Is the 7970M worth it?

I am about to buy a laptop from xoticPC and I am a little bit hesitating between the 7970 and the GTX 675M. Since Malibal claims that the GTX 675m is the best thing there is right now. And some people on the web say that the new radeon is incredibly more powerfull.

So what's the verdict? AMD or NVIDIA? Or should I wait a little bit for something else?

 

Considering that the 7970 is not technically available yet, stating the 675m is the best thing there is right now is accurate, from an availability stance.

*edit: at least, generally available since none of the resellers have them yet.

 

Go team red if you are ordering soon. I need a computer so bad that I purchased a 675m to expedite and I'm going to have to buy one aftermarket. The 7970m performs like a boss in the benchmarks I've seen thus far.

-- Sent from my Palm Pre using Forums

 

Another vote for the 7970. It will be worth the wait.
But if you don't need bleeding edge performance, the 675m will save money and is still very capable.

 

Well I can see it right now on XoticPC. At 200 bucks. What do you mean not available?

 

Also says END OF MAY, which will probobly be June because of all the orders waiting for the 7970.

 

Available for you to order, yes. Available to the builders to actually put into the machines when you order currently, no.

 

Wow, I did not even see that. I was so excited to see it that my brain farted a little. Thanks.

I really thought I would get the thing by end of next week. Damn it!

 

Unless you order it today and order rush processing and 2 day shipping, I doubt any reseller will be able to get a any machine to you by next Friday. Furthermore, with all of the preorders for the 7970s, you will likely have to wait longer than usual for your build if you decide to get one.

 

worth the wait, hands down! cmon, ure buying a NEW laptop, its a big investment and totally worth both the extra 200 bucks and the month-long wait. ull get like 60% better performance if u buy now ull get buyer´s remorse like 2 weeks in, that would suck, now, wouldnt it?

 

Wait for the NVIDIA 680M

 

So nVidia can charge $400 more for it like they always do? No thanks. Oh, and I'm not an nVidia, hater, I have an SLI'd rig and my laptop has a 485m, but the ATI stuff in the past has always been cheaper. I bought the 485 m cause it went massively on sale at the end of it's life and the 6970 was no longer available

BTW, rumor has is that in six years, they'll release holo computing.......better wait for that too

 

The desktop version of the GTX680 was cheaper than most people expected I'm thinking the laptop version will be cheaper than the last GTX580m offer. We'll just have to wait and see if it's worth it to buy price/value wise.
The real reason behind why they charge you higher prices is that apart from gaming you get more benefits out of an nvidia based GFX card. I for one can guarantee that it's gonna take AMD a while to catch up to what CUDA has been doing in the professional department, even their FirePRO series can't match a normal gamer GTX card, I have personally benched a gtx585 in a realtime rendering against a FirePRO GL 9800. The CUDA cores of the nvidia pulled it ahead, and not to mention, the production industry is heavily supporting the nvidia architecture over the AMD version. This is not to say I don't like AMD or it's cards, it's not the point.
I'm just trying to explain why nvidia has the mindset of making theirs more expensive than the AMD alternatives, the answer is because there is an advantage to them and there are certain groups of people that buy more of the tech they put out makes them all the more confident that the price is "right" and that there is no real need to lower it.
Right now though, they do start to feel the catch up AMD is playing on them and this is probably why the price relaxed a bit for their cards, either that or it became easier for them to make these keplers than it was for fermis so the cost of manufacture was lower thus giving them some breathing space to lower the price.

 

The 680m was also a lot weaker than most people expected.........

 

There are no true specifications for the 680M yet, do you mean 675M?

 

Yeah right. I almost choked myself and stopped reading after that first bit of sentence.


@OP get an nvidia, you should know by now that they sell the only reliable graphics cards on the market ! AMD are a bunch of amateurs and their cards fail miserably after a few months, plus their drivers are garbage and can easily get you lost unless you have a Masters in an IT related field (I must insist, this is super-duper important because when you game, you also spend a hell of a lot of time browsing your drivers !!).

