7970m & GTX680m owner feedback needed

No I mean I'm doing it alone there, while Clevo/Sager engineer got all the supports . Yes I've already sent out the card, they'll exchange it and send a new one back to me, I've also requested them to install an X-clamp on it.

 

The difference is that the 7970m problems will be fixed soon (hopefully.)

Your problems with the 680m won't be fixed unless you change your specs. So if you keep your current specs, I'd go with the 7970m and save the money.

 

The only problem the 680M is having is the driver crash in a few games (So far only FFXIV), and nvidia usually fix it within 1 or 2 driver update.

 

I say for bang for the buck stay with the 7970m. The issues will be over soon, and it'll be as good as the 680m for $300 less. Imagine how many games you can get with 300 during the Steam Summer Sale.

 

Mmmm, more games or support the evil. Hmm, tough one for me. Did I buy this for games or to stare at fuzzy doughnut to brag on a forum. Hmm... a conundrum

 

The steam sale is better than Christmas. Still thinking of getting a 7970m to play them with, and without the enduro issue on the HM.

 

I have bought too many games, but I've installed them and run a test run to make sure it runs and sure enough, have not played a single game I haven't been able to play with smooth framerate, high settings with AA on. It's been impressive experience so far.

 

People keep mentioning the "HM" I'm assuming it's a laptop of sorts. Someone care to set me straight?

Sent from my Galaxy Nexus using Tapatalk 2

 

Previous generation Clevo. Current one is EM.

 

HM is the previous generation. It didn't support switchable graphics, so it has a custom vBios with Enduro disabled for it. You can get it from either Sager or RJTEch.

 

To the OP,

I have just sent my laptop back to swap the 7970m for a 680m. I hate that it's costing me an extra $260, but quite simply I'm too impatient to wait for AMD to sort our their drivers. If you can wait for the drivers, I recommend you go for the 7970m, because I am already feeling buyers remorse for paying the extra!

To give you a measurable indication of my 7970m/Enduro problems :

I only got 33.3fps on the Crysis GPU bench with 1080p, DX10, Very High and 0xAA

GPU utilization was spiking a lot between 60% - 90%.

and this was tested with clean installs of the stock 12.5 and the 12.6, 12.7 drivers, as well as multiple windows re-installs. and ofc I was plugged in, on windows high performance power plan, and crysis.exe set to high performance in CCC
bad times....

I definitely feel this can be fixed with drivers, because 3DMark and some games do perform as expected, which tells me the hardware is capable of using 100% of the GPU's power, even with Enduro. It just needs to be applied to all games, not just some of them...

 

@Paul2110
Out of curiosity, since I am also considering buying a sager with the 7970m, when you talk about low fps, is it bad as well with lower settings.

It is hard to grasp the exact problems of the 7970m on sager right now. I understand BF3 multiplayer is not working very well (is it that much better with the 680M though?) and that for some other games in DX11 it is not extraordinary either but can you get a better fps with lower settings or some games just don't work very well with 7970m and would even work better with older graphic cards.

I would sacrifice some fps in games I might never played and that could get better with adjusted drivers but I would not be happy if the card would under-perform compare to cheaper and older cards.
If the card does not crash on a regular basis, if games are playable with lower settings that ultra sometimes then fine with me.

 

To be honest, most games (especially older games) will run fine at max settings. Examples are Diablo3(60fps locked vsync), Bioshock2(60fps locked vsync), Crysis Warhead(~45fps consistently), Any COD game (60fps locked vsync).

There are some exceptions such as crysis, where you will have 45fps one second, then 20fps for 5-10 seconds then it jumps back up (this becomes unplayable particularly in open areas). Lower settings for this game don't seem to help much, often you get better performance with max settings! for example, switching between 0xAA and 8xAA doesn't affect framerates!

Similar problems with Crysis 2, though in this case lowering settings does help. I can get 40-50fps most of the time with DX11 ultra and high res textures, but as soon as you enter an open area (eg. standing on a rooftop looking down) the framerate bombs to 20-30fps.
However, lowering to DX9 and Ultra 1080p makes a huge difference here - you will get 60fps virtually locked all the time.

I also saw problems with Arma2 at 1080p, very high settings. During the first campaign mission of Red Harvest when you're running down the hill, I was getting 20-30fps which just isn't good enough for this card playing a 2009 game.

I don't have BF3 so I can't comment.

I haven't seen any crashes during gaming so don't worry about that. The 7970m is a great card, no doubt about that - it just happens to give inconsistent framerates in some games I really want to play.

 

Now that I solved the two fairly minor problems I had, my 7970m is running very well, with good temps. I think I'm one of the "lucky" ones. I'm sure the cards leaving the factory are more stable than the borderline first to come out that people were getting a month ago.

This is, without a doubt, the best computer I've ever owned, including the graphics card. It's better, considering the games now, than my even more expensive nVidia 9800m GT setup was for the games out four years ago.

 

strange, i havent tried crysis 1 but crysis 2 and all other games except bf3 run 95+ utilization for me, or atleast at enough utilization for it to be a constant 60+fps (skyrim, just cause2)