290, 780ti or 980?

[camalbitboy]

Hi All,

I'm looking for a little help. I was all set to buy myself a nice new 290 for around £300 (Gigabyte windforce one) but all of a sudden the prices have gone a little mental.

I've now got to decide between the 290 at £280, a zotac 780ti at £384 or a 980 at ?

I'm leaning towards getting the Zotac but it seems suspiciously cheap, far cheaper than any other 780ti, anyone know why?

Also from what rumours I've read the 980ti is out this Fri/Sat, but from what i can gather its not significantly faster than a 780ti and I'm guessing as its new it will be more expensive too. Any thoughts?

Cam

[shaithis]

The Zotacs are normally the cheapest cards. They just make cards at the lowest price point. Personally, I am not a fan (normally because their coolers just don't look right!) but I haven't heard any horror stories about their kit and know a few people running them fine. At the end of the day they are probably reference PCBs anyway.

[kalniel]

If you need the performance, then the 780ti is by far the fastest. The 290 is the best value for money (you should be able to find it cheaper than that) and also performs well at very high resolutions, while the 980 you would have to be paying the early adopter premium, however if you have tight power requirements then it's probably the best performer per watt.

[camalbitboy]

I'm running 2 X 560gtx's at the moment, so thats 300w max draw on an 850w coolermaster PSU.

780ti is only 250w max draw, and 290 is 275w max draw, so I won't having power issues. That seems to rule out the main benefit of the 980 as far as I can see.

So it looks like its between an MSI 290 @ £269.99, or the zotac 780 ti @ £384. I wonder how much extra performance and future proofing the £100 extra the 780 ti gives me.

[KeyboardDemon]

It looks like reviews for the GTX 980 and GTX 970 cards should be available during or just after this weekend, if I understand things correctly they will be running with the new Maxwell chips which are supposed to be 12 times faster than the Fermi chips. Once released I would expect prices to be at a premium level for the first 12 to 16 weeks and then settle at a lower price point but I would also expect to see some of the current line up of cards take a cut in prices once the GTX 9xx's come out.

[camalbitboy]

I'm tempted to wait till the reviews of the 980s and see what prices they are and what that does to the other cards pricing's, but at the same time Scan is the only place with the Zotac 780ti at anywhere near £380 and I'm concerned that they may run out of stock. Hmm

[camalbitboy]

Went for the Zotac 780ti plus borderlands presequal in the end for £384 .

The way I see it is that I would have paid £40 for the game anyway, and as the 290 didn't come with any games I wanted it meant the price difference between the two was effectively £60. Plus I've been lusting after a £780ti for about a year now

Bonus is that my wife set the max budget at £400 so I'm not even in trouble this time

[mynameissi]

I would love to know how the zotac performs after installation.
They seem very cheap compared to other makes but I'm unsure of the drawbacks :S

[RobbieRoy]

I'd love to know how you found such a switched on wife!

[camalbitboy]

Well I got the card this morning and installed it over lunch.

First thing is its a big card, about 33% longer than my 560gtxs. The shroud is made from metal, not cheap feeling plastic. The whole thing feels very solid, no flex or wobble unlike the shrouds on my KFA2 560s and the MSI Frozer 460s I had before that.

Took out the old card and put in the new, did a clean remove/install of the drivers and good to go in under 10 mins.

At idle you can't hear the graphics card at all and even under load its far quieter than my old 560 SLi set up.

Ran some quick benchmarks which I've listed below with the score etc that Tomshardware has in its charts for a reference 780ti (I know I have a different cpu etc so this is not very scientific)

Metro Benchmark
FPS avg73, min 8 Toms =78

Heaven
FPS avg 94, min 40 Toms = 86.6

3DMark Firestrike
score 9560 Toms = 10800

So basically a fairly mixed bag. The Metro benchmark seems about ok, but concerned with the min FPS of 8 that I got repeatedly. Thats the same min FPS as my SLI 560s, although well over double the avg. I also noticed from the graph that the fps was very inconsistant, almost looked like microstutter (although not when you were looking at the screen)! My single 560 gave a much smoother trace but obv at very very low avg fps.

Heaven benchmark is looking pretty good, but rather alarmed by the 3DMARK one. Over 1k score below the reference 780ti. Hell its even below the reference 780 going by Toms figures. Thing I noticed from a really quick look at the 3DMARK results page is that I couldn't see a Zotac 780ti above 9700 score or so, but loads of other brands getting way higher. I've not investigated this further yet.

I also ran MSI Afterburner torture test on the highest settings it will do and after 10 mins of cpu @98% load the fan was only just audible, fan speed was 68% and temp was 74 degress with a room temp of 25 degrees.

