GTX 980M / 970M Maxwell (Un)official news

Interesting point is that many people were saying that the 8GB RAM on the 880M was completely unnecessary. It didn't take game makers long to make the game so bloated that it could use up to 4GB, eh?

 

Yeah..Nvidia saw that one coming pretty early on. Something about that doesn't sit well with me.

 

I kind of foresaw this so I always wanted 4GB cards... but to think the jump went from 2GB at most to 6GB+ in a single year... that's just awful.

 

That is ridiculous. I think developers are just being lazy.

 

So MSI is the only company with an 8GB 980M?

Impossible. If Clevo is shipping 4GB cards, no reseller will have anything but 4GB cards.

 

The leaked laptops so far have been on reseller pages though and they are MXM cards. There is no reason to believe that Clevo is forcing that. Also yes it could be an error on the pages or such. Just saying don't bother trying to find a price till we get a site with the right cards.

Single 980m with 4gb is one thing since most of those games pushing 4gb ram you won't be adding lots of AA and such anyway, but if you are going SLI its likely to be a serious bottleneck. Though even single I would be worried its caused by sloppy programing, but still more and more games will require 4-8gb.

 

The CPU has surprisingly little effect on the P score. Going from a first gen Nehalem i7-870 quad core to a Sandy Bridge 3960X hex core resulted in an 8% improvement. Overclocking the 2600K from 3.8GHz to 5GHz gave a laughable 2.36% improvement.

Going from 4710HQ to a 4940MX you'll see maybe 2-3% improvement at best even with a hefty overclock on the 4940MX.

I blame these "next gen" consoles that have unified memory. Devs seem to think that system memory and vRAM in PCs are also unified.

I'm really hoping these are just isolated incidents and not indicative of a trend. Either way I absolutely refuse to buy any game that requires $2000 worth of GPU power to run on ultra, so the incompetent devs who makes these titles can bugger off.

 

Clevo has 8GB cards...

Generic VGA video card benchmark result - Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-4940MX CPU @ 3.10GHz,Notebook P370SM-A

Seriously, they will have 8GB 980M because those appear to be the nVidia reference and Clevo ALWAYS uses reference cards as they aren't GPU manufacturers.

MSI, ASUS, Gigabyte, etc... that's a different story.

ASUS appears to be going 4GB again - http://www.3dmark.com/fs/2760570

 

This was supposed to be a thing before Nvidia killed it:

 

lolwut

 

Well, we know where it went:

 

Fire strike was pretty barren so I scraped some recent 3dmark11 scores over the last few days. There was quite a lot so I basically parsed out the highest score from each specific laptop configuration

Code:

ID	Bench Date	GPU		Score	Core/Memory	Driver		CPU		Mobo
[url=http://www.3dmark.com/3dm11/8779909]8779909[/url]	10/01/2014	GTX 970M (1x)	9721	924/1,253	9.18.13.4400	i7-4710HQ	Micro-Star International Co., Ltd. MS-1773
[url=http://www.3dmark.com/3dm11/8780050]8780050[/url]	10/01/2014	GTX 970M (1x)	9798	924/1,253	9.18.13.4400	i7-4710HQ	Micro-Star International Co., Ltd. MS-16H5
[url=http://www.3dmark.com/3dm11/8777831]8777831[/url]	09/30/2014	GTX 970M (1x)	9998	924/1,253	9.18.13.4400	i7-4710HQ	Micro-Star International Co., Ltd. MS-1781
[url=http://www.3dmark.com/3dm11/8775775]8775775[/url]	09/30/2014	GTX 970M (1x)	10020	924/1,253	9.18.13.4400	i7-4710HQ	GIGABYTE P35V3
[url=http://www.3dmark.com/3dm11/8779112]8779112[/url]	10/01/2014	GTX 970M (1x)	10769	1,059/1,453	9.18.13.4400	i7 4702HQ	Notebook P650SE
[url=http://www.3dmark.com/3dm11/8780026]8780026[/url]	10/01/2014	GTX 970M (2x)	19741	924/1,253	9.18.13.4400	i7		GIGABYTE X7V3
[url=http://www.3dmark.com/3dm11/8775693]8775693[/url]	09/30/2014	GTX 980M (1x)	12281	540/2,505	9.18.13.4392	i7-4960HQ	Alienware 0146Q8
[url=http://www.3dmark.com/3dm11/8779624]8779624[/url]	10/01/2014	GTX 980M (1x)	12293	1,038/1,253	9.18.13.4400	i7-4860HQ	GIGABYTE P35V3
[url=http://www.3dmark.com/3dm11/8775364]8775364[/url]	09/30/2014	GTX 980M (1x)	12474	1,038/1,253	9.18.13.4411	i7		MICRO-STAR INTERNATIONAL CO., LTD MS-AF191
[url=http://www.3dmark.com/3dm11/8759341]8759341[/url]	09/26/2014	GTX 980M (1x)	13610	1,173/1,503	9.18.13.4400	i7-4710HQ	Micro-Star International Co., Ltd. MS-1781
[url=http://www.3dmark.com/3dm11/8759673]8759673[/url]	09/26/2014	GTX 980M (1x)	14188	1,173/1,253	9.18.13.4400	i7-4860HQ	ASUSTeK COMPUTER INC. G751JY

