680m + more waiting or 7970m + $301

I ordered a 9150 from xoticpc and decided to change my order from the 7970m to the 680m because of the enduro issue. But xoticpc would have to ship my laptop back to Sager which would cost $56 plus the $245 for the 680m. Also I'd have to wait even longer. Should I go through with the order change or settle with the 7970m and upgrade when a new nvidia card comes out? I will mainly just be playing GW2. Thanks

 

Don't have a 7970M but I can give some feedback on the 680M.

Played for the first time yesterday with 680M at stock clocks. All settings maxed @ 1080 and I was getting around 40-45fps running around PvE most anything I was doing.

In WvWvW when battles were bigger ( maybe 20-30 people ) I was in the low to mid 20's. I didn't have time to really play with the graphical settings ( I think supersampling probably takes several fps off the top ) but it didnt perform as well as I would have liked.

I am sure there still will be more gw2 performance tweaking to improve things ( huge improvement during the last beta weekend ) but I would like to be at least 45fps in WvW.
There is another short stress test tonight so I will take another look.

I understand that the real issue for performance with the 7970M is not the ability to play games at max settings but rather no improvement ( or limited ) in fps when you try to scale down. Maybe someone with a 7970M can confirm this?

 

I think GW2 is one of titles that has been reported and confirmed that suffers from the 7970M Enduro issue, so in your case it indeed might be worth it.

It might be worth it regardless of GW2, but that's just me.

 

Personally I think its worth it to wait for the gtx680m. I changed my build too. And im glad I did.

Sent from my Galaxy Nexus using Tapatalk 2

 

I have the 680M and could not be happier. Excellent Frame rates in Witcher 2 and Crysis on Ultra-ish settings output to my TV.

The response you got from the vendor does not make any sense. The 680M is a user replaceable part. There is no reason at all they need a new chassis for it. They should just get a 680M and install it for you. Why would they send the chassis back to Sager when all they need is a new GPU??

I would suggest that you cancel your order with XoticPC and find a vendor that can give you a more reasonable delivery date. Click here for a post about my recent buying experience. It might help to know there are several vendors out there who can ship your system pretty quickly.

 

After playing yesterday, I get pretty much the same result with the 7970M. Like you say, when i try playing with setting my utilizations get lower too. In spvp and pve the card is fine. In big WvW with 20-30 fps it's still playable and you dont really need 60 fps in big zerg fight. If money is not a big issue you will be more happy with the 680M.

I will try to record somes WvW during the stress test tonight and upload them on youtube tomorrow.

 

Thanks for the feedback guys. I'll go with the 680m. Also, I decided to send an email to cancel my order with xoticpc because I'm tired of waiting... ordered on July 15th and it could still be weeks before I get my laptop. I'll look into buying from lpcdigital.

 

So because you changed your mind you're now making XoticPC eat the shipping charges to send your already built laptop back and going to cancel the order too? Thats pretty low.

 

I never gave them the OK to ship it back to Sager so they won't be paying any shipping charge plus I have to pay a 3% cancel order fee that would be more than the cost to ship it.

 

I thought they work like LPC in that they don't actually build your laptop. They submit the order to Sager and, unless it goes to them first for some other custom option you chose, Sager sends it directly to you. I don't know but seems like if you cancel then they would have to send it back for a refund anyways. Maybe it works differently but these are the types of things that make retailers, of any market, usually have to raise prices to cover costs.

 

Just a plug for mythlogic on this. People seem to say they cost more (yes they do) but this change would have been able to handle in shop and save the extra hassle and money.

Note:I am not being paid by Mythlogic to write this, I have just been very happy with their service so far. <3

 

Something that might help you ...
I decided not to wait for chance of AMD fixing problems and contacted sager directly (not re-sealers). I was told they will do upgrade for me even if I'm past 30 days. They charged my credit card for full amount of 680m and once I ship back 7970m back they will refund me and I will just pay the difference of 245 and shipping.

For me the last straw was when I realized that audio issue on headphones jack was related to GPU interference on top of everything else, something I will not put up with on 2k laptop

 

Yeah, I think you have the wrong impression of what these resellers do. LPC, XoticPC, and the like all would send it back, because they don't build the computers. They do certain customizations (skins, monitor calibration, overclocking, etc.) and provide significantly better warranty and service than Sager. If they upgraded the GPU themselves, the Sager part of the warranty wouldn't cover the GPU. Mythlogic builds their own, so he's right they could do it in shop, but that is why they also cost more. To many, their more intimate knowledge of the system and capacity to do upgrades and such themselves is worth the extra. I chose XoticPC for more than just the price, though... they were very helpful to me, and answered about a billion asinine questions I kept asking. As for Xotic's shipping times, you have to understand that very few people order these things and get them a week later. It all depends on which systems Sager build first, and from what I understand they do them in batches of similar configs. I could be wrong on that. My shipment took a long while, but I got the carbon fiber mod, the copper cooling upgrade, and a few other time-adding customizations, plus I'm a trucker so I haven't been home to pick it up yet even though it's arrived. Just two more days till I get home, thank goodness...

 

Wait, really? The 7970m was causing interference on your headphone jack? I hope the 680m doesn't do that, too... I plan on playing a lot of games using the Sony HMZ-T1, and that would be awful if the headphones were a no-go...

 

Yeah, to the point where I had to switch to USB headset.
All was fine and sound was good until you fired up game that would bring GPU alive. There was mention of this around this forum and 680m users were reporting absence of the problem.

 

I think you may be sorely disappointed... my last 3 Clevos have all had this problem, all with different cards. It is more to do with the chipset design than what graphics card is installed. A common problem with all Sager/Clevos.

 

Can you please take a photo of the "copper cooling upgrade"? I'd like to see it. But to be honest, $10 of copper heatsinks and 5 minutes you could have the same thing.

You snooze you lose. And unless you order a special package unique to XoticPC, it's entirely built and shipped by Sager. Sounds like it hasn't even been built yet. But to be honest, XoticPC and LPC both order from Sager, so not sure if it will expedite it any more quickly. Just have XoticPC revise the order to the 680m.

 

Any kind man can tell us about working 680m and 7970m during past two stress-tests of GW2? Issues, problems and fps in pve, spvp and wvwvw? Thanks.

 

I have not experienced major interference, but I did notice in games a very faint hissing/buzzing in menus when my sound is in Stereo mode in Windows, like the sound you hear when a guitar is plugged into an amp but not being played. The noise is not audible when any sound is being produced by the game though. Also, the sound seems to go away if windows sound is set to 7.1, but when I do that, the way you hear voices in Skyrim gets screwed up because the game produces full 5.1/7.1 sound if windows is set for that. Bad for me since in Stereo mode music sounds like crap, but in games the difference is not noticeable.

 

Is the audio issue interference on the headphone jack related to 7970m or 680m?

 

I will see if it helps with my swap on Wed