Clevo P370EM - 7970m CF or 680m SLI ?

Which one is the wiser choice ?

Any news or resources regarding 7970m CF in the P370em
Im about to get the laptop, and i am inclining heavily towards 7970mCF since a single AMD card is 200EURO+19% TVA while an Nvidia card would cost me 580EURO+TVA
A ton of money difference, and i really do not think the difference is justifiable.
What do you guys say ?

Are there advantages disadvantages, like temperature, power consumption, performance, multi GPU scalling, drivers?

1)Temperature: I read somewhere nvidia cards run cooler
2)Power consumption: Heard the nvidia cards use less power, even if it has 4gb ddr5
3)Performance: Heard they should be toe on toe
4)Multi GPU scalling: Heard the scalling should be better with SLI, but in the desktop world the scalling is equaly good, and im thinking with the new drivers 12.9 or even 13 forward, things will only get better.
5)Drivers: Supposedly the Nvidia drivers are better, and not only better, but most importantly, working.
6)Ram, allthough 4gb is clearly better, how usefull is that in reality.

With few antialiasing setting i got in the star wars old republic close to 1450 mb utilization. I wonder if more AA settings will got over 2gb ram, thus 4 gb making sense.

After all calculation, nvidia solution is 904 EUROs more. A TON of money. A bitter pill to swallow.

 

I've gotten Skyrim to use more than 2GB of RAM when I intentionally sought out every single texture mod I could find and ran as many as possible. Personally, I'd go with the 7970M crossfire, even though I have a single 680M in my machine now. As mentioned, driver improvements on the desktop side leave 7970/680 nearly equal, and I too would imagine they scale reasonably similarly on the mobile platforms.

In addition to that money the 7970Ms save you, they give you the opportunity to make some back too. With 2x 7870M, you should be able to mine Bitcoins slightly more than 600 MHash/sec. If they overclock well, you may even get up to 700 MH/s.

 

Yah, the difference its a lot of money.
Hopefully the drivers wil improve with time. What bothers me is after so long a time, there is still no driver with official support for the 7970m.

What in gods name is this all about ?

 

go with crossfire, no enduro+affordable (compared to the monstrously overpriced sli 680)

 

So is planned, the crossfire option.
What i would like to know, is wheter or not is the cash sacrifice worth it, consumption, temperature wise, driver wise, memory wise etc !

Because i could get now a 7970m Crossfire, or a single 680m now and a second later on.

Even as i write these words now, i am finding difficult to swallow the difference, even if it has advantages.

 

If you got a second 680 down the road, wouldn't you be paying full price for it? How much more does the sli680 cost than the single 680? I would think it would be less than what a new 680 costs at retail, but idk...

 

I think no one can answer for sure what is the best. It all depends on what you have experienced or not.
From my personal experience (6790m xfire) I would say that the nVidia cards ARE worth their money regarding stability with dual graphic cards. I wanted to save some money, too and took crossfire and had so many bad experiences that I bought nVidia cards a couple of months later, what was even more expensive that way in the end, but since then I am very satisfied. Actually I think I would try AMD again, but not in the next 2-3 years. They have a lot to do with crossfire to get it work properly. Of course it can be different with the 7970m´s, but from what I´ve read in the Alienware forum about 7970m crossfire, it hasn´t change for the better... .
It depends on what kind of games you play, too. Some games run great without any problems, but some are flickering, some are causing black screens and some are blue screens and some are just freezing. Sometimes the cards were under full load without doing anything. Especially the memory didn´t downclock. Had it all.
So, as long as you can spend more money, I would say take nVidia...
But, of course, I know that there are people who don´t had so much trouble with crossfire and would say take it - from their perspective, it´s the right thing to do, of course.
If you were asking about single card - 7970m would be the thing to go (as long as it don´t uses Enduro at this point) of course. But with a dual card solution that you want, I would not recommend it.

 

a single 7970m costs me 200 euros plus tva
a single 680m costs me 580 euro plus tva. So the difference is huge.

I could get now crossfire 7970m, or single 680m sli, and a second 680m later on.

 

This is exactly the debate I am having.

I think that if you do not care about battery life then consider xfire. If you do not care about cost then 680m SLI.

The costs I have found is that xfire 7970m is only 10% more than a 680m. Under any circumstance (apart from battery) this is a better bang for buck.

A single 680m then buying another, runs into the problem of: in 4-5 years will I have a desktop? Also MXM cards don't really depreciate much and are hard to source. Furthermore you would have to buy a chassis that can take SLI/Xfire, which is more than the standard chassis.

