So is the AW 18 880m SLI worth it if the bios gets fixed?

Apparently Pidge from Nvidia posted here and said they had located the root cause.

My AW 18 has been approved for RMA, is in the box, wrapped and ready to go, just have to drop it off.

I would gladly keep it (I really love the machine in general) if you guys think it's worth keeping if the GPU's get sorted out.

Keep it another week (the RMA expires the 14th of this month before they have to issue another), or just ship it and be done with it?

 

The answer is still no, especially when 980M is right around the corner.

Seriously just ship it off before you have second thoughts and then regret it 2 months down the line when the 980M gets released.

 

Stop buying GTX 880M and R9 M290x

 

Ok, thanks fellas. The AW 18 is no more. Sent back.

Now the wait begins for the next hotness...

 

You made the correct choice.

September: R9 M295X
October: GTX 980M

Both might be presented earlier, but they should be available on notebooks in those months.
According to one reseller, they should be 30-50% faster than GTX 880M. Not sure if he is guessing or have seen benchmarks, but thats what he said

 

Nvidia for me. I won't use AMD products.

The two times I bought desktop ATI GPU's over the years I learned that while technically the cards were powerful, you can't do poop if the drivers are badly written.

Things may have improved since then (been a few years at least), but I'll stick to what (usually) is the superior product.

 

That's the best choice. I'm not an NVIDIA fanboy, but I really do hate problems. Unfortunately, the last AMD mobile GPU that I owned that did not have driver problems, hardware problems--or both--was ATI 5870M. I was an AMD fanboy back then, but I got burned enough that I steer clear of them to avoid drama. If they released something truly phenomenal, reliable and with excellent driver support then I would not have a problem going red again. I have zero confidence that they will, as much as I would like them to.

 

Yup. Just bad for gamers (and computer enthusiasts in general) that there aren't more choices.
With the exception of CPU's and GPU's all other components have multiple manufacturers, there's always competition amongst mobo, ram, case, fan, HDD, SSD etc, which is good. Keeps the companies on their toes...but when you only have two rivals, and one outclasses the other, it's boring, stagnant...and you get situations like the 880m's cropping up.

 

Both ATi and AMD used to be good when they were separate companies. Ever since the ATi acquisition everything just went downhill.

 

Not really. I mean, 2006 is a long time ago, and they've had many victories and of course defeats since then. You forget that AMD had the fastest single GPU in the world (5870) and was the performance leader at every price point for 6 months while Nvidia took its sweet time getting Fermi out the door. You could also argue that GCN is a superior architecture to Kepler due to its performance in both gaming and compute.

 

LOL fine I'll be more specific .

The GPUs really took a nosedive once they killed off the ATi name for good, and the CPUs, well AMD hasn't made anything exciting since the Athlon 64.

The value of good hardware is also diminished if driver support is poor, and die prematurely due to reliability issues. I mean seriously, **** like this shouldn't happen. But I suppose one could argue that's more to do with Sapphire than AMD.

 

I had two sapphire 7950s and never had this issue

Sent from my Nexus 5 using Tapatalk

 

Nosedive? In what way? AMD's darkest days were from '07-'09 when they had absolutely nothing to compete at the high-end against G80/G92/GT200 or against Core 2.

It was so bad that Nvidia basically did nothing for 2 years, just die shrunk the 8800 and called it a 9800, and still ruled the roost. Those days are well behind AMD. They've been competitive with Nvidia since the Radeon 5000 Series, which was the last generation they kept the ATi brand name. Like I said, I think GCN is a great architecture.

Not the same kind of Intel slogging as the old Athlon days, but Phenom II was competitive with Core 2 and had better bang-for-the-buck than Nehalem in multi-threaded workloads. Even to this day, it still beats the FX in IPC, although the new CPU's can overclock higher. The original Phenom was a joke, definitely one of the worst CPU's AMD ever made, right behind Bulldozer.

And let's not forget how badly Nvidia has locked down its cards these last couple years with +135 MHz core limit on mobile and Green Light Program on desktop. At least with AMD, you're not required to have to flash a modded BIOS to overvolt your desktop card, which is simply absurd. And AMD GPU's have better bang-for-the-buck. The 7950 I got for $180 last year (with 3 free games, no less) with a moderate OC still beats a $300+ GTX 770.

 

Yeah.. but... what about PhysX and Nvidia gameworks

 

They can go die in a fire.

 

Lol you didn't feed me.