P170SM-A (with GTX 870M): Get it now or wait?

Metabox P170SM - Clevo P170SM - 17.3 inch with GTX 860M, GTX 870M, GTX 880M and AMD R9 M290X

I've done a bit of research into decent gaming laptops and I've narrowed things down to the Clevo brand since they seem to come without an OS (good thing for me) and there is some degree of customisation. I'm hoping that it will work well with titles such as ARMA III. Vegas and Adobe After Effects may be things I'll be using as well.

At the moment I'm considering these options:

GTX 870M

Drive Slot 1 - 1TB 7200 rpm HDD

Drive Slot 2 - 120GB SSD Samsung EVO

I'm really itching to get something soon as my hand-me-down IBM Thinkpad R51 is an old fossil. It has white vertical bars covering about 15 percent of the screen , so it's getting to be a real pain on the eyes too.

Now, it can be said that the GTX 870M is a fine card, but I've read that it is of the older Kepler architecture, so I'm thinking that there might be a Maxwell Variant somewhere down the track.

Are there any signs that this will be the case? Would it be worth waiting for or should I give in to temptation and just make the order?

 

I just ordered the 15 inch version of this laptop with the 870 and am just waiting for shipping. I was in the same boat and conducted alot of research on the laptops themselves and the GPU's and have more or less came to the conclusion that with such a powerful GPU that can be upgraded, waiting for maxwell isnt really worth it. I mean the performance gain isnt going to be HUGE and unless your really concerned about power consumption for battery life ect. then thats not going to be a dealbreaker either.

Supposedly its sep/oct time frame for maxwell high end GPU's if you dont mind waiting for the small boost in performance and lower power consumption, but if your like me, i couldnt wait. This card will handle MOST of everything thrown at it in ULTRA settings and is like a non-overclocked 780m from last generation. Its also the most bang for your buck, since the 880m is 300$ USD more

Hope this helped and good luck!

 

The new architecture is more "efficient" as well, so performance and power consumption aside, it will run cooler than the Kepler design. Cooler chip = potentially improved longevity. Just another thing to consider.

 

If you need a machine right now, the 870M is a pretty good choice. It offers a lot of bang for the buck as it's only about 10% slower (roughly, don't clobber me guys...) than the 780M.

When high end Maxwell will drop from the sky is anybody's guess. There is a whole thread just on this topic. The general feeling is sometime in Q4 of this year or Q1 of next. If you can wait that long it might be worth it depending on what you do. You are using a dinosaur now. Any current gaming laptop you buy is going to feel like a rocket compared to what you have. Heck, my wife's Y2P in my sig will make it look silly, but it is a nice machine. I do have a bit of private lusting for it.

 

Same here, i really wanted Maxwell, and it p***sed me off NVIDIA did this to clear out inventory with keplar, but in the end, i went with this model as well, so i get the 220w power supply as you get the same performance, just it uses almost double the power vs Maxwell 860 variant.

XOTIC PC | Sager NP8278 (Clevo P170SM-A) 17.3" Gaming Laptop

vs the 180w on the 15 inche which leaves little headroom if you stress out your system.

Buy what you need now, if you wait you will always be waiting, once Maxwell is in full force Intel could have new processors out so then you may want to wait for those and so on and so on.

 

Lol, they can't sell them if the process can't produce a bulk amount.

 

True. The claim is that they could not meet production demand with the new fabrication process, so we get a taste of Maxwell for now.

 

If they could, they would due to the competition between AMD and Nvidia, this is why competition is good

 

It's what makes for moments such as this, after all!

http://cdn.makeagif.com/media/4-21-2014/qO5ZtF.gif

 

Yes, got to love those 9700pro and athlon 64 moments

 

I still have an Athlon 64. It ran for over 6 years. One day it stopped. I have yet to look at why but I am not tossing it out.

Sent with love from my Galaxy S4

 

Had an AMD Turion 64 laptop, that thing ran for 6 years. Never repasted or even cleaned out the vents once (I was a completely laptop noob at that point). Had at least a dozen thermal shutdowns due to overheating simply by opening too many tabs in Firefox or watching DVDs, yet that thing was still running when I powered it down for the last time in May 2011.

Now that 1TB 7200 rpm HDDs are a dime a dozen, and a Turion ML-37 sells for $20, I'm actually tempted to get it up and running again. If nothing else 32-bit Win XP would be a good retro gamer, sort of.

 

Well, to make sure that this topic is still on the right track and to give a little update, I've made the order from Kong Computers. I also received an email that informed me that the total will be cheaper if the SSD and HDD were to be switched around (HDD goes in Drive Slot 1 and SSD in Drive Slot 2 rather than the other way around). I take it that there isn't any difference? Still makes me wonder as to why it's cheaper though.

 

i loved my 9700pro! AMD epic days, they had some more, the x1900 were awesome as well and the Radeon HD 5 series was pretty darn competitive, even the 280/290 is up there, while heat and power are not great, NVIDIA has had their share of bad hot cards (4** series anyone)

 

It's a weird artifact of pricing differences of adding a new HDD and upgrading the stock HDD to an SSD and leaving the HDD and just buying the SSD.

You mean 5*** series.

 

the 470 i think it was an 480 were not exactly efficient power and heat wise, but ya the joke of the 5200 Ultra!!! , man, what a dud!

 

I believe it started the craze of putting huge amounts of vram on a low end card to make it look powerful.

 

The P170SM arrived today. I'm a little bit confused about the audio drivers though. I installed the Realtek one and then I went ahead and installed the Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi driver. Now I get messages saying "There is no supported audio device available". Does this mean the drivers are conflicting with each other? I want this best audio quality possible, so does this mean that I should only have the Sound Blaster driver installed?

Edit: I ran dxdiag and noticed that the "Windows Audio service is not enabled".

 

Install the nvidia sound drivers as well.

 

I got this too with my Plugable USB 3.0 dock. I forget exactly what I did now.

Technically, you only "need" the Realtek drivers to get sound. The X-Fi drivers make the sound quality much better.

I have my external monitor plugged in via HDMI which does not have speakers (VS248 seen below). The sound drivers where trying to output to my monitor.

Go to: Control Panel > Sound and see what is your default output device. That may give you an idea of what's causing the hangup.

 

Well, a lot has happened since my last post. The message stopped appearing after I installed Service Pack 1 for 7. Then I proceeded to install Magic Disc. Big mistake. Anyway, to make a long story short, I ended up wiping everything and reinstalling 7. Things seem to be okay now. I suppose the next thing to do is to figure out a way for my Dualshock 3 to connect through Bluetooth.