Recommend me a GPU please!

[Lewis_Hamilton_]

So I had some good news and will have a nice some of money to put towards a new GPU.

I currently own a HD7850 that is heavily overclocked to a 7870's performance, and was thinking about buying another since they are cheap, and going for a crossfire setup as a Christmas present for myself.

Instead as I now have some extra funds, was thinking about selling my 7850 and budgeting £250-300 for a beefy GPU that will last me a few years. I've always stuck with AMD cards in the past simply for the bang for the buck in their mid-tier range, but I'm open to going with Nvidia this time round. What would you guys recommend?

The rest of my system is old but I haven't played one game yet where I felt the need for an upgrade, other than the GPU:

I7 920 D0 @3.9Ghz
3x2GB DDR3 RAM @ 1550Mhz - will upgrade to 12-16GB 2133Mhz RAM
Gigabyte EX58-UD5 motherboard.
OCZ 700w PSU

I game on a 42" plasma, with the 7850 I can play everything at 1080p/60 with usually high-max settings with decentish Anti-Aliasing, but I haven't really played any of this years very demanding games. I will be double dipping with GTAV when it comes to PC in January, and would to see it in all it's glory.

Due to the plasma I won't be able to go above 1080/60, but it would be nice to have ultra with max AA and possibly downsampling from 1440p for a few years.

Recommend me a GPU guys, what would you go for? I think my targets are realistic in that budget.

Thanks for any replies!

 

[Davidies]

I'd say, definitely get an Nvidia GTX 970. You can get one on Amazon UK for about £270-290.

If you care about power usage, it should not use more than 160 watts from what I've heard.

 

[NLxAROSA]

Agreed, 970GTX. Meets your demands, silent and energy efficient, most bang for the buck given your budget. The most silent ones are the MSI and ASUS because of the hybrid cooling (passive until 67 degrees C, active above).

 

[Lewis_Hamilton_]

I'd say, definitely get an Nvidia GTX 970. You can get one on Amazon UK for about £270-290.

If you care about power usage, it should not use more than 160 watts from what I've heard.

Agreed, 970GTX. Meets your demands, silent and energy efficient, most bang for the buck given your budget. The most silent ones are the MSI and ASUS because of the hybrid cooling (passive until 67 degrees C, active above).

That's the main card I'm thinking about, but was also looking at the R9 290X. Everything I've heard about the 970 has been extremely positive, but for some reason I feel like the 290X might be slightly more future proof? Not sure that uncertainty is worth the extra heat, noise and power consumption though.

Anything else out there I could be looking at? Or if I either went up to £350, or SLI/Crossfire a couple of £175 cards?

 

[NLxAROSA]

Can you elaborate on 'more future proof'? As far as I can tell, the only thing the 290X has going for it is the 512-bit memory bus, which (correct me if I'm wrong) is only a benefit when gaming at high resolutions (4k). At 1080p, the bus width is not the blocking factor, so the R9 290X is completely blown out of the water by the GTX970 there.

 

[Lewis_Hamilton_]

My apologies. I plan on moving on to a 4K TV as my next upgrade after the GPU. It won't be for a little while yet, probably when 55" are in the £500-600 range.

Would the extra bus width also help with very high AA settings while I am still at 1080p? As I feel overly sensitive to even small jaggies, I just can't stop looking at them if they are there.

It's almost certain I'll end up going with the 970 but just weighing up my options.

 

[Saidur_Ali]

Nvidia is way to go especially with Maxwell cards given how energy efficient they are and also ShadowPlay is awesome and the new cards have 4K recording support and HDMI 2.0. You also get a decent game for free. Best thing to do at moment is to get a GTX 970 with decent boost clock like this one: Link

I'm personally waiting for 20nm or 16nm version to come out before upgrading from a GTX 670.

 

[Davidies]

You can also go to the GPU Boss website (Can't link as I'm on my phone) and compare any graphics cards you have in mind, like the 290x versus GTX 970 for example.

 

[Tesla]

970 is the best price/performance card out right now, at least until we see how the 960 and the r9 300 series performs come Q1 2015 (the latter of which is rumoured to be on a 20nm process instead of 28nm, and should be able to do 4K gaming very, very well).

 

[TB]

You can also go to the GPU Boss website (Can't link as I'm on my phone) and compare any graphics cards you have in mind, like the 290x versus GTX 970 for example.

Clicky.