At the moment I am holding fire because my preferred supplier is not convinced enough by the performance of Xfire 7970m.

 

If you really want a dual GPU setup then Nvidia is the only option at the moment, but for a whole different reason: Micro stuttering. AMD has done nothing about it, but Nvidia introduced many features that put them way ahead in this area. You can check this out in this graph or even on Wikipedia (or this, slightly outdated, article). Right now two 7970M will push any game beyond 50 fps in 1920x1080 so you will not notice any negative effect, but in 1 or 2 years you might only reach 30 fps. Normally more than enough to play a game, but with XFire micro stuttering will most likely ruin your experience. Software adjustments only bring you so far, Nvidia introduced hardware features against micro stuttering with Kepler, so this problem will not be solved by a mere driver update to your 7970Ms. That is the reason why I'd go with two GTX 680M, after all, if you spend that much money on a laptop you want to make sure that you can play any new game on ultra settings for at least 2 years.

 

hardware features against microstuttering with kepler, now thats something you dont hear of everyday.
Where have you heard that ? Links something ?
If that indeed is the case, i might go the 680m sli way, or if that is to expensive, maybe 675mx SLI or something....
Crap.....

 

From a German review of the GTX 690. Here is the interesting passage:

It further says that the hardware feature is based on the software adjustments made to improve micro stuttering. It also makes sense if you look at the older Tomshardware article, there is a huge between the GTX 590 and the GTX 690 when it comes to micro stuttering, while AMD did not improve. In the conclusions it also says that every Kepler card has those hardware adjustments, not just the GTX 690.

 

Now im forced to get the 680m SLI, cause AMD is so... inferior in these regards.

1)More RAM
2)Better driver support
3)Less heat, less powerconsumption
4)Better SLI scalling
5)Hardware anti micro stutter support.
6)Adaptive V-Sync

It seems one gets a lot more for his money.

 

If one has a lot of money

 

Don`t buy 7970M CF. Its plagued with problems. I know many Alienware owners have jumped to 680M SLI because of it


http://forum.notebookreview.com/alienware-m18x/678063-you-satisfeid-your-amd-7970m-crossfire.html

http://www.techinferno.com/2012/06/23/a-consumer-nightmare-alienware-m18x-r2-amd-7970m-crossfire/

 

My 2 cents.. 680m SLI no question. Unless it's not financially possible.

Look if anyone is planning on getting a single 680m and then down the road get another there is a good chance there will just be a 780m by that time, and well yeah..

Get the dual 680m SLI, work some overtime if need be and you will not regret it. I cannot say the same about the Xfire.

 

7970M SLi is retarded, to say the least... mother of god

 

Then Lord help me ! I ordered with the crossfire.
Its a 3920xm CPU, 7970m CF laptop. It will have 32gb ram, crucial m4 256 ssd msata, killer wireless 1202 (thats 2x2 mimo and bluetooth), blueray reader.
And i will try to see if it fits the 15mm thick western digital 2 TB 2,5" hdd. Hope it fits. It fits inside the x7200 chasis, if you can believe that, a 15mm hd and 9,5mm hd in the hdd bay.

 

If you can change killer wireless then change because they have a lot of drivers problem including me. However, if you insist on keeping it I would hope you don't run in problem like us users here. Biggest problem for the killer is disconnectivity from router on periodically . BTW, congrats on your build .


Oh forgot one thing. when you get your setup make sure you install clevo driver and then on top of that install amd 12.9 drivers+ their cap (cap for crossfire,very important). The newest driver+ cap is best crossfire driver, all crossfire owners are satisfied with this driver.

 

it's a engineering sample, i got it cheap, otherwise i wound never ever payed the premium for the cpu. Because its an engineering sample, i'm not sure i'll be getiin clevo drivers.
I plan to install directly desktop driver, if that will work.

Another good point for the AMD solution is bit coin mining speed, at 300mhs/sec per card, its way better than my 34 Mhash/sec i get with 460m per card or even one would get with a 680m around 100.

I wanted to get killer wireless just because i heard its good and better then other intel stuff. i'll be getting the 1202, thats with bluetooth.
Do you got a link where i can read the killer related problems ?

 

I didnt know you will have eng cpu sample. Just beware that its eng sample , therefore it could be one of the many revisions samples that intel designed until researched to desired version. So you might have a bad revision, and as result you will not get the desired performance, overheat issues, debugged , etc..... As for amd driver, its impossible to install desktop driver for a reason. The reason is that your graphics card has switch able feature ( switch between intel gpu and your card) that was designed by amd and customised by clevo . So you need clevo driver components to detect your gpu . A desktop driver wont detect your graphics for that reason. BTW, we already tried that and didnt work. In order to work you must follow what I said in previous post. As for killer, just searhc the forum in sager and AW, you will see many people complaining about issues as well as you can many people posting in official bigfoot forum (google it).