laptops used:
Micro-Star International Co., Ltd. MS-1773
Micro-Star International Co., Ltd. MS-16H5
Micro-Star International Co., Ltd. MS-1781 (970M)
GIGABYTE P35V3 (i7-4710HQ)
Notebook P650SE
GIGABYTE X7V3
Alienware 0146Q8
GIGABYTE P35V3 (i7-4860HQ)
MICRO-STAR INTERNATIONAL CO., LTD MS-AF191
Micro-Star International Co., Ltd. MS-1781 (980M)
ASUSTeK COMPUTER INC. G751JY

 

The amount of "HQ" chips I saw just now made me want to die. WHY IS THERE AN ALIENWARE WITH A HQ CHIP? EXPLAIN! NOW!

 

Please tell me that's the new Alienware 13. Please...

 

An alienware 13 with i7-4960HQ and 980m? hahaha I doubt it. But as it seems... maybe all notebook sellers will go for the HQ route?

 

An AW13 with a 4960HQ? No. It's just gotta be some kind of a joke is what. like, they obviously mistook "Acer" for "Alienware"... has to be. And the Acer will probably explode if you run it on a game for more than 30 minutes. Yes, that must exactly be it.

 

Well the 4960HQ is still 47W like the other non-Extreme i7's, 980M is efficient Maxwell, and AW chassis are thick and have great cooling, so I don't see why not. Remember, the AW14 chassis has a bigger footprint than many 15" gaming notebooks.

I mean, the only reason to have Iris Pro in a notebook with a dGPU is for mobility, right? Only makes sense for AW's most portable laptop to have it. That's what I'm trying to convince myself of. If even AW is going down the soldered CPU path on its big flagships, I don't know what this world is coming to.

 

Intel has to be offering some kind of margin advantage on these HQ chips, over the MQ variants.

 

no broadwell cpu with these, waste of money then. only worth buying just GPU alone

 

eh Broadwell may not even have socketed mobile CPUs, and "high performance" H SKUs aren't due until 2H 2015, so yeah no point waiting for Broadwell

 

Who cares about the P score though, the GPU score is where it's at - and the CPU is not holding the graphics card back if it's still getting a good GPU score. As you know the P score takes into account the Physics CPU score too. 4710HQ won't hold back the GPU, not at 60Hz gaming except for some rare titles.

 

Aw crap, so it is true after all.
Alienware will also start using the soldered HQ chips.

This is probably Alienware 17
Generic VGA video card benchmark result - Intel Core i7-4960HQ,Alienware 0146Q8

There is a guy who have been posting videos of him playing various games with his Alienware, but I thought he was trolling when I saw the CPU. But apparantly its real then.....

