Upgrading from a 285m to a 660m, worth it?

This would be an upgrade from the rig in my current sig to something equipped with a 15.6" 1920 x 1080 screen and an i7 3639QM at 2.4GHz and a 660M.

I've had people tell me that I would see anything from a 30-100% performance boost so I don't know what to believe anymore.

The new laptop would cost me £600 and I would be looking to sell my current one which I assume would cover most of that cost. In the end, I'm expecting to be spending £200 for this upgrade of my own money once my current laptop has been sold.

What would you do in my position? I ask because the store I'm looking to buy it from has an offer guaranteeing delivery by Christmas, but that offer ends tonight...

 

You can just buy a 660M MXM card and install it to the clevo

 

I would say depends on the games you play, my Sager has a 280M and it still suits my gaming needs. W860CU should accept 6970M which is ~200-250 dollars these days.

 

Upgrading the GPU is a great suggestion. Cheaper and give you more life out of your machine.

 

So the GPU in my rig isn't soldered in? Is replacing the GPU something I can do or would it be best to go find a professional store?

The 6970M does seem a little bit more powerful than the 660M, although I have no idea where to buy individual components like that here in the UK.

EDIT: Found some on ebay but it's a lot more than $200 - usually double that.

Still worth it or should I just sell this laptop and buy an entirely new one? I'd be tempted to because of the faster processor but I guess I'm probably not very CPU limited anyway...

If installing a new GPU isn't too complicated and I can find a reasonably prices 6970M that ships to the UK, I'd certainly be interested.

 

Found this: Clevo W870CU

Seems legit and cheaper than I had anticipated. Still, the whole GPU switching process seems terrifying for someone who has only ever replaced a HDD before....

 

Nope not soldered it you are free!

It's really easy.. as long as you get everything provided, the only thing to do is unscrew, then repaste (very easy) and screw the new GPU on!

 

Really? Because the description posted here is TERRIFYING: Clevo W870CU

It's also somewhat poorly written but still, it's somewhat put me off the idea. Not sure I even have a dremel...

But then again, this makes it look easy: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7kPs7iLln9A

 

That's why you'll have to buy a 6970M that is already fixed for you. Usually eurocom sells these on ebay

 

You should NOT need a dremel, that's probably the terrifying part you saw. Otherwise, it's just as jaug1337 stated. Unscrew, remove heatsink, remove GPU, clean off thermal paste from GPU and Heatsink, install new GPU, apply thermal paste, screw down heatsink, done, ???, profit.

Whatever you do, do NOT do like in that video by leaving the thermal paste on heatsink and GPU. No no no no no no no... great way to burn up your GPU. Always clean thoroughly. Just use high % Isopropyl alcohol (like 99% if you can find it, but 95%+ should do fine) and soft paper towel to clean it up. Then apply the new bead of paste before you secure heatsink.

 

I wouldn't even use isopropyl alcohol, just go to your local drug store and find anhydrous alcohol, means no water.

 

Yeah, cutting through the heatsink does not seem like a good time.

So should the 6970M fit fine in the same slot as the 285m without any modifications? Or is that still necessary?

Also read stuff about the power supply in the W870CU not being enough really but still working? Or should that not be an issue?

This does seem like a sensible upgrade, but I'll probably spend the next week reading about it before I pull the trigger on a purchase. The £200 price tag from MXM-Upgrade seems reasonable and if it's as simple as you say, I think I could probably manage that.

The guys I linked to earlier also have a 1 year warranty and they've been mentioned before on the site so I'll probably get the card from them, unless I can find the modified eurocom version with heatsink that was mentioned earlier for around the same price.

 

Yes W860/W870CU are MXM 3.0b compliant, pretty much any new GPU minus the newest generation should work.

 

But the 6970m is a little bigger than the 285m right? I just ask because of the modifications to the heatsink that I heard had to be done in order to fit it in (see my previous post). If it was just a case of unplugging my current card and throwing this one in, I'd probably buy the upgrade straight away. It seems a little more complicated though.

