970M (3GB VRAM) over 965M (2GB VRAM) worth it?

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XCavalier

Reputable
Oct 4, 2015
2
0
4,510
Looking to buy new Alienware 15.
Have the option to upgrade to:
1) 256GB PCIe SSD(boot) + 1TB HDD
From
128GB M.2 SATA 6Gb/s SSD(boot)
+1TB HDD
For $100 more.
OR
2) GTX 970M (3GB VRAM)
From GTX 965M (2GB VRAM)
For $150 more.

I can Upgrade only one of the two.... Which is the better option?
I'm not a very hardcore gamer but I do plan on playing games like FIFA, NBA and GTA a lot. (of course occasionally the big titles). I want zippy performance as well so a better SSD also feels tempting.
Most importantly I want to keep this laptop for 4 years so it should last that long with good performance.

Other info:
-Model Alienware 15
-CPU core i7 6700HQ Quad core
-RAM 8GB DDR4 (plan to upgrade at a later point in time because already pushing budget limit)
-1920*1080
-128 GB M.2 SATA 6gb/s SSD + 1TB
-gtx 965M 2gb vram

The cost with these is $1450 the max I can spend is $1600 so help me choose the right upgrade for my needs.

Thanks in advance
 
Solution
S
970 is much better than 965m. In fact, 965m is much closer to the 960m than one might think. The 128 bit memory bus drags the 965m down way more (compared to the 192 bit of the 970m) than the minor performance it gets from the huge bump in unit shaders (compared to the 960m). These are the reasons that lead people to imagine 960m will perform very close to 970m, which couldn't be more far from truth. 970m is hugely better than 965m from any point of view (except for the price) and especially performance (30-40% faster on average, with peaks as high as 60% consistently in various gaming scenarios). The 970m is vastly superior also because, or maybe mainly because it has 16 additional render output processors (48 vs 32), all these leading...
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sepukku

Honorable
Jun 10, 2012
2
0
10,520
970 is much better than 965m. In fact, 965m is much closer to the 960m than one might think. The 128 bit memory bus drags the 965m down way more (compared to the 192 bit of the 970m) than the minor performance it gets from the huge bump in unit shaders (compared to the 960m). These are the reasons that lead people to imagine 960m will perform very close to 970m, which couldn't be more far from truth. 970m is hugely better than 965m from any point of view (except for the price) and especially performance (30-40% faster on average, with peaks as high as 60% consistently in various gaming scenarios). The 970m is vastly superior also because, or maybe mainly because it has 16 additional render output processors (48 vs 32), all these leading to massively higher pixel rate (~70%) and much higher (40%+) texture rate and floating-point performance, which is like everything in gaming.
 
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