GTX860M vs GTX850M

I was considering getting the Gigabyte's P15F V2 which comes with the GTX850M but upon research the Gigabyte's P34G V2 comes with the GTX860M which seems to offer additional amount of performance for gaming.

My conundrum is that here in Australia this is an additional $300-$400 which is a good amount of money to me. Do you think it is worth spending that much to get the better gfx card?

 

Do you think it is? Look at the benchmarks and see if the jump seems worth it. It's the same chip so the clocks are comparable to check the performance.

 

Frankly, I am not sure. This is my first notebook as I've always had desktops before.

I'll go back and have another look at the benchmarks.

 

If P15F got the GDDR5 version of GTX 850M, it will essentially be a GTX 860M. Both are full GM107s. All you need to do is increase the core clock some.

But be aware that the P34G may have a cooling system built for a 860M while P15F may not. GM107 runs pretty cool anyway so you should be safe, just telling you to double check if P15F got a really sucky cooling system or not

 

850m won't OC to the same top end that 860m will from OC's that I've seen. It may go 200-250MHz more on the core, but the 860m can go 250MHz+ on the core which would make it that much faster. But if you're looking to match the 860m stock, that should be no issue as long as you have a modded vBIOS (+135MHz max core OC is implicit in every stock nVidia chip).

 

I just checked the specs on the Gigabyte website and it says that the GTX 850M is DDR3. I am not familiar with mobile gfx card. Is this much less superior than the GDDR5 version?

 

Thank you for the reply.

How do I do that?

 

You could be right. The GTX 860M could be binned better which allows it to reach higher OC.

Thats a big NO for the P15F

Compare the games tested here:
GTX 850M DDR3
GTX 850M GDDR5

A quick calculation in my head says GDDR5 version is between 20-30% faster

 

No DDR3 vRAM. We should start a campaign with T-shirts.

 

Why did we take a step back? It was like some low end cards (6490m / 635m comes to mind) came with 64 bit GDDR5 and then poof... Would it really be that much more to have axed the DDR3 to add GDDR5 for 64-bit low end cards?

 

GDDR5 costs almost twice as much as GDDR3 at the same density. There have always been GDDR3 low end GT models as a form of product segmentation. Sadly, Maxwell has a huge L2 cache which mitigates some of the bandwidth penalty of GDDR3 so we might actually see a resurgence of this crappy excuse for engineering. Good lord, no modern dedicated GPU with at least the rendering power of the GT650m should have less than 64GB/s of bandwidth, especially on a high resolution screen.

 

GT 520 1GB DDR3:
DDR3 price $3.89

GTX 560Ti 1GB GDDR5:
GDDR5 price: $18.49

Source:
http://www.abload.de/img/gpuq3280ufv.png

 

It's just hard to believe that after years of GDDR5 the price isn't falling any. I know it's cheaper, but...

 

Five times more expensive, wow. Which is why I'm so boggled by why they keep throwing tons of GDDR5 vRAM on these mobile video cards when it isn't needed. The 6970 with 2GB GDDR5 shows $48.57, so 8GB is at least four times that cost, probably more, so you're looking at probably well over $200 in manufacturers cost alone on vRAM with even half that isn't required on the 880m. 880m could do fine with 3GB vRAM (yet I know being 256-bit it needs to be 2GB or 4GB), so they need to make it 384-bit so they can use only 3GB vRAM and save on some cost.

 

4GB is the sweet spot at the moment in my opinion. Especially for upcoming Maxwell. Gotta leave enough space for those super HD textures in The Witcher 3!

 

4GB is fine. But 8GB? Sheesh.

 

More is always merrier

 

No. Just no.

The only thing that makes sense as the culprit for 880M heat is the 8GB of RAM...

Sent from my HTC One_M8 using Tapatalk

 

I don't think so..I personally think the main issue is that there is something wrong in the design/silicon and the stock clocks are just too high meaning this thing is a disaster in the making.. I think the vRAM thing can only be confirmed if someone compared how the G750JZ's 4GB 880M performs with the 8GB one...

 

GDDR5 does produce a significant amount of heat, the 6Ghz units on my desktop 270X can reach 80 degrees at full load, this is with an extremely efficient MSI Hawk cooler with a finned heatplate and powerful fans.

 

I've been trying to see those numbers but haven't yet. I would bet that the 4GB is indeed significantly cooler.

The 880M is a higher binned 780M (954MHz @ 0.987v), nothing else makes sense but the RAM.

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More VRAM shouldnt affect the GPUs core at all.
The only thing more VRAM could do is top the power limit within the VBIOS, but I highly doubt we are talking many watts here. I don`t think the extra VRAM chips produce so much heat it overwhelms the heatsink so that the core temp is affected.

But as always I could have no idea what I`m talking about, so I would like to see some tests indicating more VRAM = disaster

 

Someone posted it somewhere, and I can't find the post now to find the term, that said that the VRAM is likely increasing core heat by some kind of voltage leakage (he had a term for it, its driving me nuts that I don't remember what it was, there was a wiki link and all).

Johnksss has also conducted testing and come to the conclusion that the core isn't responsible for the heat as well.