A little help needed (7970M or 680M)

Somewhat new to posting new thread on here so could you go easy on me if this is the wrong section (used to XDA where I would be attacked viciously if I even dared put something in the wrong section)

Anyway, I am going to be purchasing a P150EM. I asked around on the 'What notebook should I buy?' section but I now have another question related spefically to clevos

When the 7970M first came out, there was millions of problems I read, when the 680M came out there wasnt anywhere near the amount of problems. After all these months how does the 7970M hold up? Are most of the problems if not all of them been fixed?

680M I hasnt really had any problems from what I know of, is it worth spending the extra £100 and picking up a 680M over the 7970M?

QUESTION: is 7970M fixd? If not should I buy 680M and not worry?

Thank you NBR people's

 

7970M is fixed. Still some very few ]driver problems but nothing to worry about. Best bang for your bucks
680M never had any problems. It just work. If you plan on overclocking your GPU, 680M is a beast.

 

It depends what you want to do. On most newer big titles the 7970M under-utilization problem seems to be essentially fixed on ultra settings, but in several games when I put minimum settings in order to maximize FPS, I get 30% utilization... But I'm getting enough FPS so I'm happy. It was a really great purchase for me considering the price.

 

Can I ask,did I post in the correct section?

Thank you for the help. I might go ahead and purchase a 7970M then, there is currently a 680M going here in the UK for £1200 (1950.36USD) and the 7970M going for £1100 (1787.83USD) so I'll save myself the money and buy a nice external sound card to make up the clevos poor sound everyone is talking about

 

Games I would be playing would only be LoL, D3, SC2, Far Cry 3, Crysis 3 when it drops and other games here and there.

 

for the me the extra $ for the 680 is justified for performance and decent drivers all the time.

 

All those games you mentioned should be fine to play at max settings except Far Cry 3, this game has issues on both the 7970m and the 680m, though I don't have any issues myself.

performance is sort of on par and they are back and forth on most games, if you plan to overclock then the 680m is a monster of a gpu. Drivers you don't even have to think about with Nvidia, all the drivers released are stable and have no issues whatsoever.

 

That is what I was thinking, but the 680M puts me to the very limit of my budget and it would be nice to splash out on a sound card and headphones,I've always been a Nvidia fan and all the ATI cards I have had before had problems, going to a card that people know has problems really puts me off despite the low price.

Really dont know what to do S:

 

Well dude you will be more than fine, but for a 100£ difference I would go 680M all the way, in my case it was a 300€ difference. They are on par on ultra settings, but on low settings it's a different story...

 

but with a top of the line GPU, why would you want to play at low settings? maybe in a few years, when its too weak to run current games, but at that time i would hope the drivers would be smoothed out even more

also did the AMD's driver installatino issues get fixed? e.g. blue screen

 

That's a good point to make, if you can't play it on Ultra then it will be the same case in low settings for the 7970m. When you have the 680m you can lower settings to make game play smoother, though, I have an inkling the AMD techs are finally developing the WHQL drivers which should improve(maybe fix) the memory issues and also under utilization.

 

My suggestion is to wait for the 680MX listed on notebookcheck's website. Going by the specs they have for it, it should have a LOT better memory bandwidth and still be a little better in core/shader speeds than the regular 680M.

 

The 680MX will have more memory bandwidth, but same core speed. 719mhz core and 1250mhz memory instead of 900mhz memory meaning 115.6gb/s vs 160gb/s

 

Might go ahead a do so, I have always been one for overclocking and i have a feeling the Nvidia will have more resale value years down the line and will offer me more power too (years down the line)

Cannot wait pretty much computerless atm. Plus wont they cost a lot more


I am going to pull the trigger if the 680M is still in stock within the next few days. Also realised it comes with 16GB ram opposed to the 8GB. Kinda seals the deal right there

 

Same core speed yes, but higher core count. 1536 versus 1344 I believe, so that's where the better speed comes from.

 

Ah yes, forgot to mention that haha ><" which also in turn means less heat produced per core, which means higher overclockability.

 

Because I'm an avid and competitive FPS player and I absolutely demand more than 120 fps to match my 120hz monitor! Which I cannot get with my 7970M and its 30% utilization, I hover at around 90 fps with minimum settings in most game modes, and man that really sucks when you pay so much for a laptop. But as I said it only depends what you want to do. If you are a bit tolerant then both cards are awesome choices, just be happy with whichever you purchase.

The beauty with Clevo computers is that I can probably get a 680M for 200€ in a couple of years if I am not satisfied!

 

jeez, these UK prices are insane!!!

like double to almost triple the pricing im used to...

Sent from my Galaxy Nexus using Tapatalk 2

 

The 680MX that is exclusive to MACs? That ain't gonna do most of us any good until they decide to release it for PCs as well.

 

for me to get up into 120 range. turning off everything that is preformed by the cpu, such as particles and shadows. then there is less of a bottleneck between the cpu and gpu.

 

This is the cheapest 680M I have ever seen ever in the UK brand new (Dell Outlet go for like £950~)

 

your question is self answered, go green.
7970M is a great card IMHO, but if you dont want any of the known issues then go for nvidia, you wont get a definitive answer here, both cards are great and one is much cheaper but demands more work and patience, thats all there is to it,

 

very well put vozier, especially when it comes to EM machines luckily, HM laptops dont require any driver tinkering, they just work with the 7970m

Sent from my Galaxy Nexus using Tapatalk 2

 

Very well said, gonna stay green! Thank you for your input

 

I would go with 680m. Had nothing but hassle with 7970m and had to switch to an HM series clevo with 7970m to play without problems introduced by enduro. I know some say that its fixed, but I've recently played on m17x and compared enduro on and enduro off modes I can tell you that isnt strictly true. There are plently of games where 7970m with enduro still lags far behind in non enduro enabled 7970m, even in BF3 on some maps you still get some patchy utilization issues; so if you are spending £1200+ on a laptop you may as well get something that works properly.