Which video card

krs

krs

krs

Associate
Joined
28 Sep 2013
Posts
2
This is my first post on the forum and I will be buying a new OcUK laptop.

My question is about choice of video card. I want to get the best value but I have a budget of £1900 to £2000 pounds available within the next week or so.

The ATI Radeon HD 8970 4GB is a good value option but are there any compatibility issues with the card or drivers with windows 8, modern games, future games and legacy games such as quake, doom etc.

Is the performance as good as the Nvida high end cards such as the GeForce GTX 770M 3GB or GeForce GTX 780M 4GB.

This Laptop will need to last me a number of years so I will be going for a high spec to future proof as much as possible. Is it of great improvement to upgrade the processor option to Core I7 4800MQ?

Sorry to ask so many questions but I need to be confident that I'm making the right choices.

Thanks for any help
 
I have a MSI with the GTX 780 in it.

Truly a beast. I picked it up for just tad over your budget. Very happy with it.

Previously I had a Clevo/Sager with actually a faster Ivy Bridge CPU than the Haswell I now have, but with the HD7970 gfx card. Much better value per performance, but a bit poor build quality I thought, but I wasn't bothered, as it delivered pretty decent gaming performance....to begin with.

Then one day, it crashed. After that, I was stuck with the dreaded AMD gfx switching bug and hated every minute of trying to get the damn piece of crap to work, which I never could do. A very common problem with AMD mobile GPU's and Intel boards I believe. The alternative is to go with an AMD cpu as well, but these really do blow.

Perhaps things are different with the HD8970, but I doubt it.

Also even if I never got the gfx switching bug (gfx card not kicking in and/or being throttled), AMD drivers and programs are pretty horrible, limited, and unwieldy to use compared with Nvidia.

If you have firm eye on the HD 8970, then you need to look at a gaming laptop that allows for manual/forced utilisation of the GPU.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom