5850m vs 6990m

I'm thinking about upgrading my Alienware's GPU to a 6990m but was curious if it was worth the $350 upgrade? I don't expect performance to double but a 50% boost would make it worth my time I think.

Anyone do this upgrade if so how was the performance gain? Thanks!

Big difference. Think 5770 vs 6870 difference

question you gotta ask yourself is

"is the performance increase worth the $350 I am going to have to shell out?" and my answer would be "Not a chance"

According to Passmark, the 6990m is a good amount faster than the 5850m. If you're having FPS troubles it might be worth it, but $350 is still a lot of money.

I own a 6990m and its wicked quick.... I can play BF3 in High settings smoothly and medium settings are off the chart in FPS for a laptop GPU if that tells you anything. Ultra is about 30-45FPS in Multiplayer. This things almost as quick as a 6950 desktop GPu.

That's pretty awesome. How does it compare to the GTX 480 desktop card? That's what I'm running right now and I can play BF3 on Ultra very smoothly which I found surprising but that's another story,

Now all I have to do is find one! I see a couple on ebay but they are $430 which is way to expensive for me unless I can unload my 5850m for $100 or so.

Right now I have my 5850m overclocked to 800/1100 stock is 625/1000 and have noticed MW3 has smoothed out some which is nice but it still dips pretty low in some spots which makes it unplayable.

Well a GTX 480 beats a 6870 desktop part which is what the 6990m is based on, but clocked lower. IMO BF3 will not be playable at that res unless you really bring down the graphic settings.

It makes no sense to compare a mobile card to a desktop card. Maybe just for an extremely rough comparison, but there are so many other factors that you honestly can not make a fair comparison. The 6990m is a beast of a card, yet under full load only draws 75-100W of power. The GTX 460 pulls 137W, at idle, up to 270W at full load. My sager NP8170 cannot exceed 240W total draw, for the entire system, at full load or it will trip the breaker in the power brick. Also, the heat production and dissipation and size restrictions are always a factor. If you want a very capable notebook GPU then the 6900m is one of the best. It can hang with the 580M and costs 1/3rd of the price, but you also have to be realistic. If you are wanting a true desktop replacement with comparable performance, be prepared to spend a lot of money.

Vengance_01 said:

Well a GTX 480 beats a 6870 desktop part which is what the 6990m is based on, but clocked lower. IMO BF3 will not be playable at that res unless you really bring down the graphic settings.

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I dont see where a resolution was stated. Are you just assuming that he means at 1920x1080? Even with the 6990m if you want to play competitively in multiplayer then you will have no choice but to tone down the settings to least high, or lower the resolution.

MGDMN said:

I dont see where a resolution was stated. Are you just assuming that he means at 1920x1080? Even with the 6990m if you want to play competitively in multiplayer then you will have no choice but to tone down the settings to least high, or lower the resolution.

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Yeah I never stated a resolution. I was going to upgrade to a 1080P display but right now I'm using a 900P one and may just keep it.