GTX 960M now? Or wait for Pascal 1060M?

Hello! It is my first time posting here and sorry for any mistakes. So i already have a GTX 980 equipped PC and wanted a secondary device which is the laptop for when i occasionally am on the go. I decided on the GTX 960M because it's cheap and enough to play games at high fps at low settings. Should I buy a laptop that has the GTX 960M now or wait for the Pascal gpu's to launch for the extra fps and future proofness. And is there an estimate of when the Pascal gpu's will launch in the following months? Thanks!

 

Cost might be an issue, new laptops with 1060M will most likely cost more than what the ones with 960M can be had for today. Are you at your upper limit?

Otherwise I'd say wait if you don't need one now. Estimates for Pascal laptops are generally September/October (not confirmed).

Edit: And welcome to NBR

 

Depends on your budget and needs.

I'd strongly urge you to wait. Even if you were to purchase and resell (which is an option if you're desperate) you'd be losing a few hundred dollars due to depreciation as soon as the 1060M is released. We are less than 90 days away from the launch of mobile Pascal. We will start seeing benchmarks and whatnot by the end of July. August is the anticipated launch period.

Laptops will be for sale in September. The 1060M will be approximately 40% better than the 960M - maybe more - and will cost the same.

 

Agreed, better to hold out.. I'd personally expect the 1060M laptops to be at least be 50% better but let's see... Price wise, I would expect a bump of around $100 compared to a similarly specced 960M laptop but you never know.. Depends on how cheap AMD gaming laptops are.. We might actually get a few more with the new Polaris chips being so power efficient...

 

wait and see ! 1060M will explode the 960M

 

I think we might see some laptops in August. Typically, late summer is the time for students heading off to college to buy laptops and September is cutting it rather close for that. AMD has said that mobile Polaris will be out by the back-to-school season so I suspect Pascal will follow suit.

Also, why do you think that it will be approximately 40% better? Based on the process improvements and results released so far, I would have guessed it would be more than that.

 

The second and third weeks of August are the expected launch date for mobile Pascal. By early September, they should be shipping to customers.

Low end mobile cards have never improved more than 50%. I think 40% is a fair guess, but it may be as much as 50%, or perhaps more. It will depend greatly on the application, too. 50% give or take 10% is what I think. But it should be much more efficient!

 

We've never had a two-node die shrink before though. There's room there to lower the power consumption and increase performance at the same time.

 

Wait for the 1060M (or even the 1065/1070M) - you'll not regret it. The 960M uses the GM 107 chip, which is first-gen, mid-range Maxwell, and is more than two years old already. Don't waste your money on dated technology.

 

should i sell my ge 62 2qe

 

It's definitely possible for it be nearly a 100% increase. I don't doubt that possibility. My personal expectations are around 50%, though. NVIDIA always holds back for re-brands. Maybe next year's Pascal 1160M will be fully 2x 960M capable in regards to performance.

When Volta comes around, we may not have an M series anymore, as HBM2 will arrive. That will be interesting!

 

Thanks for all the replies so far guys I really appreciate you taking your time to help me. So now i decided to wait for the GTX 1060M but I'm also thinking about increasing my budget for a 1070M. Is it worth the extra $400-500? Im mostly gonna play non-graphic intensive on my laptop like overwatch, csgo and mmo's as well as mobas. I play graphic intensive games on my gtx 980 pc, but now that I got interested in the Battlefield 1 gameplay from E3 and that I wanna play it everywhere i go, is the 1060M gonna be enough or should i go for the 1070M? If I should go for the 1060M then should I get the 1070M for future-proofing my laptop? Thanks!

 

The 1070M will perform closely to your desktop 980. The 1080M is expected to perform around Titan X levels.

 

IMO you shouldn't wait. Even if the mobile pascal gpus are coming soon, we probably won't see laptops with them inside for another year or so.

 

So it's gonna be a portable version of my PC? That's so nice! So do you think it's worth it?

But that has never happened before and they will lose to AMD marketing before them.

 

What do you mean? It has always been like that. GPU's havent even been announced yet. Usually we see the first laptops with the gpus a few months after their announcement, and then there's a couple months more till they actually go on the shelves. You are probably looking at 1st half of 2017... If you wanna wait, wait, I wouldn't.

 

Clevo will have mass availability by October by all indicators. Clevo never sits on their heels when a new GPU launches.

 

I already went and bought a laptop with a 980. Just going with the egpu route... if it ever becomes available.

 

It will, and probably quite soon. Core can't be the only option for too long.

 

Nice to know. When do you think the more popular manufacturers will start pushing theirs? Talking about Asus, Dell, Lenovo, etc.

 

Next year. They're always late to the party.

 

To me, GTX 760M -> GTX 960M is the most relevant transition to study when building expectations. That jump was over 60%.

 

you should wait
I ****ing need a new laptop now but I'm still holding my trigger for Mobile Pascal even though I'm dying because of the waiting time xD

 

There's a spread. The GPUs have to some extent been announced already: Nvidia is selling the desktop versions and AMD has announced, named and partially described the laptop one. The first laptops will be available for the back-to-school season -- AMD has explicitly said this and Nvidia will almost certainly follow suit. Of course, if you are looking for a specific manufacturer, you may have to wait longer as not all of them will have laptops out -- some will not come out until the holiday season.