Don't make the foolish mistake of letting yourself be tempted by AMD's shameful display of all kind of dumping practices that are harmful to consumers (and also partly responsible for hunger in the third world) and choose the responsible alternative. Also if you're still not convinced, red is the color of communists while green is the color of modern, environment-friendly progress ; think about the meaning of this.

/sarcasm

 

^^^ Biased at all?

I'm pretty sure the AMD cards run just as reliably as the NV cards. Also, the driver issues are grossly over exaggerated.

If making graphics cards were so easy a group of amateurs can do it why don't we have thousands of companies doing it? Why aren't you doing it?

Edit: just noticed the /sarcasm. I probably should have read the entire post because it was pretty obvious even without the /sarcasm.

 

"/sarcasm"

 

i think u oversaw the "sarcasm" bit at the end of his "rant"

 

AMD responsible for world hunger. Who would have known.

 

Yep, my bad. Rant on...

 

Actually yes it is cheaper, not by much but cheaper, 8$ cheaper than the last card.
And no, AMD isn't responsible for world hunger lol

 

let me give you heads up! I have always been a Nvidia user, got AMD last year! the performance is very good for price! drivers? piece of crap! I get blue screens once a week, sometimes while shutting down, sometime while browsing! so I am tempted to buy the 7970 myself, but I would rather wait and buy the gtx680m.

 

ummm....are u sure thats because of the gpu drivers? have u checked ur RAM and hard drives for errors? temps all in the green zone?

cheers

 

never had problems with my current 5870m.
though i have to admit finding a way to install the latest driver is a b!thc... spent the whole day searching in forums to find the best way of upgrading the drivers w/o the possibility of bricking the unit. since the official asus provided driver is outdated (the same goes towards sager's).

so i assume you did something wrong when you try to upgrade the driver other than the ones from the sager's site. but if you didn't upgrade to the latest driver some of the games (ffxiv benchmark for me that i could remember) refused to run properly.

 

If this is an nvidia vs amd debate, y'all should know that i have 460m sli in the x7200 and i have, granted in the latest time not more, but i dit have tons of TDR error with blue screen of death.
Solely because of drivers, i have never overclocked my cards ever.

Thats why i will be wanting to change the 460m sli with 7970 CF.
A tought endevour to be sure, the end result will be 3d mark2011 P score somewhere in the neigbourhood of 12000 from the 3636 i score now.

Now thats an upgrade worth making, esspecially if you consider that the CF solution has the ability to completyly switch off the second card when in idle, in windows. Better power draw when not gaming.

 

Exactly.

As the these 'leaked' weird 680M specs were out not to long ago, nVIDIA has the time to step their game both hardware wise and counter-prise wise it's all about timing and power, 2012 is going to be awesome (but surely next year is going to bypass by all means!!)

 

I have been totally blown away with what the 7970M has brought to the table, and if I were building a laptop right now it would be a no-brainer decision for me to pick that as my GPU. When I get back from my travells in SE Asia, I will be promptly ordering a 7970M and sell my 6970M.

 

When overclocked it's looking like an 80% increase from overclocked 6990M Xfire. There is no room debate! It would be the same for single cards too.

 

It´s kinda funny that it is the opposite with my X7200....
Had 6970m CF - black screens, freezes and in idle not downclocking cards, so much of it... Some games were not playable with CF, had to use profiles and only use 1 card.
Switched to GTX 485m SLI and not one blue screen oder black screen or freeze...
So I would like to get 7970m CF, too, but I am afraid of what might happen then .
Maybe GTX 680m will fit too... though it will cost much more, I guess...

 

lol so i take it basically mobile GPU of either amd and nvidia make have driver issues if you don't use the notebook manufacturer's supplied outdated driver version, and will give you extra headache trying to update the driver yourself.

