Possibly Upgrading from 6990m to 7970m need feedback

So today I got a quote from XoticPC of $449 to upgrade my GPU on my Sager 8150. So I've come here today to get opinions of people who own the 7970m and wondering if its worth upgrading from the 6990m. Any and all opinions or feedback on this matter is hughely appreciated.

Also im considering upgrading the RAM from 8GB to 16GB, any help with what type/brand of RAM I should go with?

 

Unless you commonly do heavy photo editing or other RAM-intensive tasks, 8gb is more than enough. I had 16gb in my Sager, but it was a complete waste of cash.

As for the 7970m, yes, I believe it's worth the upgrade, especially with the new drivers. The 6990m is still a good card, but the 7970m outperforms it by a wide margin (as much as 80-100% in 3DMark 11.)

 

Tanner from Xotic did say I would lose the function of the HDMI port by upgrading which sorta stinks, but I really don't use it often, so I guess that's ok.

I think i may just purchase the card through Xotic since their customer service is amazing.

As for the RAM, sometimes I do editing in Adobe Elements/Lightroom but never really noticed any lag or hang ups with my current set up, so perhaps your right about the RAM.

Thanks

 

No prob, enjoy the 7970m! Had one on my old NP9150 and it handled anything I could throw at it. I've got my old 3DMark 11 score in my sig if you're wondering what it can do with an overclock.

 

Whoops....somehow this double posted....sorry.

 

As someone with 16gb of ram ( it was a free upgrade at the time I ordered ) I can tell you that there isn't much point unless stated above you need it for photo or video editing. I don't multi-task a lot of things at once mind you but even right now I am sitting at 14% of my ram being used and I don't think I have EVER seen that go above 35% so it is kind of wasted.

Also having the 7970m and having a friend with the 6990m I can tell you that you will see a large improvement in your games if that's what your aiming for. I see a substantial increase in performance over his in game performance on the same games. I can tell you I can run everything I play, WoW, SC2, Planetside 2,BF3 a full array of steam games and LoL all on ultra extreme settings and all play just fine although I do cap them at 60FPS because I don't feel seeing 100+ is of any benefit and I like to think limiting the FPS can keep the stress down on the card.

While the 6990m is still an awesome card if your looking for a performance increase the 7970m should give you one.

 

Memory is so cheap these days. You're better off getting that later on if you absolutely need it. Honestly, as others said above, 8GB is plenty. As for the GPU upgrade - DO IT! From what I have read and witnessed (benchmarks), and what I have been told, the 7970M is on par with the 680M, and I can't stress enough how freaking awesome this card is. :thumbsup:

 

It's better to get 8 gigs of kingston 1866mhz pnp ram. If you see that it's not enough just get another 8gigs. They're really not that expensive and they come with unlimited warranty.

 

I have one more question before I pull the trigger on spending 449$ and upgrading the GPU... im not familiar with the current line of cards, but is the 7970m the best AMD card out right now for notebooks? I don't want to purchase then tomorrow AMD announces something brand new.

 

At this point in time the 7970m is the best AMD card available for a laptop.

 

The 7970m looks to be the best what AMD will put out for some time.
The upcoming 8xxxm series (which is due to be released this year) might be a re-brand of the 7xxxm series (same cards, same capabilities, different numbering/names - although granted, right now we mostly have rumors on that front, so we don't know anything definitive yet - but if someone has more info, please feel free to post it).

The 7970m definitely seems worth getting (compared to 6990m) because it will offer much higher gaming performance, but also better OpenCL/compute performance (which is something video editing can use).

 

ok think I will make the purchase tomorrow, I just did a test run and opened up my laptop as if i was replacing the GPU now, just to see where everything was, pretty easy.