I'm trying not to skimp on anything, but I can't go over $2000 so I have to deal with that budget. That said, the 7970M saves me $250 to go towards upgrading something else and from the data I've reviewed online, the 7970M and the 680M are neck and neck in terms of performance. So it's really not much of a downgrade but it still saves me quite a bit of money which lets me add something nice like an upgraded processor or an SSD and still stay under budget.
From the review I read the 680m was about 20% faster on average than the 7970m and it ran cooler and used less power which are important with a laptop. I only read 1 review quickly though.
Never heard of psu requirements, what does that mean? From what I understand, the laptop I chose is considered a "desktop replacement" and very upgradeable as far as laptops go. I don't know much other than that though. I know you can slot a second graphics card into the laptop for increased performance and that is something I will definitely do in a few years. The other bits should be upgradeable as far as I know but you seem to be saying otherwise.
How do I find out how much psu my laptop has and how far I'll be able to upgrade it?
Sorry PSU is the power supply. Just because you have a slot to plug a new video card in to doesn't mean your laptop psu can power it. Not saying yours wouldn't but it's something that happened to me and I thought you should be aware. Make sure the psu will be powerful enough for future upgrades if thats an avenue you wish to pursue is all i'm saying.
Also as I said earlier don't under estimate the importance of the 2 extra GB of texture memory the 680m provides over the 7970m. A fully modded skyrim can push 1.5GB to even 2GB cards. So I don't think it's a stretch to think games 2-3 years from now will greatly benefit from the extra 2GB's. It wont matter how fast the card is if you run out of texture memory you either slow to a crawl or crash.
Anyway you might want to check out Cyber power laptops specifically the Fangbook x7-300. Here's the specs—
CPU: Intel® Core™ i7-3630QM Mobile Processor 2.40 GHz 6M Smart Cache, Max Turbo Freq. 3.40 GHz
HDD: 64GB SanDisk SATA III 6.0Gb/s SSD - 490 MB/s Read & 240 MB/s Write (Single Drive)
MEMORY: 16GB (8GBx2) DDR3-1333 SODIMM Memory (Corsair or Major Brand)
MOTHERBOARD: Intel HM77 Express Chipset Mainboard
SOUND: Built-in 3D Premium Surround Sound
VIDEO: NVIDIA GTX 680M 4GB PCIe Video
For $40 you can upgrade to samsung 840 120GB SSD for the boot drive and it comes with a 750GB second drive for games and programs.
I've heard good things about them but have never used them as I build my own systems. So do your due diligence.
This would get you a nice setup for under $2000.00
I can't help but think of the system you could build with $2000 and still have money for a laptop or tablet for your bedroom but I understand your reasoning and won't bother you about it.
Oh and there's no such thing as overkill when your talking about wanting it to last years.