 

wait, seriously? WOW. I haven't been here in a while and totally missed this news. That's just incredible. I may just sell my 6990m and get this.

Gosh, an 80% increase over the 6990m. I was more expecting something like 40% max but boy am I happy.

 

What would the thermal be on this card in the P150

 

Curious about this too, can't wait for them to ship to see what kind of OC'ing we can pull off in the 150EM. If we can pull off the 150mhz on core we get a desktop 7870 which is insane (on the same level as a 580GTX lol). I'm also curious about how well the Overclocking would work out with the 180w A/C adapter.

 

Know the feeling! I've only had crashes and BSOD's with AMD cards on my desktop.. once I switched to nVIDIA everything got fixed right away!

Worried that the 7970M might troll me, but for the performance boost, I might just give it a try.. hopefully it'll work

 

Thinking the same.

 

I miss the ATI glory days like the 9800 AGP I still have it inside a P4 HT desktop rig, sweet little thing

 

It comes and goes. Game of the Thrones my dear friend, the gaming thrones.

 

How are the new drivers?

 

the hacked together drivers work very well for the 7970, I expect officially supported ones to be even better. Its been 2 years since I had issues with ATI/AMD's drivers themselves but occasionally had issues with CCC usually from forgetting to get rid of the old one fully after they did a major update to it.

honestly im with a few others and have more issues with Nvidia's drivers especially with DPC latency for audio work and OpenGL crashes

 

Where do I get these hacked drivers? I am planning to get cf 7970m once it is available.

 

go to slickdude80's 7970 install thread, drivers and OC instructions are there
http://forum.notebookreview.com/ali...ling-amd-7970m-m17x-r3-illustrated-guide.html
official drivers should be around soon im guessing

 

let me fix that for you, damn space bar!

EDIT.. oh you fixed it.. right when I clicked on you, damn you

 

Sorry, darn sticky spacebar on my MBA today I guess

 

I like how the 580m was a "powerhouse" back in march before anyone knew about the 7970m and is now just "still very capable."

 

thats tech progress for you haha altho i must say im quite happy with my 485M having been a tier 1 card for one and a half years now, seeing that 580M was just a 9% OCed 485M and the 675M a rebadged 580M

 

Same here I hope one of the european resellers will have 7970m available and that it works in P150HM

 

wasnt there talk of eurocom opening up a shop in chzech republic for the european clevo users? there was even supposed to be a website! anyone got additional info on that?

Sent from my GT-I9001 using Tapatalk 2

 

I stumbled upon this topic, and have since long returned back to NBR now. I am in the market for a laptop myself, once more. My last purchase was a Sager NP5793 w/ nVidia 8800M GTX which was the top-of-the-shelf mobile GPU at the time! However, it failed in 2 years due a case of very poor engineering (soldering issue) on nVidia's end. This ended the life of my laptop, and I had to buy a new one entirely. After that, I stuck with a simple ASUS laptop for a year with an ATI 6570M GPU. And I say most of you posters here have been critically WRONG! The only time I had driver issues was in Gnome3 / Fedora LINUX, which I'm sure most of you simple gamers don't use! The windows driver support was everything I could ask for. This is truly no reason to give preference to nVidia over ATI. CUDA/PhysX however is a whole different scenario, and nVidia is better in this regard. However, considering that from prior experiences nVidia has not once, but twice failed me terminally, I will NOT be buying from them again. I would wholeheartedly trust the ATI that has served me so well, and buy from them once more. To those who find nVidia to be reliable, look up the case histories. It is NOT the case. I find ATI to be far more reliable today. To future buyers, DO give this due consideration.. My two cents.

 

Had the same thing with an Nvidia 8600 Bricked the laptop), as well as constant driver issues from day one. Also had driver issues with an ATI many years ago, but have had no issues whatsoever with my current one.
Thing that really bugs me about nvidia is they are no better, but charge stupid amounts more. Don't like being robbed.