Worth getting a 7970m on a P150EM?

I didn't have the time to read trough all of threads regarding this subject but it seems that the 7970m is having a lot of trouble in some games on anything that u cant force enduro to shut down.

Unlucky as I am I recently acquired a P150EM with the 7970m and this is really turning me down, the good part is that the laptop hasn't arrived yet so I can still probably change it for a 680m.

Do you think ATI / Clevo will fix this soon with updated drivers? Because I never owned a Radeon and people seem to complain a lot that its takes too freakin long for them to update drivers!

Thanks in advance

 

I have a P150EM with a 7970m for about a month now. Great laptop, however if I had to do it all over again I would have went for a 680m.

The 7970m issues are really annoying,and prevent you from playing most games with DX 11 features. Also AMD nor Clevo have made any statements to inspire confidence that these issues have been acknowledged and will be fixed.

Performance wise even without being optimized I am happy, however not being able to play games on ULTRA really bothers me.

I would STRONGLY recommend you pay the extra $$$ for a 680m. If I could do it over again I would of waited for the 680m.....

 

Hello,

I can only contradict with the post below, I own a P150EM with 7970m in it an everything runs great on ultra.
Currently running 12.6 Catalyst drivers

I'm talking about:
Blizz games,
Bethesda games,
Deus EX:HR
Anno 2070
Metro 2033.

Everything works like it's supposed to be.

 

everything is fine here, all games i played there was no low fps here. i am running 12.7 drivers . some people here dont know how to configure their laptop to get high fps. for example, when i got my laptop i disabled core praking . set high performance on my laptop. install latest drivers such as intel chip set, usb 3.0 etc ,realtek . . set high performance in ccc (amd catalyst ) for games . install directx update from microsft , this update cant be installed from windows update you have to go to Microsoft website to download it .

 

The problem is users shouldn't have to optimize there software for every single game they want to play with and etc. At least that's how I see it.

 

Oh well got my response from mythlogic in another thread, seems like they (myth) are trying their best to fix this with new drivers but the gpu usage will still be an issue even after it, a minor issue but still... Im still undecided but I THINK im going to spend a few more and just get the gtx 680m instead, the ones using it are not having trouble at all with it, on the other hand the majority of people using the 7970m are complaining about enduro specially on some games, oh well, I ordered mine just 2 days ago and am supposed to wait a month till it arrives so I still have some time to make a decision.

for those interest this was what myth posted:

 

In exchange, that $300 more cash spent will bring you something that fully works right out of the box.

 

The 680 still has some minor driver issues of it's own, most notable being 3-D support. That said it's probably worth that extra $300 if you are benchmarking/OC addict.........outside of that the cash would be better spent on an SSD.

On a sidenote my brother just bought one for his comp and I'm really wishing that I would have splurged for one also,they make a huge improvement to performance.

 

7970M is worth it. When it works it's pretty amazing. At 99% GPU usage, I'm getting between 70-85 FPS with 2x AA and everything else on highest including DX11. The problem is when it drops, but I still get above 45 FPS.

Hopefully AMD will resolve the driver issues they are having with 7xxx GCN series. Remember, this is a total departure from their previous cards. GCN is very different from what they have made in the past.

I don't know about others, I see incredible synthetic benchmarks on the 680M. But when they post their in-game benchmarks, it's only about 2-5 FPS more than what I'm getting!

 

Also 99% GPU usage in most games SSD self upgrade is very easy to perform, you can upgrade it yourself at anytime, most people would say self upgrade is cheaper than having to purchase it with the laptop. I already knew how fast the SSD already is at SATA II speed before purchasing this P150EM, and right before ordering the P150EM I bought the SATA III Samsung 830 SSD, and it's almost twice faster than the already fast SATA II SSD.

 

I got my P150EM w/7970m last week and encountered all sorts of video related problems out of the box. From crappy frame rates to BSOD. I was ready to eat the shipping and return it for a 680M but decided to try a bit more. First, I clean installed the Clevo drivers and then installed the 12.7 beta driver only on top and now everything works perfectly. Performance wise it is great. The $200 savings can go towards another component like future SSD. Yes it super sucks that AMD/Clevo has not released a decent driver for it and haven't announced anything either. But I really doubt they're never going to address it. So right now it works good enough (at least for me) and it's going to work better in the future.