Still, the 6970m is cheap enough that this might be worth it. Found it for £250 delivered on Eurocom's ebay page (sent from the US) as well as £200 delivered from MXM-Upgrades (EU location so would likely arrive quicker) and also for £125 off a random guy on ebay... but that one makes no mention of any warranty unlike the others so I'm a little wary.

 

I would try to find a GTX 670MX and install that if you wanted to stay Nvidia. It's faster than the 6970M and draws a little over half the power. Win-win.

It costs around $375 for the full kit, but it's well worth it.

 

I wish I had that much money to burn... Would love to stay Nvidia for simplicity's sake but the 670MX has just been released, right? No way I could find that for a similar price as the 6970M.

EDIT: Actually, $375 for everything might be OK... How's shipping to the UK though? And I doubt I'd get a warranty in case something went wrong. Seems risky. Although the lessened power draw seems great.

 

No the physical sizes are the same, worst case you may need to mod heatsinks or get a new heatsink and backplate.

Clevo has all but abanoned the W8xxx platform, unless it is confirmed a 670MX works, I would avoid it.

 

So this guy was wrong in suggesting that the parts are different: http://www.mxm-upgrade.com/W870.html? Or does it just not matter as the chassis can fit both?

Is it easy enough to find a replacement heatsink (and more importantly, reasonably priced)? I'll have a quick look as I'd rather have something that's guaranteed to work rather than have to do the modifications myself.

I found a couple of other mobile GPUs offering a similar level of performance for around the same price but none seem to be supported by the W8xx platform so I'll likely stick to the 6970M unless there's a strong argument for another model.

 

Actually the newest AMD generation works too, a fine lad just made the 7970M work ever so nicely

 

I have not been able to find any anhydrous alcohol. I have trouble finding 99%, and bought 3 bottles last time I saw it. In any case just the point that it doesn't need to be expensive or use crazy aftermarket products, although those work too. I buy the anti-static cotton swabs for finer detail cleaning. Otherwise been using alcohol and paper towel for many years with no issues.

In any case I would buy a video card with a heatsink unless you're absolutely certain that your heatsink actually works with the new card.

 

Yeah, that's what I'm thinking of doing. I've managed to find a few people selling the 6970M heatsink online for not that much so will just make sure I buy that as well. There's also a few people on ebay in the US selling the 6970m with the heatsink but, again, I'd rather buy the card from MXM-upgrade as it's based in the EU and I'd get shorter shipping times as well as some sort of 1 year warranty. None of the ebay sellers offer that unfortunately.

If I buy the 6970M and a separate heatsink, then is it really just a case of removing my GPU and plugging this one? I know I have to apply thermal paste and plan on buying a ESD band as well as mat along with the alcohol for cleaning so I know there's a few more steps to it than that but it seems doable, even for me.

While we're talking about things out of my price range... Would love a 7970M but no way I can stretch to double my budget (also, as it's my first time switching a GPU, I'd rather buy a cheaper model in case something goes terribly, horribly wrong).

 

Yes ofc, it's fully understandable, just stating that it's possible good luck the 6970M mate

 

I know

So, I'll probably take the plunge on that 6970M afterall. Should be a huge performance increase (nearly double compared to my 285m) so I'll be happy.

All I need to go along with the GPU is a heatsink, right? Will I also need a spare pack of X-brackets and screws?

And one last question, will I have to flash the vBios?

Thanks for your advice so far by the way, everyone's been incredibly helpful so far! These have always been my favourite forums, and with good reason.

 

The 7970M required a flash of the vBIOS.

The only thing with the 6970M is to install the drivers and it should work like that.

 

That's good to know (and certainly makes my life easier), thanks!

As for the X-brackets, I guess the heatsink I'm buying should come with them? If not, they're probably easy enough to find online and not too expensive. Probably comes to around a £250 upgrade in total, definitely better than the £660 I nearly spend on a new laptop with only a 660m

 

Allow me to interject, because I feel you should strongly reconsider taking the brand new laptop.

