I have a purchase dilemna. Please help me out.

Hello. I need help on a purchasing dilemna. If given these options and you have cash, which would you choose?

a) Buy the used AW 18 with dual 780M GTX, I-7 4700MQ, Samsung 840 evo 250GB with Raid 0 1TB with warranty until April 2015 for $1500.00 and buy 980M DUAL SLI at RJ Tech for additional $1500.00

b) Upgrade my AW M18x R2 to 980M Dual SLI at RJ Tech, buy the heatsinks, SLI and cable and take a risk to see if it works or not for $1500.00

c) Buy the Clevo P337SMA with dual 980M SLI, 4810 MQ, 2 1 TB Samsung Evo PRO 850 Raid 0 with 3 year warranty for $4850.

 

Hmmm that is a tough one, mind if I ask why not just stick with the 7970m xfire until 20nm?

 

I'll tell you, brother. I don't want to assure myself that 20nm will work.

How many nm is the 980m?

 

28nm

10char

 

You have a pretty powerful laptop. I would wait it out I think, unless xfire is causing you trouble.

With your level of hardware, I think I would definitely check out the compatibility to upgrade to 980m with new heatsinks and all, instead of a full new machine. If nothing can be done, I would wait another year before upgrading

 

I mean unless you are crazy about DA:I, FC3, AC:U, get a laptop. Otherwise all other big titles will be releasing around February 2015 and onwards. It is really too much expense to get a SLI laptop for a few months while you already have an amazingly powerful machines that will max out these games at 1080p

 

Yeah, I am a bit skeptical for 980M to work with my M18x R2 to be quite honest. The 880M did not work (c'mon, it didn't work. Let's be honest here. At best it was buggy).

 

880m is different story all together, you'd know if you'd followed the whole fiasco. Persoanlly I'd simply upgrade your video cards which is what I'll do once AW releases them. Ill sell my old cards and jump into a new pair.
That makes the most sense for me since I'm happy with my old ye Faithful R2 and it's still a more potent machine than the AW18.
If you simply want a 'new' toy or an aethetic change then that's something only you can answer.

 

As far as most of the AW owners are concerned, the M18x R2 is better than the AW18. So you might want to stick with that and some 980Ms; if you can wait and see if someone tried it and it works, then you're good. Also, I know not of any AW18 with 780Ms selling anywhere... also your 3720QM is better than a 4700MQ.

 

Are you sure you need the kind of read speeds from the multiple 1TB SSDs in Raid0? Great for video editing and creative apps, but extremely expensive and doesn't improve gaming performance very much.

Otherwise, you might consider just getting a single 400-500GB SSD for your OS and games and use 2.5" 7200RPM HDD for storage.

 

Like others have said, staying with your current setup is a good idea as well.

 

Question, how well would my current set up be able to play Witcher 3, GTA V or Arkham Knight?

 

Probably maxxed at 1080p (depending on their xfire support)

 

How many fps?

 

Seriously, how can he know. Those games aren't even out yet.

 

Lol of course no one can know as the games are not released yet.

Sent from my Nexus 5 using Tapatalk

 

Go easy on him guys! He is just worried a bit OK I will use my foresight power!!

*&^@%$&@*!(&^@%#^@*@(!(@##&@*@ (encryption) = 40 fps! Congratulations!! (this was for witcher 3)

Joke aside, I am sure you will be just fine, I told you this before, if I were you I would hold onto my machine at least until Broadwell, it is just around the corner!

 

Is Broadwell still MXM?

 

Do you mean Maxwell (GPU) ? Yep they are

 

Is Broadwell a graphics card?

 

I'm just asking Maxheap about it actually.

 

Broadwell is a CPU. It is not related to MXM.

 

You have to admit..It was a retarded question.. Especially from somneone who reads this forum and has been on it for quite a while.. Also google would get you your answer

Broadwell is the next gen Intel CPU architecture and Maxwell is the NVIDIA's new GPU architecture....

 

Hehe, sorry about that, brother.

 

Lol no worries .. You meant no harm and neither do I

 

Sorry bro, missed your question there. MXM is a mobile PCI-e slot on large desktop replacement laptops. Where you can just take out your graphics card and replace it with a new one that also uses MXM (there are many other technicalities like proper heatsink and so on that is not trivial, I killed a 7970m trying to fit a 460m heatsink on it, even though it looked perfectly fine). CPUs connect to a different socket than PCI-e slots.

 

That's not exactly right. Most dedicated GPUs use a MXM slot, even the ones that are integrated. Also, they don't need to be large DTR types either; the 560M/660M/860M machines have MXM and came in quite slim form factors as far as I remember.

 

really?? never saw an MXM slim laptop before, do you have an example? Especially considering you need to stack, mobo + thermal pads + card + thermal pads + heatsink

 

Oh yeah. Update. I got the AW18 instead. I love it. My plan is to get the 980m cards on there(if it works) then transfer the 780ms to my m18x r2

 

The gigabyte and lenovo laptops use MXM... as do the aorus laptops. MSI's slimmer GS series uses MXM. All the midrange and higher end spec cards use MXM as the interface, as far as I know.

 

No way, these gpus are on the mobo no??

 

You need to read properly. You've done this a lot the last few days; ask questions that we answered in posts to you right before you did the asking.

 

so you are saying they are soldered on the motherboard AND are connected through MXM?

 

Yes, that's what I'm saying. The card is connecting through a MXM slot but soldering it allows for lower profile heatsinks and a form factor that'll fit a "at best, card X" type of deal... unlike say... a P370EM, which had 680Ms as the best at the time, but you can shove two 880Ms into it with a BIOS update and the proper heatsinks. But the machine wasn't really built to take that by design. They allowed for it to cool any laptop card, though.

 

Well, that is a new one, I didn't know soldered MXM laptop existed, still confuses me though, why to put in the MXM connector in the first place? at least Aorus doesn't seem to have a mobile PCI-e slot as I inspected the picture a lot and unless they hid it under the heatsink, which is a long shot considering the length of PCI-e slot, it seems to be a non-MXM connector (also couldn't find any link to prove if it is MXM, if you can find one, I would appreciate). The whole list of MXM laptops can be found at the following link:

Mobile PCI Express Module - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

I see no list. And yes they still use the interface, even if they are proprietary in the laptop's design. It's like how ASUS cards can't work in anything but an ASUS, but are still MXM. Using GPU-Z on one of those integrated machines should still show PCI/e 3.0 x16 @ x16, no?

 

I don't know much about this mate, but from what I know very little, that doesn't mean its an MXM card, it means it uses PCI/e 3.0 x16 @ x16 type connection to the motherboard (pretty much all discrete GPUs will say this on GPU-Z). From what I know MXM is made for the purposes of swapping the graphics card without chiseling the mobo to cut it out kinda situation for vendors being easily able to upgrade the laptop (please someone correct me if I am wrong).

 

Looking at the photo, it should be quite obvious these GPU's (on both sides of the CPU in the middle) are soldered just like in the last two versions of the X7. The X7 is too thin for MXM, two cards would be out of the question.

 

Real quick, how well does my AW 18 rig run Watch_Dogs on max settings?

 

Buy the game.

Download FRAPS.

Play the game.

Turn on FPS counter.

Was that so hard?

 

Well.. isn't that the reason I ask? To research the product before buying it.

And yeah, buying a game which I'm not sure how it will run is difficult in my wallet. Just saying.

 

That's what I thought so! MXM soldered stuff sounds weird..

 

It's a contradictory statement. They're mutually exclusive.

 

I know right?