AMD's Mobility Radeon HD 6970 In CrossFire On Eurocom's Panther

Name: AMD’s Radeon HD 6970M - AMD&#039;s Mobility Radeon HD 6970 In CrossFire On Eurocom&#039;s Panther
Author: Thomas Soderstrom

by Thomas Soderstrom January 30, 2011 at 11:00 PM

42 Comments

AMD’s Radeon HD 6970M

We’re glad to see that even AMD is referring to its new mobile modules by the shorter “Radeon HD 6970M” moniker, as the original “Mobility Radeon HD 6970” naming scheme was terribly wordy. We’re even willing to overlook any similarities to the naming practices of its competitor, for the sake of brevity.

Speaking of similarities, Eurocom thought that Nvidia’s GTX 470M SLI would so closely-match the performance levels of AMD’s Radeon HD 6970M in CrossFire that it included a pair of each for today’s tests. If the performance is indeed similar, AMD will take the performance-value win with a colossal $219 price advantage.

A surprisingly-small die comes not from a shrink in die process, but the use of a less complex GPU. A closer look at the Radeon HD 6970M’s specs indicates that its “Blackcomb XT” is nothing more than an underclocked Radeon HD 6850 desktop part, indicating that it's based on the older VLIW5 architecture, and not the company's newer VLIW4 arrangement.

Desktop vs Mobility Radeon Graphics
	Desktop Radeon HD 6970	Desktop Radeon HD 6850	Radeon HD 6970M
Transistors	2.64 billion	1.7 billion	1.7 billion
Engine Clock	880 MHz	775 MHz	680 MHz
Shader (ALUs)	1536	960	960
Texture Units	96	48	48
ROP Units	32	32	32
Compute Performance	2.7 TFLOPS	1.49 TFLOPS	1.3 TFLOPS
DRAM Type	GDDR5-5500	GDDR5-4000	GDDR5-3600
DRAM Interface	256-bits	256-bits	256-bits
Memory Bandwidth	176 GB/s	128 GB/s	115.2 GB/s
TDP	250 W	127 W	100 W

AMD isn’t the only one still playing the horrid name game with its notebook parts, as Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 470M appears to be nothing more than an underclocked GeForce GTX 460 SE, priced around 3x higher, without the fancy heat sinks and brackets that a desktop card must include.

Desktop vs Mobile GeForce Graphics
	Desktop GeForce GTX 470	Desktop GeForce GTX 460 SE	GeForce GTX 470M
Transistors	3 billion	1.95 billion	1.95 billion
Engine Clock	607 MHz	650 MHz	535 MHz
CUDA Cores	448	288	288
Texture Units	56	48	48
ROP Units	40	32	24
Compute Performance	1.09 TFLOPS	855 GFLOPS	634 GFLOPS
DRAM Type	GDDR5-3348	GDDR5-3400	GDDR5-3000
DRAM Interface	320-bits	256-bits	192-bits
Memory Bandwidth	133.9 GB/s	108.8 GB/s	72 GB/s
TDP	215 W	150 W	50 W (GPU Only)

Note that AMD lists TDP for a complete card, while Nvidia lists it for the GPU alone. We expect actual power consumption to be somewhat similar from the complete modules.

Previous Next

Summary

About the author

Thomas Soderstrom @hardware_tom

Thomas Soderstrom is a Senior Staff Editor at Tom's Hardware US. He tests and reviews cases, cooling, memory and motherboards.

Notebooks

This thread is closed for comments

42 comments

Comment from the forums

Your comment

haxs101

5292$... Are you kidding me!!
dogman_1234

Yikes!
Crashman

dogman_1234Yikes!

What, you don't have a $180,000 car sitting in front of your $5m mansion?
fstrthnu

This is even more absurd than the other recent power gaming notebook that was tested. You could save almost $500 by using Sandy Bridge instead of the old i7s, for the same performance. Even Falcon Mach V's usually don't get this expensive. This is absolutely ridiculous
Crashman

fstrthnuThis is even more absurd than the other recent power gaming notebook that was tested. You could save almost $500 by using Sandy Bridge instead of the old i7s, for the same performance. Even Falcon Mach V's usually don't get this expensive. This is absolutely ridiculous

No you couldn't. Because as of CES when these cards launched, nobody produced a dual-graphics module chassis for the Sandy Bridge.
one-shot

There are the battery life graphs that I love! Thanks for adding those to the laptop review! My first laptop was a P4 Northwood that barely got 90 minutes of battery life. This one is insane!
_Pez_

Insane and impossible to get and pay in Mëxico ....
Maziar

First of all,great review ! I was desperately waiting for 6970M review from Tom's.
The overall performance is quite good especially in single mode which it's faster than both GTX 470M/480M.I think if AMD pays more attention to mobile drivers, then 2 of this cards should perform better.
About the price,well not everyone configures the laptop with i7 980x.Websites usually test the high-end specs in order to reduce the bottleneck and let the laptop run at its full potential.
I've read that Sager will soon release a model with mobile Sandy bridge CPUs along with 1 6970M and it won't be very expensive I think.
tacoslave

CrashmanWhat, you don't have a $180,000 car sitting in front of your $5m mansion?