Just search for "GTX 980M" on youtube and you will find him

 

Must be cheaper to offer soldered CPU's then, otherwise why would they do it. I'm surprised though, because upgrade-ability is a strong marketing point of Alienware, and if you end up with a CPU failure you wouldn't have to replace the whole motherboard. I suppose CPUs rarely fail then, and they probably don't think that upgrade-ability figures highly in the vast majority of Alienware consumers - how true that is I don't know. I'm disappointed by this move on their part, but what would p*ss me off more if they start soldering the RAM or GPU, as I would generally buy the CPU & never upgrade it anyway, but I would be upgrading RAM & GPU.

 

Well, if anyone is interested, I have the possibility to pre-order the new clevo gtx 980m sli. My seller told me I would be one of the first to recieve it, because he has marked it as a so called "rusher order"(ty translation). And that the ETA around 30.10.14 is. I am just talking to him about details about the clevo, and will keep you guys up to date. I hope he can tell me more about 4/8gb on the cards etc.

 

Why do you care that I care?

Spoiler

 

P score is nothing. It's 720p. You need X score at least, and now with Fire Strike, that's even better. But graphics score definitely means more. Otherwise it can artificially inflated with a superclocked XM chip and means nothing in reality.

 

Great work! I'm waiting to see these numbers. But why do I feel there are some inaccuracy within the data?

 

Sorry for the question; which is better??? XMG or MSI???? Why???

 

For those who even questioned it
Eyes-on with PC Shadow of Mordor's 6GB ultra-HD textures • Eurogamer.net

5.6GB actually used on ultra
3GB on high

Vram requirement is real deal.

 

You mean sager/clevo vs msi machines? Depends what you are after.

 

Gamegpu.ru doesn´t tell the same story

 

Just pointing out that the P score is not really relevant (more misleading & confusing than anything else).

 

If you ask me, MSI has overall better quality in sound etcetera. But if you'd go for max performance then you'd go for clevo. And people saying that clevo is cheaper then Msi then think again and try setting up an clevo with precisely the same specs. You'll be wondering why the costs are suddenly so high. Either way neither of them are "better" but to make it easy I prefer having a msi over a clevo.

Goodluck making the voice yourself.

 

Gamegpu are using high not ultra is likely, my actual use of the game showed in fact 5.4 and digitalF specialty is testing the games plus that chart you added is worthless, you want 3GB CARD to use 8GB vram? nvidia maxed out at 1080p already obviously it will use the max it can, you can run ultra texture at 1gb vram gpu but you will get ton of issues/frame drops/insane stutter etc

The article i posted actually went in depth explaining the results for those who wants to get educated

 

This is true, and normally I would never refer to the "P" score in this regard. But I have a lot of friends who don't know much about this type of stuff, who also have very expensive gaming rigs, and I love to brag to them about my laptop. The "P" score, while irrelevant to us, is very relevant to that of an "untrained" mind. So, the "P" score brings big relevance to my life because of this. Ergo, my reference to the P score matters.

 

Maybe it's Intel who is pushing the HQ CPUs. It's possible they want to go to board soldered chips so they are jacking up the cost of MQ chips. Look at the rumors that say no MQ for Broadwell.

Guess once I get my new cards this will be my last gaming laptop.

Sent from my HTC One_M8 using Tapatalk

 

If Alienware goes entirely soldered, I am going to be so lucky for having gotten the R1. And yeah, it will probably be my last if this is true. I may purchase the new AW 13 for class because it's small and cheap, but other than that, I won't be spending thousands on gaming rigs anymore.

Seems unlikely to me, though. Particularly for Alienware.

 

Well to be honest board soldered CPUs wouldn't make that much of a difference to most. It's not like Intel lets you upgrade from one architecture to the next on the same board anymore anyway, it just means you will have to buy the CPU you want when you buy the machine. It makes more sense to board solder a CPU than a GPU if you think about it like that but it is still very much an anti-consumer move and is just another step towards forcing people to get a whole new machine when they want to upgrade. Intel changes the pin layouts for no good reason other than the break compatibility with older boards (regardless of what they try to say to justify it, if an old board doesn't support the new chip features you make that clear and disable them) in desktops and it wouldn't surprise me at all to see them stop releasing MQ and MX chips for laptops and instead releasing soldered garbage that can clock really low or insanely high all depending on the cooling. Would save them a ton of money.

