Should I bother upgrading yet?

[hadouken25]

Here's to a long first post!

Tax time is coming soon, and I'm trying to fill in all that I'm going to do with my extra spending cash from tax return.

I get quite a bit from them, on purpose, to give myself a "gift" at the end of the year.

Anyway - 2012 tax return that I got around April of 2013 I went through XoticPC for the first time ever to order my first brand-new, full fledged gaming laptop. I ordered the Clevo P150EM\Sager NP9150 Special Edition with an Intel Core i7-3630QM, 16GB DDR3-1600, regular 750GB 7200RPM HDD, regular 15.6" 1080p display, and the 4GB Nvidia GTX 680M.

First out with the obvious, I should have opted for an mSATA SSD boot drive and/or a solid state drive, I realize that. I had been using a 120GB OCZ Agility 3 SSD in my regular 2.5" slot primarily for practically the entire year of 2013, until I replaced it with the factory original 750GB HDD (I ran out of space). I plan on buying an mSATA cache, or OS drive - as well as a larger SSD to keep this laptop "fresh". Warranty is over in a few months, and I will be using 680M vBios mods on here so I can overclock 'er and see what it can do.

Question lies with:

In a $2750 budget, and wanting to try out a larger 17.3" Sager/Clevo notebook (I keep eyeballing the 9380 and 9380-S) and I keep on wanting to try out the 8970M by AMD/ATI, with a slightly upgraded i7 processor (i7-4800 vs the similar clocked i7-4700 in my NP9150SE). I keep reading about dreaded driver support with radeon graphics cards (I NEVER had a problem on my desktop 7850 2GB, are driver issues only on mobile AMD GPU's?) and even looking through benchmarks it looks like the 680M still outpaces the 8970m in most cases (Metro 2033 & Last Light)(Crysis 3)(Battlefield 4) or at least manages to get within 10% of it.

With my budget I think I can comfortably find a Crossfire 8970M system, but with hearing how drivers already are with a single GPU, am I really going to find benefit running them in crossfire? Ugh...

With how amazing my 680M has treated me I have no problem going with the latest & greatest 780M. But, if somebody is able to convince me that the 8970M will out do my 680M or at least be slightly more future proof, I'd love to hear what you have to say. Make no mistake, I might have a $2750 budget but the budget is there for a reason: I don't wish to exceed it.

I primarily have interest in this 8970M because I kept up with Notebookcheck.Net reviews comparing the 2GB 7970M to the 4GB GTX 680M and with time and new drivers, the 7970M pretty much kept up with the 680M in gaming benchmarks. I was impressed, I could have saved $250 and got the 7970M!

[katta2010]

I wouldn't, the difference is not the worth the money honestly.

[Q56_Monster]

Stay with team green

[Khenglish]

The 8970m isn't as good as the 7970m since the extra 2GB of memory is only useful if you are running more than 1 game at a time, and the 8970m memory is not overclockable while the 7970m memory can be overclocked a lot.

Keep what you have and wait for 20nm GPUs, which unfortunately are still a long way out.

[Hterag]

I'd have to agree with what the others have said so far. I'm in a very similar situation and would love to get a 780M or 8970M to replace my 680M but the difference doesn't seem worth it right now. I'd wait and see what we get from the 880M soon.

[Hterag]

I'd have to agree with what the others have said so far.

I'm in a very similar situation and would love to get a 780M or 8970M to replace my 680M but the difference doesn't seem worth it right now. I'd wait and see what we get from the 880M soon.