[Q] nVidia Geforce GTX 870M vs 880M

I will soon be pulling the trigger on an NP8258. I'm wondering if there's anything really worthwhile about the GTX 880M that warrants the additional $300 price tag? Also, with the GTX 870M having a 192-bit bus as opposed to the GTX 880M (and my current AMD Radeon HD 7970M) with the 256-bit bus, what would I be missing out? Would it be much of a bottleneck to consider the 880M strongly enough? Also, would the 870M be considered an upgrade over my 7970M?

Thank you for your time!

 

870m is not much of a upgrade from 7970m~~ , as we don't really know how much the 870 can OC.

 

I'm only interested in stock clocks anyway. I wouldn't OC. My prime concern is whether the smaller bus will present a weaker performance scenario on average.

 

I hate to say it, but now is not a very good time to be upgrading. We are about to see a huge performance jump once Nvidia releases the 980M or 880MX (whatever the new top end mobile card will be from Maxwell). The 880M is just a rebranded 780M, since the 8GB VRAM can't be utilized. The 870M isn't really worth upgrading to from a 7970M.

 

Thanks for that input! My only concern is that my current Alienware is in warranty and I'd like to sell it while that's still the case. When do you think is nVidia's release schedule for the 900M series ? From a cost/performance perspective, I wouldn't get too much back for my Alienware anyway if I waited too long, making the upgrade less worthwhile in the first place.

 

Can I put my two cents here,Prasad, I am in the same boat as you are (7970m) and will most likely switch to NVIDIA again (where hopefully the battery life would be better in Optimus mode, the enduro in the R4 was rated to be better than Optimus) when I move from the R4.

I believe that whether you sell the R4 with or without warranty, the depreciation would be roughly the same, and the gains (upgrade with 880M/870M/Rxx) minimal, as someone here rightfully said, the maxwell upgrades are limited to the 860M and below, and it looks like the feature set for the maxwell would be pretty good (power saving and all) and since the current 880M is just a rebrand of 780M, you would be better off either buying a 780M machine or holding off on the purchase altogether and wait it out for the top end of the maxwell range in the months to come.

The 7970M is no slouch,just needs a few tweaks to keep it running, infact with the latest whqls, I have been using enduro with no (IMHO) perceptible loss in frame rate (on stock clocks for the entire rig on sleeping dogs/SC BL/BF3/AC3) , and am quite content for this moment. I would rather that new architecture for the 256+bit gpu is released than to buy into rehash of yesterday tech.


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Yeah, however my performance isn't my only concern at this point. I've moved to the US for my masters course and it's a pain again having to carry around a 17 incher for school. I'd like to switch soon enough.

 

Buy an iPad, surface or something, any gaming laptop worth it's salt won't give you usable battery life anyways.

I'd buy a slightly used or even new (if someone knows theUStechmarket well enough)
And use that in uni, and use the other at home for rec. purposes

 

I dunno, the P350/P357SM gets over 4 hours battery life.

 

Really? Not that I've tried using my P370SM on battery, but without Optimus 4 hours seem like a bit of stretch for the underpowered battery.

Also, any Optimus gaming laptop will give you good battery AND good gaming performance if you're plugged in. Win win I say.

 

Well in saying that my R4 (with all ssd) gives me 5+ hours to shut down, however it's big and bulky that the OP did not want to move around.

I am afraid I don't know much about clevo/ box config, but if I remember the r4 with the 680m had less battery life in Optimus mode than the 7970m in enduro.

Still I feel a second repurposed machine for college is better than lugging around your primary machine, I for eg still use the AOD 150 for portability with 16 hours of battery life on the 9cell battery I purchased for it ...beat that MacBook Air /iPad for that matter

 

I doubt you'd be in college for 16 hours in a row. Besides, I'm not a fan of having too many devices. A smartphone that does everything I want and a pc that handles all my gaming and computer science work like kernel compilations is all I need! Also, battery life was not the scope of this topic.

 

Choose the 880m

 

Choose religion B instead... That's what that sounds like. And no.

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880m provides about 25% more FPS than 870m at 1080p. Up to you if it's worth the price of the upgrade or not.

 

Just as a note the 870M will overclock to the same levels as any other GK104 core.

 

Is the 880M the same core as the 870M ?

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Neither are really all that much of an upgrade over the 7970m, the best option would be to wait for the Top Maxwell one when its launched (980m?).