 

All I care about is the graphics card and not the manufacturer, no matter what laptop it is that is launching in the launch window im getting it. Though most likely the first manufacturer could be Sager and I don't really care since all I hear is good reviews about them so why not? As long as the price of the laptop with 1060M is around $1000, and if I extend my budget, price of the laptop with 1070M is around $1500 I'm completely happy.

 

Well, it's not the manufacturer as such, but different manufacturers make different design choices. There are laptops in which the internals are great, but the display is mediocre or ones where some component you usually don't even think about (e.g. the wireless card) is lousy and difficult to change because they've whitelisted it in the BIOS. Furthermore, every laptop must make a tradeoffs between size, weight and thinness and power, cooling and noise. It might be that the laptops initially available are not very good for one reason or another -- though there's usually at least a few models which are decent.

 

Those are all speculations. Why are you speculating so much? Are you working for Nvidia or any of those companies and have access to a currently confidential information? One should always prepare for the worst, and in this case the worst (and in my opinion quite likely) scenario is we won't see major brands with 10XX inside until 2017.

Oh and btw, nobody announced anything yet. The Nvidia announcement was about the desktop gpu's, not mobile gpu's. Check your facts please.

So if the first laptop that has that gpu is 50cm thick and weighs 10kg you'll still buy it?

 

No mobile Pascal until 2017 isn't happening.

Notebookcheck already reported, that an MSI rep flat out told them that the new Nvidia GPUs would be in their laptops by October.

 

That doesn't mean their full lineup. High end first, followed by mid-range 1040, 1050, 1060.

 

Well, that went topsy-turvy in 2014, didn't it? The first Maxwell GPUs for notebooks were the GTX 850M and 860M.

 

If end of 2016 or beginning of 2017 is too late for you, you can wait until July-August and get something from the Red team. So far, only RX 480M was officially announced. But in regard to your needs, I would say it is already good enough with performance close to 965M but with only 35W TDP (!). This thing can be easily put even in a convertible and other ultra-thin notebooks, so another of your needs - mobility, is also take into account. Also note that the card's performance may significantly increase over time with better drivers.

 

I said launch window not launch day, why are you so aggressive it's not you who's buying the laptop it's me.

 

Well we know GP104 exists and likely will be the same basis for mobile 1070 and 1080 as desktop. No GP106 or other silicon seen in the wild yet that I've found. My feeling is they still need to work out power/cooling performance for the mid range chips.

 

Actually, it'd make even more sense to compare GT 750M -> GTX 960M (GK107 to GM107) and GTX 760M to GTX 965M (GK106 to GM206). In both cases, the jump was well and truly nearly 100%.

Now, the speculation's that the GTX 1060M will be GP106 (thank goodness), and we'll be jumping from GM107 to GP106 with respect to the xx60M series - it might be even possible that the 1060M might perform more than twice as well as the 960M - that'd be incredible. But then again, Nvidia is known to disappoint... So, we shall see.

 

The 1060M is worth the wait. Don't buy the 960M now.

Peace out!

 

Well-said. It's even more worth the wait when having the GTX 860M.

 

We're all speculating here; that's what threads like this are for. If everybody knew the exact date on which the exact laptop they want we'll be released, there'd be no need to talk about it. That said, what I said above has been the case in every laptop update that ever was: some manufacturers are faster than others and they make various tradeoffs. Thus, it's pretty likely to be the case.

Read what I actually said. Nvidia has released (not just announced, they're in people's hands right now) the desktop GPUs. AMD has announced and described its mobile GPUs (though they haven't actually released anything yet).

 

In the launch window of the pascal mobile gpu's, do you guys think the gtx 1060M will be available or will it just be 1080M and 1070M for a few months?

 

1070m 1080m

 

I never said launch day either, reread my message, then reread your own.

 

ananas go away please

 

Gents - please keep this civil.

 

Ouch :/ I'm just gonna have to wait and see when they announce the mobile pascal gpu's hopefully they release the 1060M along with the other gpu's

 

Well, they need to announce the desktop version of the 1060M first, containing the GP106/107 chip before they get to mobile - it's how it's always done at Nvidia. The 860M was announced very shortly after the GTX 750 Ti, both of which used the GM107 chip.

We can only hope beyond hope that the GTX 1060M uses GP106. Then it'd be a cool ~100% leap over the GTX 860M, with incredibly low power requirements. We shall see.

 

so long as there's an MXM version then i don't care/.

 

MXM? Of a 1060M? Not likely.

 

So while I've been waiting I have decided to increase my budget to $1300 (including international shipping costs). And for the time being decided on these 3 laptops with their respective gpu's just in case the pascal equipped laptops dont launch before October and or I need the laptop early for whatever reason. Tell me what you guys think. Thanks! Btw they are all Asus laptops.

960M: https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B015...etailBullets_secondary_view_div_1466201630021

965M: https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B015...1&redirect=true&tag=youtube0b80-20&th=1&psc=1

970M: https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B015...etailBullets_secondary_view_div_1466201570685

 

970m all the way, doesn't have a skylake cpu but the 970m demolishes the 960m and is worth the small downgrade in cpu for that model

 

Though is the laptop 2 heavy? I will be carrying it to classes but not as often. Each class is around 3 minutes away from any other class.

 

Don't ask a guy who has a gt80s lol, nothing is too heavy for me