Is the R9 M290X Crossfire a worthy upgrade for a great running 7970?

The old girl is starting to show her age and I cant play all games maxed out now. I have a awesome running crossfire 7970 machine but the time has come for an upgrade. I know the 980 SLI is the way to go and is pretty reliable at this point, but I dont know if I want to dump 1200 into it.

The R9 290 is labeled a re-labeled 7970 but how can it be? The 290 is a 4 gig card and the 7970 is a 2 gig. Wouldnt the extra 2 gig for each card help with in game performance even if max oc isnt that greater then the 7970.

Thoughts???

 

It's a 12% speed bump which I think you will find very underwhelming. 980M is the way to go. Heck, ONE 980M will beat your 7970M CF. Get one 980M and if you like it, save your pennies for the second one.

 

No, R9 M290X is overclocked 7970M with more memory. It won't help. Crossfire with M290x is a pain too. Nobody even uses M390x now.

Buy 780M/980M.

 

Thanks for the input. Isnt the 780 a re-branded 680 so it really doesnt have more power than the twin 7970s?

 

No. 780M is 680MX that wasn't available in laptops and it's about 25% more powerful than 680M. It's also much cheaper option than 980M.

880M is 780M with more memory and overclock. I have them and they work good for me but people got a lot of problems with production defects so it's basically 780M vs 980M or if you know the risk 880M.

Just don't buy new AMD cards. Crossfire cables are very hard to find and Crossfire support is a pain itself.

 

With recent drivers 7970m should be on par with 780m. Even if it isn't, the percentage wont be any bigger than the upgrade to R9-M290X, which at the very least would be on par with 780m. So, I think that you can get some improvement out of R9-M290X, but yeah 980m is the better upgrade, although quite expensive, since it seems the last compatible MXM (for now).

 

Thanks bud, that what I figure. My 7970s have responded well to the new drivers. I can run clocks at 980/1500!!!!!! I was able to play Battle Field 1 Beta maxed out with 60 FPS.

 

cool your upgrade jets there might be rx 480 coming to mxm3.0 type b!!!!! Just hang around and find out if these will work. Going to be significantly cheaper than 980m and might be on par with desktop 980

http://www.anandtech.com/show/10710/amd-announces-embedded-radeon-e9260-e9550

https://world.taobao.com/item/53850...main&spm=a1z10.5-c.w4002-3808616631.15.QnwHQ8

 

Polaris 480? No thanks. No crossfire cable. No OC.

 

How do you know that it would need a crossfire cable and cant be overclocked?

 

Because new Alienware models used stupid new connector that is impossible to buy and because desktop 480 has no OC headroom and because no one even uses R9 M390x.

But maybe, just maybe they will work with older laptops like M18xR1 so there may be some buyers

 

You're forgetting something major man....AMD dumped CF connectors altogether after the R9 M290X/GCN 1.1/1.2. Starting with GCN 2.0 (R9 290X), they went to communicating over XDMA PCIe, no cables required any more. And its fairly lax, works in any motherboard. I think this is the case with RX 480 mobile.

 

So why Nvidia uses new SLI connectors for 4K now? Will XDMA be sufficient? I doubt it. We will see. Im very skeptical when it comes to AMD. They did whole marathon of fails last years.

Nobody even uses new Radeons in crossfire because SLI is now years ahead of Crossfire support in all games so nice work AMD. And what if they would like to use? They will buy 3x 480 to get beaten by 1080? They're dead man, that's major.

 

Really those 300 series refreshes you call failures where quite competitive value per dollar wise. What will you say if the pascal refresh for 2017 turns out true just like kepler and the 600/700 series? PCI-E has more than adequate bandwidth for inter gpu communications shown buy better scaling than SLI. I haven't had any major crossfire issues that weren't resolved buy a subsequent driver release(maybe Im lucky and play the right games). And amd's drivers are getting better while it seems NVIDIA's are getting worse with more botched driver releases.


Sad state of NVIDIA

lying about direct x 12 /Vulkan hardware support was great ?! 80%of the dgpu market will soon be obsolete because of this.

No hardware async

Kepler is now pathetic against old GCN, Will soon happen to Maxwell

Pay more than 100$ for G-Sync instead of Freesync.

Gameworks is designed to perform bad on AMD (for example it use x64 tessellation) and AMD has to optimize drivers after release but then the benchmarks already are skewed

Pathetic lawsuits against qualcomm and Samsung.

The GTX 970 3.5gb lie

Forced to use the bloated geforce experience for driver updates that break machines

Nvidia do no innovation compared with AMD, which has him far less money (example HBM)

Refusing open standards like freesync and openGL/mantle instead get closed/proprietary gimpworst and G-sync

The throttling 880m that got swept under the rug

Trying to stop overclocking on mobile cards through drivers only to repealed there mistake after people threatening false advertising lawsuits

Lies like
"Pascal 10x Maxwell"
"Faster than 980 SLI"
"2x Titan X"
"GROUNDBREAKING NEW DESIGN"
"A-Sync Compute"
"2.1GHz @ 67c"

I could go on .....

And I'm not a fan boy I've owned NVidia cards as well as amd and I buy what is the best for money and suit's my needs at the time. Nvidia doesn't want to support older MXM cards so be it I will look to amd and the mobile rx 480.....

 

This is typical, I dont have any experience with the product but I will regurgitate what Ive heard. I use to love NVIDIA, I had a tons of issues with 9800GTM and GTX280Ms, slow driver updates, bad SLI support etc. I I LIVED IT. You still have to mod NVIDIA drivers to make them work with mobile cards, and when NVIDIA decides, your Card is now longer supported.

Im still running my 7970s 15% OC'd no issues, the driver support is awesome now, the day I downloaded Battle Field 1 Beta and Forza # there were new drivers released with crossfire profiles. I love AMD, praying the AMD card might be an alternative for the uber pricey 980s.

 

Well this has gotten me excited!!!!!

 

Exactly, Ive found that driver support has been AWESOME!!! Crysis 3 runs both cards at 99%, Battlefield 1 was Crossfire off the bat with about 85% use. Battlefield Hard... was great, Shaows of Moredor etc.