I will echo others and say go for the Nvidia. I've had no complaints with my 770 and the 970 walks all over it. 👍

 

[Lewis_Hamilton_]

Well I've pretty much made up my mind on the 970, I've seen one for £249 at Ebuyer including VAT and free next day delivery, seems like a pretty good deal for such a great card. Thanks everyone for the replies.

Now to very impatiently wait for pay day at the end of the week

Do any of you think I will need to be looking at a CPU upgrade? It's been great over the past 5 years and I still think it's got a good few left in it despite spending it's entire life running 40-50% above stock clocks. It easily goes above 4Ghz with only a tiny further increase in voltage, but being a first gen i7, it does get rather hot under load at those speeds, as in high 80's-low 90's.

At 3.9Ghz it barely tickles 70C under full load.

 

[Techy]

Well I've pretty much made up my mind on the 970, I've seen one for £249 at Ebuyer including VAT and free next day delivery, seems like a pretty good deal for such a great card. Thanks everyone for the replies.

Now to very impatiently wait for pay day at the end of the week

Do any of you think I will need to be looking at a CPU upgrade? It's been great over the past 5 years and I still think it's got a good few left in it despite spending it's entire life running 40-50% above stock clocks. It easily goes above 4Ghz with only a tiny further increase in voltage, but being a first gen i7, it does get rather hot under load at those speeds, as in high 80's-low 90's.

At 3.9Ghz it barely tickles 70C under full load.

How are you cooling it?

 

[Lewis_Hamilton_]

How are you cooling it?

With a Cooler Master Hyper Evo 212 and Artic Silver 5 Thermal Paste. My case is quite small but it has decent air flow throughout.

 

[Ibonibo]

I also have a I7 920

Bought a 970GTX (Gainward Phantom) yesterday. Awaiting delivery.
Card is best bang for the buck. That's the consenus from reviews and user reviews.

I think with even the old 920, it should improve the performance enough, to wait with a new PC for a while.

as for a new CPU, problem that is, Mainboard.
Haswell-E is the only choice for me, if I would upgrade.... meaning new Mb, the Cpu, the Gpu,.... comes close to a new PC

But should I upgrade, I would do everything, basicly buying a new PC, and keep the current PC as secondary.

I think though that the 920 with a 970gtx is good enough for a year or so, till the next update on Intels CPUs.

 

[Techy]

With a Cooler Master Hyper Evo 212 and Artic Silver 5 Thermal Paste. My case is quite small but it has decent air flow throughout.

How long had you used this cooling setup for?

 

[Lewis_Hamilton_]

How long had you used this cooling setup for?

Since I bought the CPU in 2009. I got the CPU, PSU, RAM, MoBo etc at the same time. I've cleaned and reapplied the thermal paste several times since then, as well as to make sure the system isn't clogged up with too much dust.

 

[Lewis_Hamilton_]

Well it's bought, got it for £239 and will be delivered on Saturday, cannot wait.

I had reverted back to my old HD4830 for the past couple of months so that I can truly have my mind blown when I see what the next upgrade looks like.

One of the things I'm actually looking forward to most is supersampling and 8xMSAAing my PS2 games (yes, I'm doing it legally, I own a launch console and many games). You can make some PS2 games look really good if you have a powerful enough card to pull it off.

 

[DQuaN]

I might ask for some advice on that as mine look awful! Probably best to do it away from GTP though!

 

[Techy]

Since I bought the CPU in 2009. I got the CPU, PSU, RAM, MoBo etc at the same time. I've cleaned and reapplied the thermal paste several times since then, as well as to make sure the system isn't clogged up with too much dust.

Keep monitoring the CPU and GPU as you're playing games. Those CPU temps are a little on the hot side.

 

[Lewis_Hamilton_]

*Cries*

While I was waiting for my delivery this morning, I was reading up on the thousands of complaints on Amazon's discussion/feedback pages about their newer delivery courier. Most of them were about drivers not even going up to people's doors to knock or leave a missed delivery note, yet emailing about attempted deliveries. I feared the same would happen to me... and it did.

Was waiting a few feet from the door all morning and noticed a van outside. Nobody came and knocked, nobody left a missed delivery note in the letterbox, but at that very instant, I recieved a message that an "attempt" was made to deliver my package and the van drove away. The driver did not even leave his vehicle. I instantly contacted customer services to explain what just happened and asked them to contact the driver to turn around, as it was just a couple of minutes ago and was told "Only one attempt can be made per business day".

I paid for the most expensive delivery option too, what a farce.

Edit: OK then, I take some of it back, complaining gets you everywhere
The driver came back 3 hours later with a rather sad looking face and actually knocked this time. Whipped it in and installing the drivers now, woohoo!