 

I'm sorry, I'm getting a little confused here. What engineering sample? Aren't you asking for advice to choose between the Xfire and SLI? Suddenly it's an engineering sample for the CPU.

Is the engineering sample the CPU or GPU?

 

good explanation here:

Engineering sample - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Ya he was asking about xfire or sli , mentioned about eng sample so I got engaged with it lol

 

The whole laptop is engineering sample. But i will be gettin 2 years warranty. and 2 weeks to try it out.

 

I'm an engineer and I know the meaning engineering sample. It's just out of a sudden that the whole top of the line laptop becomes an engineering sample. Kind of surprised by it.

I don't know how you get the "opportunity" or connection to buy an engineering sample. No offense, but it just sounds a little shady to me. Are you buying directly from the engineer and he/she himself is selling the laptop? Or are you in some sort of beta program where you get to purchase engineering samples at a fraction of the original? (I'm just making a comment. You don't have to respond to this.)

This is my advice about engineering sample. Don't pay for it. Even if you do, make sure you only get charged for no more than 25% of the original cost. Because if it doesn't work out, you can still rip out the computer and sell them as parts to cover your cost. Good luck to you.

 

How many designs, aka Engineering types are made for one GPU? Are we talking 3 or 10 before they find something that works for them?

 

i'm gettin it from papa clevo directly, because im a notebook evangelist

 

@Cloudfire
I work in safety certification industry for industrial products, so I can't comment about consumer products. For safety testing, when we test the products and the results are non-compliant, clients will continue to redesign their products (making changes here and there) until they pass. We care about safety, not performance. For performance related testing, I'm assuming there are going to be multiple revisions until they get it right. There is no exactly a fix number set for engineering samples. It's totally dependent on the budget the company set for their product.

@Bytales
That's good for you. From my point of view, they should give you the laptop and pay you to test it. I still stick to my original comment. Don't pay too much for it. Even if you are paying $2000 for a $3000 laptop, that's still way too much for an engineering sample. Do keep us posted how that engineering sample perform

 

They offer 2 years warranty, and if there is going to be an incompatibility along the line with something, they offered to replace the motherboard to the end product one, if such incompatibilities were to occur.
So i said to myself, why not, i get an 3920xm cpu, 7970m 2 pieces, at at a much cheaper price i would pay only from buying a 580m SLI , the maximum official supported GPUs in the x7200.

Besides i have 2 weeks to test it and decide if i keep it or not. not only that they took my samsung ssd for 70 euros, and i have the option to buy a bigger one, msata, and have a platform with 4 ram slots.

And lighted keyboard.
Not doing so, would have been very hard and much more expensive to sell my x7200, and then buy something else.

The thing is im not allowed to sell it to anyone, and the warranty applies only for me.

 

I have had a 7970m p370em cf for 2 weeks now , and can say i am over the moon . A few teething problems with 12.9 beta driver, but with a clean install of 12.8 with driver sweeper, the system is stable, and every game i can play with fixed frame rate at 60fps, with the exception of Sleeping dogs, where i need to take AA down from extreme to the next one down.

Now , if anything does go wrong i will be the first to post here, but so far , its exceeeded my expectations. That being said, SLI is the better option if money is no object, simply because fewer people seem to have issues.

BUT DONT be put off by 7970m in CF - its not broken, it may just take a little time getting the right drivers and settings so its completely stable. Thats my own experience, and making sure that ccc drivers are cleaning installed is probably the single most important thing you have to do - if bits are left of the old driver, thats when you will likely have problems.

Will keep updating but so far it has been brilliant - guild wars 2 , BF3 , sleeping dogs, Batman all run brilliantly.

 

I will be doing a clean windows install. What should i install first ? (driver wise from GPU i mean)
I allready have amd catalyst 12.9beta dotnet4 220mb. I was planing to install that, then the latest catalyst profiles.
So far its good to hear the cards perform well. ANd the difference in price for a 680m SLI is downright outrageous.

 

Actually, you wouldn't want to concern battery life in either config. The manuals state that any XFire/SLI should strictly run off a "plugged in" 370EM.

 

Holy sh.it it just came. It scored a PGU vantage score of ... look here


Oh, and i installed catalyst 12.9 beta just after windows install, no clevo drivers, and i got the new catalyst control center.
Havent tested games as of yet.