Nvidia 580m versus AMD 6990m

Nvidia 580m versus AMD 6990m...

Base Performance: 6990m wins most benchmarks?
OC'd Performance: 6990m mostly wins
Heat: 580m wins
Battery Life: 580m wins
Cost: 6990m by a landslide
3d graphics: 580m (6990m doesn't support)
Gaming driver support: Nvidia wins most of the time

If you really want 3d, then 580m is the way to go.
If you're getting a Clevo mostly for gaming, 6990m is the way to go.
If price is a big concern, 6990m is the way to go.

Just some thoughts I'd throw out there to those wondering. I do find myself still trying to determine how much battery life decreases when using the 6990m (assuming non-gaming). Don't suppose anyone has any ideas on that?

 

Since clevo doesnt support IGP or any other similar technology, the difference in battery life is minimal.

Also 6990 does support 3D, it´s just not as mature as Nvidia Technology.

 

Thanks for summarizing pages and pages of info. Maybe this should be stickied so people don't keep posting threads...

Mr. Mysterious

 

I thought I read somewhere that if you use Adobe Creative Suite products, you should get an NVidia card, that it was the only one that supported Photoshop, etc. well. Is this true or can I get the 6990 instead of the 485? I need to order tomorrow, and will use this laptop for both work and games...

 

i would say
now
Base Performance: gtx580m wins most games/benchmarks except 3dmark 11
OC'd Performance: gtx580m mostly wins

future
we know amd driver keep improve/nvidia driver mellow very fast......so the time when gtx680/hd7970m out the hd6990m might complete outpreform 580m

 

about the overclocking, im not sure that amd has the advantage here. the 580m runs at 0.87 volts and if you increase the voltage you could get better performance than the desktop gtx 560 ti, which it is based upon. in the 580m thread another forum member said that he clocked his card at 820mhz core at standard voltage a 41% overclock btw, the gtx 560 ti is 822mhz core. also i saw some tempuratures on the 6990, and just like the 6970m they were hot in the lower 90s.

also what desktop card is the 485m based on?

 

Well I saw some guy in the Alienware forum and his 6990m ran at about 79C while gaming, if mine runs this cool I'd be so happy!

 

Some of the CS programs can do CUDA. If your life is PS, it's a maybe in my book.

 

Where is your proof?

 

this is interesting. I too would like to know. I though all GPUs were utilized in Adobe.

 

Yeah, after overvolting the cards DGDXGDG's statement may be true, but @stock voltage the difference is not there, only a few games with extreme tessellation favor the greens. At least from what we have seen in the AW section. Another point, if you are not going for the X7200 with 2 PSU's you may never be able to overvolt or overclock the 580M's as high to be able to beat the 6990M's. The RED's on the other hand are very good overclockers even at stock voltage. If you could overvolt the 6990M's there would be a total annihilation, IMHO for 2 main reasons - they draw less power and remain cool even with a heavy OC.

 

So as a Sager/Clevo reseller, what is the bottom line.

Which one is better? 6990m or 580m at stock and at overcloak. Also what did you mean by your last sentence? Are you saying the 6990m draw less power and remain cool with heavy OC or did you mean the 580m?

 

obviously you didn't see my post another forum member overclocked his 580m to 820mhz, which is a 41% overclock, on stock voltage. no one knows how much the 6990m will overclock.

 

Personally I will never come to close to OC so high, but yes--there have been instances where GTX 580m have OC higher than desktop GTX 560ti and HD 6990m OC higher than desktop HD 6870

 

But can the memory reach 1002MHZ?

 

i don't think the person tried, because msi and evga will only allow it to go to 1800, which my 485m can easily do so i suspect that it can.

 

There's no clear winner this round. I meant the 6990M in my last sentence.

Could you provide a link to that 41% OC on stock voltage?


How about 8998pts GPU score in 3Dmark11 (6990M CF)

 

oops sorry its was 32% not 41%. and here the 3dmark11 http://3dmark.com/3dm11/1652325 and for some reason 3dmark.com is now down, maybe thats why i couldn't do 3d mark vantage before.

 

The link doesn't show anything.

As for the OC'ing potential on stock voltage, most people with 580M can't get higher than 740-750 on the core which is nowhere near 30%. Most 6990M owners hit 850-870 fully stable on the core which is a comparable OC' to say the least.

 

All the 6990m Oc so far are Alienware versions.
Hopefully the "Sager/clevo" version of the 6990m can OC just as well...maybe even better

 

We are getting the first batch of the 6990M's in a week from now and will do testing vs Dell's cards.

 

sorry the website is down like i said, but look at the last 10 posts on the gtx 580m thread.

 

so would you mind take some pics of dell oem gtx580m/hd6990m front/back aikimox?
want to see how clevo cost down these days............

 

Will do when I get to the lab next time. You should have asked me about it 8 hours ago

 

try this link again NVIDIA GeForce GTX 580M video card benchmark result - Intel Core i7-2920XM Processor,CLEVO P150HMx score: P4400 3DMarks oh and i checked and i have the highest 3dmark performance score for a 485m and a 2630qm, 3897 3dmarks... yus!

 

Graphics score is only 4k. Even if you could go stable 820 in SLI you would still be near 8k at best.

 

yeah i agree the nvidia sli isn't as good as crossfire

 

Everything being equal, I'd prefer to buy an Nvidia, as I'm extremely nonplussed at the driver shenanigans by AMD.

Things aren't close to equal; the 6990M is the clear winner this round. If someone told you you could 'upgrade' one of the parts to an almost identical part for almost $300 more, and receive almost no noticeable performance gain, who would agree to that? People bought the 580m because it was out, and I can at least understand that, but I wish that everyone planning to order a 580m now that the 6990m is out would just order the latter, pretend that it is a 580m, and send me the $280 instead. Everyone wins!

