Eurocom Racer: Why the Radeon HD 6970M Rocks

Looking Forward to Eurocom’s Racer and AMD’s 6970M

After laying down some laps with the Racer for the past couple of weeks, I’m definitely looking forward to more notebooks like this. It’s a decent build that offers great performance and all the features most of us want. As an enthusiast notebook, my primary complaints involve the noise levels and Eurocom’s pricing—particularly on some of the upgrades. Even with those concerns, right now the estimated price is low enough to be competitive with other “upper midrange” gaming notebooks (i.e. the ASUS G73SW and MSI GT680R). It costs more, but with the right GPU it definitely comes out ahead. It’s also significantly noisier than the G73SW, unfortunately.

As a mobile workstation, I’m not so convinced. You can get Quadro FX 5000M and an i7-2920XM processor, sure, and that’s not something currently available from any of the big OEMs. But technically, the Eurocom Racer isn’t available yet either. Part of that is almost certainly the Sandy Bridge chipset bug, but until I see the Racer listed on the main Eurocom site this is a preview of not-yet-shipping hardware. My bigger issue with this as a mobile workstation is that the build quality is nowhere near that of notebooks like the Dell Precision, HP EliteBook, or Lenovo ThinkPad W-series. There’s no magnesium-alloy frame, metal surfaces, or spill resistant keyboard here; instead, you get a Clevo notebook with a few extras courtesy of Eurocom.

Also, while none of the big OEMs have gone so far as to stuff a Quadro FX 5000M into a 15.6” chassis, one look at the noise levels makes me think that perhaps they have the right idea. Like the old adage says: just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should. At 40 to 45dB under heavier loads, there’s a certain amount of hubris in trying to dissipate up to 180W of power in such a small space. Anyway, if you’re in the market for either a somewhat different enthusiast notebook or a mobile workstation with Sandy Bridge and Quadro FX 5000M, keep an eye on the Eurocom site; depending on final pricing, it could be a very nice upgrade. We're told by Eurocom that the Racer should go on sale around April 1.

For the other half of the conclusion, let’s discuss AMD’s Radeon HD 6970M, arguably the star of the show. When Eurocom first offered us the chance to benchmark AMD’s latest and greatest mobile GPU, I was interested to see how it would perform. I expected it to be faster than the previous generation, but it wasn’t until I saw the specs that I really got excited. HD 5870 was a reasonable alternative to the GTX 480M, and from a price and power perspective it had a lot going for it. With the GTX 485M, I figured this generation would see NVIDIA increase the performance gap, but if anything it actually got smaller. Part of that undoubtedly goes to the memory bandwidth; I’ve wondered if mobile GPUs might be bandwidth constrained in some titles, and with 115.2GB/s of bandwidth that 6970M certainly makes that a non-issue.

Now it’s just a case of getting the drivers and games better optimized, which is the one area where NVIDIA maintains a clear lead. Say what you will about CUDA and PhysX; the fact is they’re out there and more games and applications make use of those items than OpenCL or DirectCompute (at least for now). NVIDIA also seems to have their logo show up with more games that I’ve played than AMD (or ATI), so subjectively at least I’d say NVIDIA is working more with developers.

When looking at laptops and notebooks, another important aspect is useful technologies like NVIDIA’s Optimus. Optimus is something I really appreciate when I unplug a laptop, but sadly no manufacturers have even attempted to enable the feature with any of the GTX GPUs. With no graphics switching enabled for either side on high-end parts, we end up looking at performance and value. NVIDIA in my mind holds an edge in the performance area, and CUDA and PhysX are at least worth a small consideration; AMD counters this the same way they’ve been fighting Intel: pricing. The difference is that where Intel has a significant lead in performance and performance per watt in most areas, AMD is close enough to NVIDIA to make their lower prices the deciding factor.

That means that once again we’re back to the question of availability. Right now, you can find the GTX 460M in numerous notebooks, and there are several vendors stocking the 485M. The older GTX 480M is pretty much EOL at this point, which is good since the 6970M ends up outperforming it while using less power. The biggest problem is going to be actually finding a vendor that stocks—and ships—HD 6970M. We’re reviewing the Eurocom Racer, but as noted above, it isn’t actually available for purchase yet. AVADirect has recently added the HD 6970M as an option on the larger Clevo P170HM, but the Cougar Point chipset bug means those notebooks aren’t quite shipping to customers either—they’re on pre-order status and will hopefully start shipping by the end of the month, but I wouldn’t put down any money until the pre-order notice goes away.

With those two options, we can at least look at pre-release pricing. Eurocom lists the 6970M as a $66 upgrade from the base GTX 460M for the Racer, but AVADirect wants $220 to upgrade from the 460M to the 6970M on their Clevo X7200. AVADirect also has the 470M listed on the X7200 (both that and the 6970M are listed as pre-order). Since the X7200 supports SLI and CrossFire, we can also guesstimate at the cost of each individual GPU—though vendors certainly tweak their pricing as they see fit.

For the upgrade from single-GPU to dual-GPUs, AVADirect charges $215 for the GTX 460M, $271 for the GTX 470M, $446 for the HD 6970M, and a whopping $927 for a second GTX 485M. Eurocom on the other hand charges $193 for a second HD 5870M, $303 for GTX 460M, $368 for 470M, $368 for HD 6970M as well, $697 for 480M (if you’re crazy and now want to pay a premium for an EOL product), and a not-quite-so-massive $785 for 485M. AVADirect generally has better pricing on GeForce parts while Eurocom charges less for Radeon GPUs—perhaps that has something to do with Eurocom being headquartered in Canada. If the current configurator pricing for the Racer holds, Eurocom is also offering a single HD 6970M at a very attractive price.

We haven’t tested the 470M just yet, but it’s safe to assume that it won’t surpass the 6970M in most cases, since as we’ve shown the 6970M is already dangerously close to the 485M. Depending on where you’re shopping, the most reasonable choice is going to likely boil down to either the 470M or the 6970M. AMD should have the advantage in performance, but NVIDIA generally manages better battery life if that’s important to you. Since we’re usually looking at less than three hours with desktop replacements, that’s not enough to sway our vote, so for the time being it looks like the Radeon HD 6970M is the mobile GPU to beat. However, if NVIDIA counters with price cuts, it could easily go the other way. Now all we need to see is more mainstream notebooks like the ASUS G53/G73 and Alienware M15x/M17x add support for AMD’s latest tour de force.