SLI GTX 970m possible in P870km/tm?

Figured the fastest way to get an answer would be to ask here.

I'm thinking of buying a barebones P870km or P870tm. Would it be possible to run the SLI GTX 970m's from my P377sm-a in either P870 with the vapor chamber cooler as a stop gap while I save up for dual 1070's or dual 1080's?

 

For sure the P870DM-G will support. Not sure about the KM/TM models that support the 10xx cards.

 

I have no interest in a DM haha. I own one that has plagued me with headaches since day one.

I have access to a KM with SLI 1080's that I could use to answer this question, but before I go about doing the work to test fit the cards and inconvenience the owner of the KM, I figured someone here might already know....

 

I tried a single GTX 780m on KM1 and it's working fine, maybe you will need some drivers modifications for the 970m's.

 

That's good to know. Was that with the vapor chamber heatsink?

 

Yes,

 

How does the DM have issues that the KM doesn't have?

 

Issues present in the DM but not the KM:

-MXM slots too close together
-5V fans instead of 12V fans
-Vapor chamber cooler doesn't physically fit.

And then this particular computer:

-2, maybe 3 GTX 980m's died while being used with it. None were over clocked.
-Repeated issues where it randomly refuses to post
-Had two sticks of ram go bad while using it
-Constant overheating issues that I never could solve which included purchasing 3 heatsink that ended up being warped. Lapping them did not help.
-Issue where non-Gsync cards would not enable SLI due to bios not recognizing new screen EDID. Custom bios from Prema mostly fixed that.
-Loads more that I can't remember...

 

TM and KM should electrically be able to run 970m cards despite the changes to the mxm slot for the 10 series cards.

The heatsinks will not fit the 970m cards though. Clevo 10 series have the GPU die located in a different position than any other mxm board. A DM heatsink set will be close, but one of the mxm slots on a DM is shifted slightly from the TM and KM, so you'll need to bend the pipes a bit to get it to align. Be very careful bending them or they will suddenly bend and kink. I usually pin the pipes partially in a vice so that this cannot happen.

 

get used to those if you still want to go for KM.
I don't quite understand why you would even spend money tho. I mean there are tons of new notebooks coming out and SLI support is absolute garbage.

 

I've had fairly extensive experience with a KM with dual 1080's and at least on this particular laptop, the cooling is more than adequate. The 12V fans and vapor chamber seemed to do the trick that the DM couldn't manage. Can't comment on anything beyond personal experience.

As for tons of laptops coming out...none support dual RTX cards (because a mobile NVLink hasn't been engineered yet), and almost none support a standardized GPU socket.

The RTX 2080 is at best 25% faster than a GTX 1080. There's no incentive for me to upgrade to current gen if I'm looking at a maximum of 25%.

I'm not looking for something disposable, which is what all of these new laptops are looking to be. I'll skip this generation and get a laptop with modular, standardized GPU's that supports SLI and hope either AMD surprises us with Vega VII for mobile or NVLink is brought to mobile for the following generation with MXM GPU's.

Worst case scenario, I'm 25% slower than the fastest RTX laptop. Best case scenario, I'm 60% faster in games that utilize SLI well. This is the first new generation I've seen where more performance can be had by staying with the last gen hardware.

As for SLI not being supported - the vast majority of games I play do support it. And scaling and support, while not as good as a few years ago, is much better than a decade ago. SLI is far from irrelevant.

 

Overheating was refered to the CPU mostly. I heard good things about the vapor chamber myself tho.

You are investing in something disposable. The 10th gen will very likely have a new socket, MXM is dead, nowadays people try MXM cards which are made for other systems (such as small form factor PC's). This sadly causes tons of issues, ranging from absolute non compatibility to something half assed that works, ish. Even Clevo 1080's which have a newer revision won't work with older clevos such as the KM for firmware reasons, which is absolutely stupid considering that the notebookm ships with 1080s.

The Alienware 51m seems the most futureproof notebook as it seems right now.

 

Far less disposable than anything else out there. Didn't even comment on the fact that if something fries, all I have to do is replace that component - not the whole laptop.

As long as it has an MXM slot, there is the chance that there will be an option in the future; without options, you have nothing or next to nothing and the item is truly disposable. I wouldn't declare MXM dead yet, still a few unknowns and wild cards out there. RTX 2080 is supposed to be coming in a MXM form factor similar to the GTX 1080's, sans the SLI connector.


CPU upgradability doesn't really mean too much to me. If the trends of the past decade continue to hold, for gaming, buying the top tier cpu option should be more than sufficient for the life of the computer. When the i7 920xm came out I gamed on that for 6 years (and 4 gpu upgrades) with no significant performance hit. I've been using the 4800mq for almost 5 years now with no significant detrimental gaming impact. It would be nice to be able to upgrade my CPU every 5-6 years, but if I can't have that I'd much rather it be at least socketed so I can replace dead chips. I have had cpus die on me. It's much nicer to shell out a few hundred for a replacement cpu than a few thousand for a replacement laptop because your dead cpu is BGA.

The Area 51 uses a proprietary GPU package. Many companies have promised upgradability in the past with their own proprietary GPU packages - MSI, ASUS, Dell - all either supported 1 gpu cycle or none at all and left buyers high and dry. MXM is at least a standard. If anyone makes a GPU in the future that fits that standard - even loosely, there is a high probability it can be made to work.

Even if all that falls on deaf ears, the main point is for the games I wish to play, I can not get better performance with a single RTX 2080 over SLI GTX 1080's aside from building a desktop, which doesn't make sense for me.

Anyhow, I'm not that interested in arguing the merits of what I plan on doing - I've already done my research. I made this thread to see if it was possible. Seems like it is.

 

There's egpu to consider.

 

I've considered it, but it isn't really for me. I like to do my gaming on the go (mainly when I'm traveling for work). And I'm on the go a lot.

 

Propriatary slot, so no. Just, no.

 

Depends on your situation. When I am on the go, I am using my laptop's 1080p screen, so my GTX1070 is just fine for that. When I am at home, I have a nice 28" 4k panel, so it would be nice to have some more oomph.

 

So what if its propriatary? doesn't make it less future proof.

typical clevo sellers.

 

By definition it basically does.