Sent from my HTC One_M8 using Tapatalk

 

If that's an actual Alienware 18 with a soldered CPU, we're finished.

 

I've always bought Clevos. And choosing similar components always got me a cheaper deal by $100-200.

However, the poor cooling and noisy fans are putting me off. Then again, maybe I'm just shell shocked by the power hungry and hot 880m I'm running. Although this was still an issue with my 680m and 285m. Maybe I should just stop getting high end Nvidia cards? Eh. Still want the 980m.

If MSI is an equivalent price and the fans make it run cooler and quieter, I'll jump ship.

 

I think the problem is more with the 880m, and Haswell, than it is the chassis. That's two very, very hot components. Not really any of the manufactures run them cool enough.

 

The poor cooling can most likely be fixed for very little money and a couple of hours of your time if you are willing.

Not saying you should have to do it. It should be right from the factory.

 

Because Digital Foundry used a 6GB Titan. 780 Ti and 290X are 3GB and 4GB cards respectively. Per GameGPU, 780 Ti is at its VRAM limit the entire time, 290X hits it at 4K, although I'd have to question that as one of our own users, Marksman30k, hit nearly 4GB at 1080p maxed out:



He's using 290 CrossFire, so divide the number by two and you get 3934 MB VRAM usage.

Indeed, if GameGPU were using prerelease "review" code, which I have a hunch they were, then their measurements would be much lower since the Ultra texture pack wasn't yet available.

 

That's definitely a large part of the problem.

The cooling on the P377SM-A I have would be exceptional if I had 780M cards.

My CPU heatsink, however, makes pretty much zero contact with the CPU and uses the thermal paste to bridge that gap so the CPU heatsink definitely needs work. I'm still not hitting 90s like certain other machines though...

 

Here you go

ASUS 980M G751 available for preorder in France

ASUS G751 980M GTX 4GDDR5 - 1999E
PC Portable Asus ROG G751 JY-T7032H 17.3'' - Ordinateur portable - Fnac.com

(fnac is one of the main PC resellers in France)

Asus G751 970M GTX 3GDDR5 - 1 500Euro
PC Portable Asus ROG G751 JT-T7016H 17.3'' - Ordinateur portable - Fnac.com


be aware, 1 Euro = 1 USD that's how it works here for laptops, so expect in the USA 2000 USD and 1500 USD

Should be available between October 7th and October 15th

 

True. Even when viewing laptops in a similar ranges, the differences aren't huge: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XMjc3l2sI8w&list=UUBBDrsnEZDmlJOJbRZ5pJCA

Guess the 880m is just a little troublemaker.

 

At was resolution? i have been reading a post about the game in a Spanish forum, and people claim they can play it perfectly fine on ultra with GPU like 280x, and it is a serious forum

 

Resolution of what?

Per Digital Foundry:

Maybe the people in the Spanish forum didn't download the texture pack? Because without it, Ultra textures is the same as High.

 

Given the discussion on VRAM in this thread, I thought I would just throw out that some laptops with the 970M/980M do come with a larger amount of memory:

Google Search - 970M w/ 6GB of VRAM:

"6,144 MB" "970m" site:3dmark.com


Google Search - 980M w/ 8GB of VRAM:

"8,192 MB" "980m" site:3dmark.com

 

Yeah from leaks we know that G72 Gets 8GB option and 970m available with 6GB
As i mentioned before 970+980m has the raw power to eat ps4 ports but you can get limited with vram and get annoying stutter/frame drops/etc unless reduce vram usage

2GB = Low
3GB = Low some games "require" 4GB VRAM now you can run it on 1GB card but will again stutter/frame drops/etc
4GB = standard for next gen ports
6GB = Great to run things ultra from now on
8GB = future proof

Wont spend 2000$ so i can't run things on ultra when my gpu power already can handle it but gets limited by vram
970m 6GB and 980m 8GB is the way to go.