New Nvidia 900m series flagship

Yeah I agree, we're not in a nice place in the GPU industry. AMD can't get that much needed break and Nvidia are walking all over consumers and they know it.
Yeah AMD have a decent product with the Fury/X, it's so close but no cigar. If only they could knock Nvidia off their high horse for a generation and serve them up some humble pie.

Then mobile GPU's being soldered and so many people cool with it

 

I have no issues with my GTX 970. I knew about the whole 3.5GB before I bought into the card, and regardless its a powerhouse 1080p card for the money. And it runs cool. With things like DSR and ShadowPlay I have difficulty switching back to AMD at this point. I want to see AMD make a huge improvement and I want to see them put a beating on Nvidia, but until then how can I justify buying one of their cards?

I am planning to buy a GTX 980 Ti very soon, I'm just waiting for Newegg to the get Strix 980 Ti back in stock. I had it in my cart the other day and it sold out before I bought it.

Gaming notebook are dead as we knew them in my opinion. Buying soldered CPU and GPUs is lame, and basically has ended all interest in them for me. If I don't have the option to upgrade the GPU another generation or 2, then its a huge waste of money IMO.

 

Spoiler: This is kind of a book

Just because you don't doesn't mean others won't, and I am someone who would. Also, on principle, that card should be boycotted for what nVidia pulled. Even if it WAS a mistake, the advertising and marketing for it didn't change. And furthermore, the advertising specs are STILL lying: there are in fact eight 32-bit memory controller chips on the card, but since only seven of them work in tandem, its memory is NOT on a 256-bit memory bus, and they still advertise it as being so. There's more people who either missed the ramgate fiasco or don't bother with news enough unless they want an upgrade to not know that, and they'll see "4GB 256-bit mem bus" and take it at face value, and the number of people pushing that card is ridiculous. You'd think people would be more annoyed at being tricked, even if the trick doesn't affect them specifically (I'm annoyed at it and I have two 780Ms and I will NEVER own a 970).

So do aftermarket AMD cards like a Sapphire Tri-X or Vapor-X. nVidia reference cards aren't very cool themselves.

AMD has an option similar to DSR in their Omega drivers, but I don't remember its name. Also, AMD VCE through the Raptr program is similar to Shadowplay (and handles higher resolutions and above 60fps better, I might add).

I do want to see this though. Right now AMD is at best a sidegrade. If the Fury and Fury X had 8GB of vRAM, and the Fiji issues I mentioned earlier were nonexistent, then I'd probably never tell a single user to get a 980Ti, unless they wanted multi-GPU and wanted to play in windowed mode/borderless windowed (which Crossfire STILL doesn't work with for some reason). Thankfully the R9 390 is basically equal or better to the 970 on all accounts except overclockability, so it's easily accepted as a recommendation. But the ~450-500 GPU market is kaput. It's not like the big difference between 560Ti, 570 and 580, or 760/770/780 having a fairly linear, palpable increase. It's now that a 970 is so close to a 980 that nobody cares about the 980, similar to the 670/680 days. But unlike a few months ago, just $100 above a 980 (or thereabouts) the 980Ti exists, much stronger and still overclockable. What point is the 980? The 980 should be a $450 card WITH aftermarket coolers, but they're all still over $500. The R9 390X is also a solid $120 or so over a R9 390, but for what? 10% performance? $120 for 10% is a joke. Look at the 980, it was $100 for 40-50% going to a 980Ti when that card came out. There's no gap between the 980Ti/R9 Fury X and the 970/R9 390. Those cards might as well not exist.

You could look at the Zotac AMP! extreme one. $700 and its cooler seems to be pretty good.

I fully agree. Even if Clevo is happy making desktop CPU-using laptops, nobody else is, and the majority of users STILL don't seem to care about the TDP limits or soldered nature of their CPUs. Also, outside of NBR the consensus is still "buy ASUS", "every alienware ever sucks and is a waste of money" and "clevo is **** tier". MSI is neither here nor there, but they're used as a reference for the larger laptops and their outrageous prices on decked out GT72/GT80 models turn off a lot of people. And then that's just people who can stomach laptops more than 1" thick and more than 4 pounds, which are still in the minority. Razer Blade/Acer Nitro/HP Omen are LOVED over on places like Reddit from my experience. Talking bad about them is a downvote magnet, even if your points are sound and you (unlike the downvoters) know what you're talking about.