so I have a laptop, gaming is the only heavy lifting she does. It is an msi GT70 Dragon edition with an I7 3730 qm cpu, 680m gpu 16 gb ram and a 180watt power brick. system performed very well till he graphics card died. Now i am looking for a new gpu. The 680m was a 100 watt card and i am looking at either a 970m 88 watts ($625 in canada) or the 980m 100watt card ($900). question being will the 980m give me any real world benefit or just throttle badly ? Also the story goes that dell make a 210 watt brick that i could make work if beneficial.
First off do you have the means to swap out a laptop gpu? and secondly, if you're going up to the $900 range you may as well get a new laptop and save yourself a headache.
I would say regardless if its possible to swap out the gpu its a massive waste of money to buy a 900$ proprietary gpu. Especially on a platform that has limited cooling ability and throttles the gpu and cpu back to stay at temp. I would also say just saving the money for a better laptop is a smarter idea.
I haven't had a lot of experience with mine for a reason I'll get into in a sec, but so long as you have a laptop that doesn't have its mPCIe slots whitelisted (Lenovo whitelists them, but you can get around that with a BIOS mod), and the laptop isn't going anywhere for a while, it should work fine.
The reason I haven't been using mine is because on the laptop I tried it out on, I used a 7770 and installed AMD's drivers. The adapter works fine, it does actually work. However, for some reason, if I shut the laptop down, unplug everything, and attempt to restart the machine without the card attached, the machine BSODs when the AMD drivers initialize and find out that there's no AMD hardware. There may be a workaround, but for now that seriously limits mobility if you plan to use this as a sometimes-on-the-road machine.
I'll try it in games on another laptop I have and let you know how it shapes up.
thanks for all the thoughts, my reasoning is that i luv the lappy and even at 900 bucs i revive the laptop back up to functional gaming again and will extend the usability a couple more years. 900 bucs wont even come close to replacing the laptop let alone a lappy with discreet gpu. the gpu died, gpu crashes system on anything that uses the nvidia card, heat pins instantly on startup. I believe i will go the 980 route should extend the life the longest, not sure if i will upgrade the power brick to 210 but i will have that as a option moving forward . Thanks