question 7970 single or crossfire

I'm about to pull the trigger on a new laptop and I need help from experienced 9170 and 9370 owners. I want either a 9170 single 7970 or a 9370 with crossfire. My gaming habits are mainly skyrim with tons of graphics mods such as 2k hd textures and enb. I never game above 1080p resolution. I can get the single card ssetup for much less so if I can save money I would like to. Do I need crossfire or will a single 7970 give me all the performance I want?

 

Not all games will take advantage of dual video cards and the ones that do dont always double your performance. The 7970M in the 9170 would be best in that regard. If you can go with the NP9370 with a 7970M that would be ideal. Then you will have the full power of the single card and also dont have to worry about any potential Enduro issues as this model doesnt use it.

 

How is the cooling with only one card and how easy is it to add a second for crossfire later?

 

Thermodynamics with regards to a single 7970 would be cooler than a CrossFire setup. I've never upgraded to crossfire from a single GPU myself in a notebook, but I imagine that it's not painstakingly hard - at least the physical installation. I've read that there have been problems with CrossFire setups in the past, but I think that was more so with Dell systems.

 

cooling should be more than sufficient since the machine is designed to deal with dual gpu configs. thus one gpu would generate less heat inside the chassis. as for adding a second gpu down the line, its pretty straight-forward, especially since the second heatsink for the gpu is already in ur machine when u buy it. basically it would just be a matter of putting on thermal pads to the right heatsink spots, slide the gpu card into the mxm slot, apply thermal paste to the gpu core and screw on the heatsink by using 4 screws. should all be done inside half an hour, at most

 

Installing the GPU is fairly strait forward. If you'd built desktops in the past or upgraded parts in one then adding a second one in this computer will be easy. Mobile video cards are more difficult to find then desktop GPU's, and they tend to hold their prices too.

 

Have you heard anything about the crossfire support on the 7970m and skyrim? I've done a little searching and it seems to be not supported, but that was a long time ago, how is crossfire with the new ati beta drivers?

 

Looks like its still not supported, lowers performance in some cases

 

The cooling system for card one is a separate module in the 9370 so temperatures should be pretty constant regardless of which configuration you go for. The other advantage is you could add card 2 in the future.