It's true that £250 is less than £660, but that extra £410 nets you:

1. Most importantly, a brand new laptop, complete with fully warrantied parts and chassis. The savings seems nice, until your G780's motherboard has an issue.
2. A newer generation quad core, which is twice as fast as the anemic i7-720QM.

I've always disagreed with spending nearly half of the cost of a brand new machine on a GPU. Speaking of which, the GTX 660M is only 10-15% slower than the 6970M. If I was given the choice today, I'd choose the 660M every time, because of the benefits and incentives which come with having an Nvidia card. AMD offers nothing on top, like Nvidia does with their driver features.

 

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The 6970M in practice is a lot more than 10-15% faster than the 660M. Everything I've seen have suggested that a 660M would be a 50% performance increase over my current 285m while the 6970M offers up nearly a two-fold increase at 100%.

As I use this machine mainly for gaming, the GPU is the most important component, especially as I'm not really CPU-bound in anything I've ever played (apart from maybe Total War games but, even then, I feel like doubling the GPU power would brute force past that).

A newer warranty and CPU would be nice, but the performance difference seems a lot larger than that, at least from the benchmarks I've seen. If I'm wrong though, I would be happy to reconsider as I could likely overclock the 660m to make up that 10-15% deficit.

 

Good points Kevin make.
Kepler is pretty OC friendly too so you can always overclock up to 6970M if you want to (and it still runs pretty cool compared to 6970M). Combine that with a brand new notebook and a CPU that will benefit you in some games plus emulators like Dolphin.

 

I went through Notebookcheck's gaming benchmarks, and picked out all of the ones where both the 6970M and GTX 660M were tested at Ultra settings. Of the 21 games, the 6970M's average advantage was 15.43%,. It's highest lead was 29%, in Max Payne 3, while in Batman: Arkham City it's just 9%, and in both Mass Effect 3 and Diablo 3 the advantage was a mere 3%. On the other side of the coin, the GTX 660M holds a 12% lead in FIFA 2012.

And keep in mind that a lot of these tests were run with a 660M on new drivers versus a 6970M on very mature ones, so a chunk of that ground will have been made up over time.

I will stand by my recommendation, but I can understand the want for the absolute power.

 

You can buy a 6970M from Ebay for £120. I would go for a GTX 485M instead though but that's my personal choice. What is your max budget?

 

I ended up agreeing with you so I just went ahead and bought a new machine with an i7 3630qm and a 7970m.... It ended up being £200 over my budget but I thought the performance jump was big enough to justify it. And you're right, a new warranty and a massive CPU boost are welcome features, especially as I've been wanting to emulate Wii games for a while now.

Well, turns out my max budget was around £900.... Once I've sold my current laptop and my PSVita and all its games, this upgrade will end up setting me back around £250. I should be able to sell my current laptop for at the very least £400 considering how much the GPU retails by itself on ebay. I just need to find someone who's interested now.

Thanks for your advice though! I remember you helping me pick out my 285m laptop years ago

 

upgrade to 675 to make it worth it. 660 is almost mainstream whereas 285 used to be top notch. you dont want to upgrade again soon.

 

I went for a 7970m instead, thanks for the advice though! Should be arriving in a few days, cannot wait

 

Did you buy the GX60?

 

I got the Clevo P170EM with a 7970m as well as the i7 3630qm. Came to £900 with a 64GB SSD and no OS (I have a spare 500GB 7200RPM HDD and a copy of both Windows 7 and 8). Much cheaper than what I paid for my current 285m laptop new around two and a half years ago.

 

Congrats.

Let us know if u face any problems with far cry 3 and CTDs...

Enjoy

 

OK, I can't seem to install CCC on Windows 7 64-bit no matter how many times I try... Stuck with integrated graphics until I do. Any ideas what's up?