The OP is a bit misleading. If price matters AT ALL, 6990M > 580M.

 

See, I'm waiting for Ivy Bridge and Kepler to come out. But if I had to choose now, I think I'd be more inclined on the 580M since I do Autodesk work. The thing is, even small remote control vehicles with multiple parts render just fine on my 3450M, the only time I get stutters is if I turn on Shadows which I don't do. So, even for 3D rendering, I guess I'd still be perfectly suited with the 6990M. Still, I can wait for the GTX 600M series and 7900M series cards

 

Going to be a looong time. First Ivy Bridge and Kepler will hit desktops. At the same time the 600m and 7900m cards will probably be based on current architecture as mobile GPUs are always 1 or 2 steps behind. Then after the next gen of desktops "after" IB and K then will mobile platforms finally get IB and K.

EDIT: actually mobile CPUs tend to keep up pretty well with desktops steps..just our GPUs which lag considerably.

 

You forgotten to add that the AMD cards do not support Dual Link.

 

Well, I can forgo Kepler I guess, I assumed it wouldn't be available on the mobile platform when Ivy Bridge comes out. I will be upset though if I commit to a new laptop and a half a year later Kepler comes out.

Although, on the same note, I'm not sure if I will go Desktop or Laptop next so it may not matter.

 

I'm considering adding another line:
If you want to agree with the majority, then 6990m is the way to go.

Btw, I encourage you all to continue this discussion. I was simply giving an overview of things, but it's quite apparent there are some unknown variables and disagreements floating around. Personally, my biggest concern at this point is the driver support and possibly the heat. This is what happens when discussions take place weighing the pros/cons of things before a proper release and testing on the user-end has taken place in greater numbers.

 

Or, conversely: If you want to pay $280 to feel like a rebel, the 580m is the way to go.

 

The only factor brought to the table, by choosing the 580M, is 3D. Outside of that, Nvidia loses on every front.

To summarize, the majority is correct in choosing the 6990M.

 

Indeed, in the end there is no way you can justify paying an extra $250 (or $300 if you pre-ordered with Malibal when they were pricing the 6990M upgrade at +$195) for a card that offers pretty much the same performance.

 

Yeah the overclocks are really only for the select few who even do it, as it's really unnecissary in most cases. Running those high clocks for long periods of time is just nothing I would ever recommend anyone do, benchmarking it's fine, but otherwise a mild overclock of maybe 5% is really all anyone ever needs for running games for hours on end. The over volt is even more obscure, only the most ballsy and dedicated overclockers and daredevils who have the near half thousand dollars to gamble with even do that. Now you could say I have undermined every overclocker in this thread, but really it's like nitrous, you use it when you're showing off, and you need that boost, but you wouldn't use nitrous all the time you're driving, that's all I'm saying.

So really we need to be comparing the cards apples to apples stock clocks to stock clocks. The whole CAD type apps for CUDA, most people who want mobile workstations just buy a professional FX card right? So really we're just down to gaming performance at this point, and I have to say AMD really has the card here due to price, it's at least $250 less in the same performance category. What would you buy for a desktop? ( this is hypothetical ) A 6990 for $350 or a GTX 590 for $600? The price in the laptop is a little less skewed since it's all in the price, but if you bought the cards separate from newegg.com, it would be kind of crazy for Nv to try and get away with that price point. But they're trying here, so unless they lower the price, you're just playing right into their Physx and CUDA jargon, trying to justify hundreds more dollars for situational performance increases that for a regular gamer like me could hardly change anything. So until they lower the price, I'm siding with AMD here 100%.

 

Anyone know which card hard better performance for the Witcher 2?

 

Based on what I've seen with both cards in m17x benchmarks:

Both the 6990M and 580M perform basically the same at stock clock rates. Depending on the benchmark or game either would be +/-3% or so, but I'd call it even. Stock, both get around 3400-3500 in 3dMark11 and in the low 14000's in Vantage.

The 580M seems to overclock substantially higher than the 6990M. At my maximum stable clock I got around 4100 in 3dMark11 and around 15800 in Vantage on the 6990M. At its maximum clock, the 580M seems to score over 4400 in 3DMark11 and around 18000 in Vantage.

Since I don't plan on running with any substantial overclock for any period of time though, the extra cost of the 580M still doesn't make sense to me.

As for clocks, I can get my 6990M on stock voltage to 830/1130 (though other people have reported up to 880/1250, I suspect with voltage increases). I have seen scores from 580M's up to 850/1900, though the voltage was increased to achieve that. For reference a 6990M is 715/900 stock and a 580M is 620/1500.

 

The percentage of people who purchased the 580M vs the % of people who bought the 6990 is like 10% for the 580 and 90% for the 6990 on Alienware systems alone so that tells what card is better on price-performance point

by today we already know the performance on both cards is similar and I can just imagine the demand of AMD chips because they are selling like hot bread

 

Here is one thing I'm wondering. I always see the 6990M at least 500 ahead of the 580M in 3dmark 11, whereas the gap is reversed when benching vantage. Do you remember where you saw that score of 4400 for the 580M for 3dmark11? The reason I ask is they released some new drivers for the the desktop 580 and it increased certain framerates by around 8-15% in games and in the 3dmark franchise, I would love to see some benchmarks with the new drivers to see if this actually translates to an increase on the 580M card. Also the driver Nv launched the 580M with was not this new driver, so I am wondering if the weird variations we're seeing on these 3dmark scores have something to do with that? Either way 3dmark in the end gets a lot of special treatment on the driver release and is always an iffy benchmark to compare to real gaming performance. Crysis is really what we need to see benchmark wise with all the newest drivers on each card, and we can really see which card performs the best there.