as 4870 X2 with the space to designate "time two" I guess you guys are saying Asus has it listed with no space 4870X2 and that would indeed technically mean the dual gpu die version of a single card.

 

I agree on that.

 

I'll take a single GTX 280 over a ATI 4870x2, not for performance but stability issues.
The ASUS W90 with the ATI cards are reporting lots of problems so far, not even ASUS knows what's causing it.Yet.
But I'm sure once they start to perform as advertised the ATI cards would be a better choice, the single GTX 280 will not be to far behind the ATI cards.
If someone ever offers the GTX 280 in SLI, then watch out, the ATI cards will be left behind.
It's not really fair comparing dual GPU's with a single one In my own humble opinion.

 

For a single card the 4860 looks like the best one overall, new pcb, new micron process, its faster than the 4850 with a fraction of the heat/power demands.

the mobility gtx280 is just rebadged old stuff unfortunately and not new tech like ATI has. I feel kinda like Nvidia is trying to "scam" us by just overclocking old stuff and rebranding it with a new card title.

Im also semi upset with the giant fiasco with the defective 8000 series, many people have dead cards already and Nvidia has done nothing to help those people who bought them, they just wiped there hands of the matter.


My source quote

 

So does it mean 9800m rocks rather than 280m in terms of everything like cost,cooling and stuff?

 

The GTX280m is only a die shrunk desktop 8800GT with no other changes made aside from clock speeds. Keep this in mind, a single GTX280m should lose out to a single GDDR5 MR HD4870, wait for the reviews of both because I bet this will hold true.

 

No, Vicious' article was about the desktop 280's power consumption problems.

 

Correct and what they are saying is that its going to continue into the notebook market, they are not able to reduce the tech enough for a GTX260/280 to make a mobile version of it, so instead they are just going to re-binn the old stuff with higher clocks and call it a GTX260/280M and I think thats borderline false advertisement and dishonest.

Im not saying the GTX280M wont be faster than ATI's best card but I am saying it wont be as small or heat efficient which means big heavy machines while ATI will have the 4860's right behind it with nice small light non-hot machines.

I think the small loss of performance makes it very worth it, and they are going to charge way too much for the GTX280 I bet.

 

true, Im disspaointed in Nvidia's rebranding, but even so, the GTX 280m is most likley faster than the Mobility 4860 GDDR5. However the Mobility 4870 GDDR5 "may" be another story.

However I am very happy with the pricing of the GTX 280m, it is exactly $290 cheaper than the 9800m GTX! wierd huh?

 

worse. This is in regard to one game (that HAWX demo). Yes, Crossfire tends to scale a bit better than SLi on average, but the problem is that ATi is tardy when it comes to enabling Crossfire support in newer games and in all profiles.

So in most current games, a 2x M 4870s in Crossfire is a different tier than a single GTX 280M. A better comparison would be a 2x GTX 280M SLi vs 2x M4870s Crossfire.

 

Well, a 4860 might actually best out a GTX 280M if you think about it. Desktop 9800 GTX+ goes head to head with a desktop HD4850. If you were to take 20% of the clock speeds out of each GPU, you'll get a GTX 280M and a Mobility HD4850 respectively. The GTX 280M has the upper hand over the MR 4850 because of the extra memory. However, this 4860 has 1gb of ram and higher memory bandwidth, and it supposed to perform better than the 4850.

Now I know someone is going to say something along the lines of the 4860 card not existing and such, blah blah blah, but since Asus demonstrated a notebook with a working model in the chip, safe to say it's fair to make these spec based comparisons. The only thing that could hold that Asus system back would be the low res screen and the AMD chipset (AMD CPUs are not as great as they were back in the day compared to their competition).

 

Eww... Sorry but the W90 doesn't utilize a true 4870x2 nor DDR5? That's dissapointing to say the least

 

I'm really interested in this 4860. It's quietly the card that might revolutionize the mobile gaming scene.

 

I feel that Nvidia has something untold as they are well known for overpricing and they are selling 280m for 200+ cheaper??
Hope it will not be faulty like g84.

 

More likely their production line is getting more mature, thus cheaper cards.

 

no he oc'd his cpu to 4ghz.....

 

Yeah, it was a 4Ghz QX9300 OC... as far as I know no additional GPU OC.

ATi cards are also more processor dependent than nVidia counterparts IIRC.

 

Kinc had the QX9300 clocked to 4Ghz and the GPUs clocked to 600Mhz/900Mhz (c/m).

http://www.techpowerup.com/index.php?85620

 

More likely they see ATI stealing all the market share if they dont

the GTX280 is probably going to be faster than the 4860 IMO but its going to be faster at a huge cost. Bigger, Hotter, More power draw.

The 4870 is the faster ATI card the 4860 is just the more "advanced" card. Of course rumor has it that GDDR5 will be on the 4860 though and that can change up the tables a bit.

 

I dont believe this.

 

57% faster just means:
Crysis
9800M GTX = 20 fps
280M = 31 fps

Not unbelievable.

 

That chart is absolute win.

It uses the same length to measure the 0 to 100% increment that it uses to measure the 100% to 110% and all the other 10% increments....that way the GTX280m's bar looks huge compared to the 9800m GTXs bar.


I love it and now desire a similar comparison chart for my wang.

 

Everyone does this guys.

 

At least when ATi do their presentations, they offer a bit more detail as to the actual settings the tests were ran.

Nontheless, any graph shown by nVidia or ATi is going to either show 1) heavy bias or 2) sleazy salesmanship. Both graphs are no exception. Notebookcheck did a test on the GTX 280M (in a Clevo M980NU) and even though it's using BETA drivers, it won't be beating a 9800M GTX by 33%. That would mean the GPU score would have to be around 5900ish, and that ain't happening even with fully optimized drivers (and that's how much a desktop 9800 GTX scores anyways). The only one that seems reasonable is the Far Cry 2 graph.

 

At least in that graph all the increments are .5.

 

It seems like Nvidia is the only one who wants to compare with other unless like Ati.

 

ive seen that 4870 chart many times it always surprises me to see how much better it is then 3870 on Far Cry 2 and that is ultra high res as well.

 

We're sorry you need to use deceptive data presentation techniques to feel better about your wang.

 

10chars.

 

sow the performance in real word "benchmarks" like crysis and farcry 2 for example gives advantage to 280m SLI ? i am really divided between de 4870x2 and the 280m SLI... i have to buy a laptop and i dont know what to buy... OMFG im geting crazy....

what do you m8's think ?

asus w90 (with qx9300, 4870x2) vs Clevo m980 (with qx9300 SLI 280m) bouth with OC on the CPU ang GPU ?

sorry for being so annoying ...

bguards m8's

 

Well, we're not sure if the Clevo is leaving the M98 unlocked, but if they do, I'll bet on the M98.

If the new Alienware happens to have GDDR5 4870s, it will be the king.

 

Kevin IMO as normally Clevo/sager releases notebook's with unlocked multiplayer for Intel "Extreme series" Processor, but even sow, if the maximum OC wold be 3.2 (the normal stable OC of it for the QX9300), i have serious doubt's that i wold be faster that a possible "allpowerful" with an X38+4870x2 gddr5+ OC qx9300

^Just my 2 cent , some one correct me if i'm wrong

 

If it indeed has GDDR5 cards, nothing will stand in it's way, regardless of CPU speeds.

I doubt it will be X38. That's a special board Asus fabricated for its own notebook, not to be shared.