Its been a while since I built my current desktop and at the time, I put an Asus HD6850 graphics card into the system, as that suited my needs at the time. But I am now playing a lot more sim based games (FSX, Train Simulator 2014 ETS and have Battlefield 3 amongst others to play) and I am now finding that the card isn't really handling everything that well. I am considering all options (AMD or nvidia) and have a budget of £150 - £160 max I have tried doing some research and think I have two options - GTX 660 which I can get for around £140-£160 - are their any differences between the different brands apart from cooler design? This compared to the current card in charts would be a massive jump R9 270 or 270x - can get a 27- under budget and 270x for £20 over budget. Any other recommendations would be appreciated. Current setup is in sig below. I am also running two 1080p monitors on a day to day basis, but only one is used for gaming. As mentioned above, any help would be appreciated. Thanks in advance Andrew
Am I liable to have any issues with the PSU when putting a better GPU into my system? on top of the details in the sig, i have a total of four SATA HDD drives and a single PATA drive which is put in occasionally for backing up.
With the lower end Maxwell cards due anytime now, I'd wait it out. See how they do, what they do to AMDs pricing etc.
I was planning on ordering the new card this week. However if you're saying wait until the end of the month, I may be able to stretch to another £20-30 on top of my existing budget provided the benefits justify the extra outlay.
Well the two new low end cards have been announced: http://wccftech.com/nvidia-geforce-gtx-750-ti-geforce-gtx-750-generation-maxwell-gpu-architecture/ . They are quite low end so might not make an impact on the pricing for the cards you are looking at. It all comes down to how bad you get buyers remorse really. If you are the sort of person who just buys something and doesn't look back go for it. There are some great cards about at the moment, plenty in the second hand market to with all the currency mining going on. However if you are the sort of person who would be really annoyed if the prices came down or something better arrived then wait it out.
I suppose I don't really get buyers remorse - if a product is at a price I'm willing to pay then I pay it regardless of whether the price goes down a week or two later. Obviously, I do get annoyed if the price changes within minutes of ordering as has happened on Amazon once (with a Samsung 3 series Chromebook) Out of the two cards I mentioned in the op, is there much difference between the R9 270 and the GTX660? if I were to hang fire and build a little more cash up, what card would be the one to go for if I were to go to the 'level' above this range of card? Also, should I be looking at cards with as much RAM as possible on the card (IE two identical cards, but one is £20 more but has 3GB - I take it I would see a performance boost with the additional GB (sounds like a totally dumb question I know)
not unless the GPU manufacturer actually designed the card that way. if you're looking at a radeon 7850 yes, the 2GB model has actual performance benefits over the 1GB model but if it's just an extra 2GB VRAM slapped on by the video card manufacturer, give it a pass. no performance benefit at all, just an e-peen thing
For the average user, yes you'd be correct. VRam only really matters with very high resolutions usually using multiple monitors or games like Skyrim with ultra high resolution textures. Then you'd see performance differences. There is a good comparison website here for GPUs, seems to lack the 270 though, has the 270X: http://www.anandtech.com/bench/GPU14/815 I'm bias so can't really weigh into the whole AMD vs nVidia at X price point debate.
So from that link you supplied, a comparison between the 270x and the gtx660 makes the 270x a better proposition in most games, which I would hope would transfer over to the less graphically intensive games I play. Not that up on the FPS of a game - what sort of figure would be classed as being playable? some of the games in the comparison are listed as 48FPS which i would have thought would be acceptable, but with a 60htz monitor (I assume this is 60 refreshes per second) is that liable to be a stuttered image on screen or not? In terms of which card to go for, I think I'm going to stick with what I have bought in the past and that's AMD, whether that's a good idea or not unless someone can explain any reason why that isn't a good idea for the gaming I am into. Would this be a decent proposition @£180 http://www.scan.co.uk/products/4gb-...-boost-1100mhz-1280-streams-d?ProductId=89433 or this one for £170 - £10 more than my budget http://www.scan.co.uk/products/4gb-...0mhz-1280-streams-dp-dvi-hdmi?ProductId=88578 both of these have 4GB RAM - I am running dual 1080P monitors so that should help shouldn't it?