 

Both use the GK104 core yes, the 870M has one 64bit mem bus, 8 rops and a shader cluster disabled.

 

Actually the performance difference between the 870m and 880m is 19.1% and I believe it's worth the upgrade to either because maxwell will be a new architecture and they will mainly focus on desktop for now to compete with AMD. And if you're looking to wait for 900 series you're more likely looking at next year May or June...... Don't be that guy who keeps on seeing the new models and saying "oh I'll wait till next year and when next year come you don't get anything and say the same thing over and over again" life is too short for that. Plus maxwell will be mainly focused on power consumption. As this is it's first year, next year you'll probably see the 970m as the 880m and the 980m as a desktop gtx 590....
If you're worried about 4k and all that then rest assure that 4k will not be a standard for Atleast another 3-4 years .... Have you seen 4x gtx titans running games on 4k....? 4 titans couldn't handle it

I had the gigabyte p35k last year with gtx 765m and now they came out with the p35w with gtx 870m so I sold my old one and ordered the p35w...

I think with the 870m or 880m you won't be tempted next year to upgrade because they will have the same features with low power consumption.... Since this will be the last batch we see for Kepler they made sure to give it maxwell features so for the next 2-3 years those keplers will still be high priority. I mean look at the maxwell gtx 860m and Kepler gtx 860m... Kepler is better than the maxwell version. Plus nvidia still havnt found a manufacturer to produce their 20nm die size....So it's your call buddy...

 

Like everyone else has stated, It's a ~20% bump. Anyhow, in terms of pure performance, the 870m is a slight downgrade from the mobility 7970, while the GTX 880m is a slight upgrade.

Check the benchmarks here: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 870M - NotebookCheck.net Tech - of course there are variations, but the common result seems to be GTX 880m > HD7970m > GTX 870m

Consider what you're willing to pay. My old p150em with HD7970 was stolen and I replaced it with a P150SM with a GTX 870m, but only because the reseller I used increased the price by 400 dollars for the GTX 880m, which I found excessive.

 

Lol the gtx 870m is a 880m but with one disabled smx, and wider memmory... Or else they were manufactured the same way.
Nvidia manufactures one chip for desktop and one for laptops but eventually they can't guarantee the smx shaders will all be working so let's say a chip has 13 out of the 16 shaders working they will make it a 870 and if 15 shaders are working they make it a 880 and so on. And if their is certain demand for graphics chips they end up removing smx from them and changing memories then lable them. They can't afford to manufacture different chips lol each SMX is 192 shaders I think. Before people caught on to it and starting flashing the video card bios and enabling those smx so they could make their 670 680's and so on. So nvidia started lazer burning those smx so no one can enable them.

 

That's why some people with same laptops and same video cards and person A can overclock more than person B for some reason even tho they have the same laptop. It's probably person A got a more stable card with stable smx shaders

 

The 780M and 880M use identical silicon and driver paths, they are as mature as each other.

 

Got myself an MSI this time, looking very good so far.

 

as a gtx 870M user, (with SLI though)
I can assure you stock vs stock, GTX 870M is 10-20% faster than 7970m both in the same condition (mature driver, sufficient cooling, etc)
and GTX 870M is 1-10% slower than GTX 780M but in some cases it is actually faster. it is actually a matter of bandwidth and memory width because on 1080P, 256bit will be faster than 192bit card
I run Crysis 3 all on very high + SMAA and I get 30-60 FPS and it never dips below 25 FPS (with the latest driver and crysis 3 update)
but i must say even GTX 8xxM isn't the best choice as in 2-4 months we might see a single GTX 970M/980M which is faster than SLI GTX 870M/880M

 

Which is when we wait for the bios mods and just grab the MXM cards and upgrade them ourselves

 

This is late... but how the cow do I get my P370SM3 to last 4 hours on battery? I dropped brightness to 10%, don't use any 3D applications and just web searching/typing (on wifi) and it lasts ~2 hours or a little more, and I think that's pretty cool and all, but I don't think 4 hours is possible. Unless I probably load a 2D clocks maximum profile for my 780Ms?

 

Try using multi monitor power saver mode in ThrottleStop.

 

I'll try that, though I don't see how it'll squeeze an extra ~2 hours out of my battery.

 

Gpus are hungry beasts, it will help.