Hello all I'm in need of a new graphics card for gaming. My budget is approx £120 and my screen resolution is 1920 X 1080. I'm currently using a HD6670 as a stopgap so obviously need something better. I've been looking at cards such as GTX 650 or GTX 560Ti but I don't mind using a AMD eqivalent if they happen to be better. I'm currently playing BF3, Counter strike and Day-Z. Many thasnks for your help. Mark
Good luck finding a new 560Ti for £120. A 6870 is more or less the same bang, for less buck (within reason). A 7770 would be a bad idea.
The card that I would recommend would be a MSI Radeon HD 7850 1GB for about £132. The only caveat is will you run into the 1GB buffer when you are gaming, but this is a question only you can answer. I game at 1920x1080 and 1440x900. Outside of synthetic benchmarks, I have only seen the memory usage go over 1GB twice in gaming situations and both times when I used masochistic levels of super sample anti-aliasing, anisotropic filtering and tessellation. I don't think the 1GB would be very limiting at 1080p, but going above 1920x1200 would not be recommended with this card. Here is the worst case scenario, running Unigine Heaven with maximum anti-aliasing, aniso and tess. There you can it maxes out at about 1.25GB in a worst case scenario (with my heavy overclock which would require more memory usage). With that card, you're probably looking at 500-900MB for 4xAA, 16xAF and high tessellation like I do. The 7850 gives you GTX 570 performance out of the box while consuming a lot less power (less than 50% of the power of a 570 and less than 40% the power of a 480). Even lesser cards like the 560Ti or the 6870 draw 25-50W more than the 7850 as they are manufactured on an older process. (Avg Pwr) (Peak Pwr) Finally, the 7850 is an oveclocking beast. Pretty much all of the cards can do 1050 MHz (stock is 860MHz) on stock voltage. Mine does 1100MHz/5500MHz on stock volts of 1.075V. This is pushing into GTX 580 territory. If you are willing to overvolt (which I am not beacuse I do not have adequate cooling in my mATX case), you can push these past 1250MHz fairly easily. Good luck with your decision!