I agree that an SSD is a much better use of $200 if money matters (which it does to me). Diablo 3, though not a demanding GPU game, stutters like crazy on a regular HD. On an SSD it's silk due to superior RRT. I watch youtube of people playing D3 with lots of stuttering and I'm not sure how they can live with that (in some cases you die from it). I run it on a 16GB flash card and it's awesome. 100FPS ultra settings 1080p. No stuttering.

EDIT: I forgot to add that while making the decision on 680M vs 7970M I felt that I was paying $200 more for "piece of mind" that the 680M "should" work better than the 7970M out of the box since most real game benchmarks showed only slightly better FPS versus the 7970M (though to be fair probably also due to non-optimal Nvidia drivers). I took the chance with the 7970M and it worked out. If the 680M was significantly faster, like the 7970M is compared to the stock 670M I would have considered it strongly. But I felt it was also unproven so went with the 7970M instead.

 

Wow Im still undecided on what to do, I was really setting my mind to just changing to the 680m, since I only recently started messing with drivers (Always just played on the pc with the drivers it came) and the experience didnt go well at all, I was extremely clueless on what to do and still am. But after I saw that sager released a driver that worked wonders for a user here I got confused again.
Im just thinking of gettin the 680m for peace of mind, but as I still have like 10 days to decide Im goin to keep following this and some other threads.
Thanks everyone

 

i am happy with my amd 7970 . i am not getting issue in game such as bf3 multiplayer like others did. this probably (maybe?) because i made some simple tweaks on windows while others have it because they unaware of it .

 

it seems like there are still problems with the 7970....worth the risk and get it?

 

After reading the thread of the new sager driver, considering the results and that is exclusive for sager anyways, I've decided to change my order from the 7970m for the gtx 680m just for the peace of mind. I dont wanna put so much money into a laptop and have the gpu running at 20% of its capability which is happening with the 7970m nowadays. Sad but true

 

Just made the change from a 7970m to a gtx 680m and i couldnt be more happy even spending $300 more.. Theres nothing like being sure that everything will work when ur laptop arrives

 

I made the change also, I dont want to spend 2k on a laptop to have issues. I really wanted a 7970 for the price and performance but whats the point of having the hardware if your running into many issues. It was a 245 dollar upgrade for me. If everything goes as plan it should be here next week.

 

Looks like more and more people are jumping ship. Though I do have the cash lying around (just about --lol) for a 680M, I'm going to stick with my 7970M especially because I'm playing all my games just fine. I can't give up on AMD now, I've come so far! Lol.

 

I will also stick with my 7970M, for now at least... I want to give AMD and Clevo time to fix the issues, but if we have to wait unreasonably long for an GPU utilization fix, the +300€ for a 680M will seem very tempting. The issues aren't earth shattering, but it is annoying to know your card isn't performing as it could and should.

 

That's not even remotely close to the truth but hey it's your dollar.

 

I've had the P150EM and 7970M for over a month with the latest Clevo drivers, and it has worked perfectly on BF3 64 player ultra since out of the box (after DX install of course)

Now, for the 150EM/170EM models, GPU heat pipe configuration has shown to be very slack for the 7970M (it is possible the 680 has the same problem too) Heat is within tolerances when these laptops arrive, but its easy to reduce max temps by 10C+ with small adjustments. It becomes very obvious to see how poorly Clevo installed their cooling system configurations. I created a thread about this issue so anyone about to receive a P1x0 notebook might wanna read it:

http://forum.notebookreview.com/sag...solutions-here-please-sticky.html#post8694123

Also, anyone with a GTX680, I'd be interested in knowing if you have the same heat efficiency problems the 7970M installments have as shown in my forum. Check it out and if you want to, test your GPU heatsink, and maybe make a post with temp results. I'm really curious to see whether the 7970 is just surrounded by bad luck

 

I will be sure to check the heating when my gtx 680m arrives a month from now btw I have never before bought such a powerfull laptop or pc and was never really was interested in OC / heating / GPU usage, so I'll have to read about that all in these 30 days so at least I will know something when it arrives I also doubt I will be able to do that stuff you did, but I might try

Also I know its not 20% but still I dont really play bf3 / nfs / max payne with 20-30 fps so ill prolly lower the settings a bit to get a better one which would not work on the 7970m :/