GTX970 vs 980M
Havos
Posts: 5,582
in The Commons
I am looking at buying a new laptop, and I thought I might as well get one with a half decent nVidia card. Most of the ones I am looking at are GTX 980M cards. Now I know the 980M is less powerful than the desktop GTX 980, but would it ourrun (for iRay purposes) a GTX 970, which is the card I have in my current desktop? I rarely play games, so I am only concerned with the iRay performance.
Daz 3D is part of 
Connect
DAZ Productions, Inc.
7533 S Center View Ct #4664
West Jordan, UT 84084
Licensing Agreement | Terms of Service | Privacy Policy | EULA
© 2025 Daz Productions Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Comments
My current laptop has a 980M in it and I have been extremely happy.
Iray renders seem to be comperable to my desktop, which has a 950ti I believe (I can confirm when I get home).
A couple of caveats though... The 980M does run hot if you are rendering, since the render engine pounds the graphics card pretty consistently (unlike a game which may have ups and downs). Make sure you get a rig with decent airflow... I also max'ed out the RAM and CPU that was available at the time. i7-4720 and 16 GBs of RAM.
Thanks for the info. I could not find any specs for a GTX 950 Ti, only the 950, and that runs slower than a GTX 970.
I will check my Desktop when I get home. I am probably mistaken on the model.
One other caveat.... Laptop power supply. It needs to be beefy. The 980M draws a lot of power when engaged. I purchased mine from Dell and the BIOS had a known bug that when too much power was drawn, the graphics card was automatically throttled down. I made them send me the bigger power supply after arguing with (non) Tech Support.
Ah, figured out a way to see it from work... My Desktop has a GeForce GTX 970. I believe it is a Ti model, but I may be mistaking that with the 750ti I have in my other Desktop (mostly for gaming).
As I mentioned, the performance has been pretty comperable between the two. I am confortable bouncing between both machines with little noticable loss of performance.
I am pretty sure there is no such thing as a 970Ti, there is only a 980Ti, so I guess you have the 970, which is the same as me.
Basically that means a 980M for my laptop would give me equivalent performance to the 970 in my desktop, which is fine for what I am likely to do with it.
Yep, you are correct. It is a GTX 970. I am not going to link the sites here, but Googling "980m vs 970" turns out results pretty close to what I would expect.
I know you didn't ask, but as a note nvidia will be shipping mobile versions of the 1070 and 1080 that are actually the full spec chips. The only change will be the TDP. Of course, who knows how much they will cost or when they will ship, but just a FYI.
http://videocardz.com/60853/nvidia-to-offer-desktop-graphics-in-notebooks
It would have been nice to get to have gotten a 1070 or 1080 mobile version, but I needed a laptop now (for work reasons), and I imagine it will be several months before we see these chips appear in a laptop. I ordered one yesterday with a 980M GPU.
When you receive it, check your power brick. As I mentioned I had to have them replace it with the bigger brick... Both are 19.5 Volts out, but the smaller is 6 Amps to the biggers 12 Amps.