Conclusion
While Eurocom’s Panther 2.0 has given us class-leading mobile game performance since the middle of last year, today’s build focuses on its new AMD Radeon HD 6970M CrossFire option, which the company says it co-developed with AMD. This Radeon HD 6970M CrossFire configuration provides similar performance to Nvidia’s high-end GeForce GTX 480M in SLI, for around half the price.
The real star in the above chart appears to be the GeForce GTX 470M SLI, offering an 8% performance improvement at around 2/3 the price of its GTX 480M SLI predecessor. Yet, the point of high-end graphics is to play at high resolutions and settings, so we should probably show how these configurations compare at the panel’s native 1920x1080 resolution before handing out any crowns.
We noticed that the Radeon HD 6970M appeared CPU-bottlenecked at lower resolutions, and reducing our comparison to the panel’s native resolution puts this in perspective. At 1920x1080, the Radeon HD 6970M CrossFire provides similar performance to the GeForce GTX 470M SLI, yet costs roughly 18% less. Matched performance at reduced cost looks like an AMD win to us.
Yet, as nice as the HD 6970M appears in CrossFire, the single-card configuration is where it truly excels. A whopping 17% lead over a single GeForce GTX 470M gives hope to mid-budget mobile gamers, while hinting at the true potential of CrossFire, should scaling be improved by future drivers.
Our special thanks goes to Eurocom for providing its Panther 2.0 with the extra hardware required to make this comparison possible.
