AVADirect Clevo P170EM: Has AMD’s HD 7970M Got Game?

Conclusion Part 1 – HD 7970M: It’s Getting Better

There are two items to discuss with this review, and I’ll start with AMD’s HD 7970M dGPU, with Enduro Technology. If I had just run with the initial impressions of the P170EM and HD 7970M without contacting AMD, my overall impression of the notebook would have been substantially worse. Buying a gaming notebook—which is the only reason I can see to purchase a notebook with an HD 7970M—and not being able to get regular graphics driver updates from the GPU manufacturer is a complete waste of time and money. I know quite a few people actually made that mistake, and for them all I can do is say that I can feel their pain—and I wrote about this last year and tried to warn people away from a then-broken Enduro/Dynamic Switchable Graphics/PowerXpress.

I understand the desire to support the underdogs of computer technology, and right now AMD’s mobile GPUs are definitely underdogs to NVIDIA’s Optimus enabled GPUs—not because they perform poorly, but without drivers you can pretty much guarantee there will be compatibility issues with future games. NVIDIA has been shipping Optimus GPUs for over 2.5 years now, and since May 2010 they’ve been delivering simultaneous driver updates for their entire product stack (except for their pre-Optimus switchable graphics solutions). AMD hasn’t had public reference drivers for their switchable graphics solutions or Enduro, and they’re only just now starting to address that problem. Even worse, the HD 7970M with Enduro enabled clearly has some performance issues—it’s really bad when NVIDIA’s previous generation GTX 580M/675M is often able to outperform the HD 7970M Enduro!

The good news is that AMD is actively working to address the driver and performance problems, and if they get all their ducks in a row we hopefully won’t see future problems with Enduro equipped notebooks. I would have liked to see this happen last year, but better late than never I suppose. As you can see from our testing, the upcoming Hotfix driver takes the HD 7970M from being way behind NVIDIA’s GTX 680M to only being 10-20% slower on average, and in some cases AMD is able to take a small lead. NVIDIA maintains the overall performance crown, but only with a substantially higher priced card (though I get the feeling they could easily drop prices if they felt more pressure from AMD). If you’re looking for a better value (which seems a dubious proposition on a $2000+ notebook, but I digress…), the HD 7970M will generally shave $300-$400 off the price of the P170EM compared to the GTX 680M, all while delivering around 85% of the performance. So you basically save 12% and lose about the same amount of performance.

There’s more to it than performance of course, and if I were in the market for a top-tier gaming notebook right now I wouldn’t hesitate to purchase a GTX 680M—either in the P170EM or in Alienware’s M17x R4—over the HD 7970M. As we said, AMD is working to address the problems with regular GPU driver updates as well as graphics performance, but they’re not finished yet. Besides, when you’re spending this much money, wouldn’t you want the fastest GPU? Within reason of course—I’m not at all a fan of SLI or CrossFire in notebooks, mostly because drivers, heat, and other wonkiness just get that much worse when you’re running two GPUs. Plus NVIDIA still has their PhysX card to play, and with Batman: Arkham City and Borderlands 2 both utilizing the technology to good effect, I like having that option available.

We’ll have more to say on the GPU side of things when we finish with part two where we look at the P170EM with a GTX 680M, but for now we’ll just say that AMD needs more time to prove that their Enduro drivers are ready and available for public consumption before we’ll recommend taking the plunge. Hopefully they’ll continue to improve things and by the end of the year, we may no longer need to worry about driver updates and can simply look at the performance and features offered by the various mobile GPUs.