7970m or 675m?

I'm building an Alienware 17x and it's a $50 upgrade to the 675m. I was reading some reviews and they typically say the 7070m is the stronger card. Which to you all suggest? :hi2:

 

7970M for sure. Much more powerful, runs a lot cooler ++

 

How about the 7970m vs 680m? :hi2:

 

If you have the money, 680M for sure. Mine is rocking
http://www.anandtech.com/show/6480/amd-enduro-beta-take-three

If you are short on money and have to stretch the budget to buy 680M, 7970M is the obvious choice.

 

7970M for best bang for your buck.
680M for reliability, though it will cost you at least $300++
Both are almost on par as far as performance goes with slight advantage on 680M but keep in mind that 7970M had many underutilization/BSOD issues over this year. 12.11 driver update fixed things up a bit but there are still good amount of people who are ripping their hairs because of 7970M not meeting their expectation.

 

I read that article that Cloudfire linked to and yeah it looks like the 7970m is no slouch and in a few games it beats the 680m but overall the 680m wins most of the time. I do agree that it really comes down to drivers and that's where Nvidia shines.

I think AMD needs to hire some new blood for thier drivers although the new guy http://twitter.com/CatalystCreator?_escaped_fragment_=/CatalystCreator#!/CatalystCreator has cleaned up some of the past issues.

 

7970m is very much on par with 680m gaming performance-wise (they are within 5% maybe 10% of each other), so comparing it to 675m (which is a renamed 580m and about 1.5 to 2x slower than 7970m [if we take benchmark results into consideration]) is not exactly 'fair' - and the 7970m is a lot cheaper.

Having lacked the personal experience with the 7970m, I cannot say anything useful on its drivers, but from what I read recently, it would appear AMD latest driver incarnation managed to get rid of most issues that a few people have been experiencing (whereas Enduro remains relatively buggy - which can be handled manually for now until automation is perfected in the drivers).

Either way, even if the drivers might not be favoring 7970m in a few games, AMD is bound to repair those deficiencies over time (besides, some games favor Nvidia and others AMD) and it will still deliver high frame rates and playability in practically ALL games across the board.

680m might come out by $300 (EURO or even GBP) more expensive (depending on the country you are buying it in), and one of the drawbacks the 680m has is severely cut OpenCL capability (compute performance), whereas AMD increased their OpenCL capability in 7xxxm generation.

 

If we are talking strictly for gaming then the 680M is probably the best as it gives the most consistently high performance 'today'.

When all other factors are taken into account (price, heat, battery life, etc.) and especially if not used strictly for gaming then the 7970m is the better balanced 'solution' right now (especially if some or most of your workflow is CS6 based).

Yes: drivers will improve - but as soon as a new tech node is reached - AMD will drop the 7970m from their 'tweaking' cycle in a heartbeat (they're too small to work on current and ancient (over 1 yr old) technologies at the same time).

Buy the component for what it does now.

So? Is this strictly for gaming? Or will a productivity angle be part of the typical usage of this component too?

Also: an IB i7 QC with at least 8GB (16GB preferred) RAM and Win8x64 PRO should be the platform you're considering going forward.