Duh of course, we all do but i mean 32 bedrooms IS kinda small. On a serious note, wtf 5k seriously? I could build a desktop and hook it up to a small generator for 1.5k and get at least 4 hours of power than pay 5k for 20min Fuk that $hit.
christop

Who is buying this? I bet it weights 50 lbs. Nice battery life of 22 minutes.
sparky2010

You know what really gets to me.. AMD really markets the whole 1.3 teraflops, and 2.7 teraflops.. but at the end of the day, nvidia, with a lot less flop, overpowers AMD's cards... so where does all of tha processing power go in AMD's cards?
stingstang

Looks like AMD hit the sweet spot in their mobile graphics division...FINALLY. I'd like to know what the price difference is between the 6970m and the 460m. It probably won't change the 460m pricing, but I'm willing to bet Nvidia snapped their fingers and said, "Damn, we can't milk our mobile cards for 4 times what they're worth anymore."
Seriously, how could they charge 800 dollars or some such crap for half the power of their 600 dollar cards?
darkchazz

Who the Fu** would pay for this
Helltech

This... is sad. I don't know why anyone would want this, especially for that price.
alidan

stingstangLooks like AMD hit the sweet spot in their mobile graphics division...FINALLY. I'd like to know what the price difference is between the 6970m and the 460m. It probably won't change the 460m pricing, but I'm willing to bet Nvidia snapped their fingers and said, "Damn, we can't milk our mobile cards for 4 times what they're worth anymore."Seriously, how could they charge 800 dollars or some such crap for half the power of their 600 dollar cards?

it does sound like they are screwing you, at first. but you have to think about it. with a full size card, they have how much space and cooling to work with? and how much space do they have with a notebook? pluss less people buy a notbook that high powered, so they have to recupe the costs of production somehow.
JohnnyLucky

The cost is way out of my price range.
jimishtar

"These desktop replacement notebooks are designed to run primarily from a wall outlet anyway"

So all of your that cry about the battery life, the price, the weight.... its an elite desktop replacement. It was never meant to be power efficient, lightweight nor cheap. You don't buy this kinda stuff cause u need it - you buy it cause u don't.
dkaral

Should be compared to GTX 485M. Remember 485M is around 40% faster than a 480M according to notebookcheck.
Reynod

$5G for a high end gaming laptop is what you would expect to pay.

A bit of a written rule over the years for me is that you can build the best PC for $5000 (with all of the performance bits but ditch the teenage blinged up case) ... it still applies.

Crunch the numbers for yourself and include CF or SLI and you will see it works.

$5G in a laptop fors out the best "mobile" money can buy ... will this is about right ... unless you want a bigger SSD I guess.

Nice article crash.
rolli59

Just need a portable generator to go with it (at that price they could throw one in for free)
On a more serious note just get a desktop!
i_am_aronman

I think i will wait for ASUS or some other big company implements this into a cheaper laptop, one that would be better to carry around. Maybe you would be able to play some of your games from your desktop and continue them in the car or at your parents place.
scook9

Asus would make a laptop with a weaker GPU that the top of the line (they have used top of the line twice in history that I know of...the W90 and the original G73 with 5870m) that would have much worse build quality. There is a reason they cost less

And as for the laptop in question here, I came to see the bench numbers, not the price. Eurocom is one of the most expensive Clevo resellers out there. You can get the EXACT same hardware (yes all their custom hardware is total marketing BS - standard Clevo build) from any number of retailers. And for $850 less the i7 950 is MORE than sufficient (at least would be for me). Then upgrade your hard drives and memory yourself because only intelligent people are usually buying these laptops and you have a godly laptop around $3500. Much more reasonable in the world of high end laptops
bildo123

darkchazzWho the Fu** would pay for this

I too would be curious on total sales for the year.
liveonc

IMOHO these gaming laptops have the same size, weight, battery life, & price, of something that belongs in the 90's.