Comparison of 960M, 970M and 980M

Ah crap, I meant the upcoming DX12.

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Or I just go for this one: Aorus X3 Plus v3
http://www.notebookcheck.net/Aorus-X3-Plus-v3-Notebook-Review.142652.0.html

 

DX12 feature level support for current GPUs is still up in the air since M$ is still finalizing the spec

 

I have an AW13, not an 15 or 17 R2. The 13 only has either an 860m or 960m.

 

I still don't think it's acceptable to lose substantial performance due to CPU bottlenecking. You might as well buy the cheapest fastest GPU that won't be bottlenecked by the ULV/PCIe like a 660 or something, but at that point, an overclocked 860M/960M would get damn close, rendering the entire GA experiment moot.

And plus like you said, the ULV rules out all the perf/price king AMD cards due AMD driver's high CPU overhead.

 

The "CPU bottlenecking" isn't that much. From the comparison I made earlier, it was 3%. That's not a lot. This is generally speaking, not speaking in specifics.
The bottleneck lies mostly with the bandwidth, which the CPU does take fault for (not sure why Intel made the bandwidth for the ULV CPUs PCI-E 2.0x4). But the power of the CPU- cores, architecture, and speed- isn't the biggest contributor. Again, generally speaking.
I also didn't say your last part. I've been puzzled as to why my R9 285 sucked horribly compare to the GTX 960. Well, now I know. Thanks.

 

CPU bottlenecking isn't that much? What games? Sure Left 4 Dead 2 or LoL or DotA 2 probably won't bottleneck much but recent big AAA games like Witcher 3, GTA V, Dying Light, and the upcoming Fallout 4, Star Wars Battlefront, and Just Cause 3 to name a few will need some serious CPU horsepower. ULV CPU is fine to drive the 860m or 960m, but much beyond that, you will see some significant performance drops.

 

You can check out the games in my signature (the second link). As I said, I'm talking generally. I'm not saying my CPU is optimal or recommended. I mean, the purpose of an eGPU dock is to improve graphics.
And as I said earlier, I can always test with more CPU intensive games (well, the ones I have. I'm not a huge PC gamer). In the most CPU intensive games, I know my CPU won't cut it.
(I'll point this out now: I'm speaking about CPUs in the power range of the i7-5500u. As the CPU gets weaker, the CPU bottlenecking will increase, possibly overcoming the bandwidth limitation. I'm not going to deny that.)

 

Good work there. It is a lot of work doing those benchmarks isn't it? But from what I see it's about a 25% hit in performance between running 960 in desktop and running connected to the graphics adapter with 960 in it.

 

Yes, the analysis I did took more effort than I thought.
I'm not seeing the 25% you're seeing, though. The overall performance of my solution is worse when I use the laptop display (using Optimus). But from all the FPS averages I noted down, the worst case for the GTX 960 was 27% (Middle preset, using laptop). Granted, the older the game and the weaker it's graphics are, the more the CPU bottlenecking and bandwidth will come into play. The CPU can only do so much. Once we use higher graphics settings, the CPU limitation get's less noticeable, as that 27% goes down to about 18% when I used the highest presets.
I'd be more inclined to believe that the total reduction was 20% (which I consider borderline between okay and huge) between my setups. That's what I initially though, but as you saw in the analysis, I didn't run every game. The number might change, and a revisit might be necessary in the future. Maybe once I get more games, and possibly once Win10 irons outs its problems.

 

The Alienware 15 comes with a 4710HQ. That at leat would allow stuff like the 390X Raedon right? Or is Aw15 heavily UV too?


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The 15 with the 4710HQ / 4720HQ should be fine with an R9 390x. You can ask bumbo2 since he has an AW15 + 390x.
Only the 13 has ULV. The 15 uses full volt (is that even the proper term?), and when using the GA, the CPU has more breathing room (in regards to the PSU).

 

For 60Hz gaming it's fine

 

16% on a 960 is what I'd define as huge.