I should also mention is that I could hear a clicking sound from the card when I first installed it, almost like a fan was wobbling/rubbing, but that seems to have disappeared this evening.

I have loaded up a couple of games eg CoD Ghosts, Civ5, Skyrim and turned them to max settings and the difference is unbelievable from what I had before. Using Fraps I can see I rarely drop below 60fps in any of them, and the smooth frame rates with all the extra graphics turned on is a major step up in gaming pleasure

[KeyboardDemon]

So basically a fairly mixed bag. The Metro benchmark seems about ok, but concerned with the min FPS of 8 that I got repeatedly. Thats the same min FPS as my SLI 560s, although well over double the avg. I also noticed from the graph that the fps was very inconsistant, almost looked like microstutter (although not when you were looking at the screen)! My single 560 gave a much smoother trace but obv at very very low avg fps.

Heaven benchmark is looking pretty good, but rather alarmed by the 3DMARK one. Over 1k score below the reference 780ti. Hell its even below the reference 780 going by Toms figures. Thing I noticed from a really quick look at the 3DMARK results page is that I couldn't see a Zotac 780ti above 9700 score or so, but loads of other brands getting way higher. I've not investigated this further yet.

I also ran MSI Afterburner torture test on the highest settings it will do and after 10 mins of cpu @98% load the fan was only just audible, fan speed was 68% and temp was 74 degress with a room temp of 25 degrees.

I should also mention is that I could hear a clicking sound from the card when I first installed it, almost like a fan was wobbling/rubbing, but that seems to have disappeared this evening.

I have loaded up a couple of games eg CoD Ghosts, Civ5, Skyrim and turned them to max settings and the difference is unbelievable from what I had before. Using Fraps I can see I rarely drop below 60fps in any of them, and the smooth frame rates with all the extra graphics turned on is a major step up in gaming pleasure

Don't worry too much about the minimum frame count of 8 in Metro, chances are it might have counted frames as it cut from one scene/camera angle to another, the fact that you are getting the same minimum from two different GPU configs suggest that it has more to do with the game than the hardware.

My GTX 780 Ti scores around 10,400 on 3d Mark Firestrike, IIRC a recent article here on Hexus put the 290X against the a 780Ti and that a score of around 9,700 points for a reference card design, though YMMV, but even two identical cards would deliver different results, a lot depends on the silicon lottery, some GPUs will run better than other GPUs of the same type.

It sounds like you are enjoying the new GPU, don't sweat too much over benchmark results, you got a great card at a great price, have fun with it.

[camalbitboy]

Don't worry too much about the minimum frame count of 8 in Metro, chances are it might have counted frames as it cut from one scene/camera angle to another, the fact that you are getting the same minimum from two different GPU configs suggest that it has more to do with the game than the hardware.

My GTX 780 Ti scores around 10,400 on 3d Mark Firestrike, IIRC a recent article here on Hexus put the 290X against the a 780Ti and that a score of around 9,700 points for a reference card design, though YMMV, but even two identical cards would deliver different results, a lot depends on the silicon lottery, some GPUs will run better than other GPUs of the same type.

It sounds like you are enjoying the new GPU, don't sweat too much over benchmark results, you got a great card at a great price, have fun with it.

Ah good point re the Metro bench min fps scores. I was thinking it was prob a limitation somewhere else in my system.

Also as you say, I'm not too focused on Benchmark results, so long as its working around the level its meant to that's good enough for me, its the real life usage tests that matter to me and there its awesome.

980 out today and the Zotacs are still at £384, £50 less than the 980s are listed, although nowhere has stock yet. Reviews indicate that 980s pretty much the same performance as the 780ti's so I'm happy I didn't make a bad decision

[kalniel]

980 out today and the Zotacs are still at £384, £50 less than the 980s are listed, although nowhere has stock yet. Reviews indicate that 980s pretty much the same performance as the 780ti's so I'm happy I didn't make a bad decision

I'd agree. While I didn't expect the 980 to quite so fast, it's not fast enough to make the 780ti a bad decision, especially given the price saving and performance in compute which I'm guessing is higher - haven't finished reading reviews yet!

edit: OK so the 980 is good in compute too, as long as you only need single precision.

I still prefer the idea of the full fat 780ti though

[narz]

I'd agree. While I didn't expect the 980 to quite so fast, it's not fast enough to make the 780ti a bad decision, especially given the price saving and performance in compute which I'm guessing is higher - haven't finished reading reviews yet!

edit: OK so the 980 is good in compute too, as long as you only need single precision.

I still prefer the idea of the full fat 780ti though

GTX 970 FTW has excellent benchmarks with low power consumption with a good price point (£250~). Its a winner for me. Too bad I got a 770 not long ago ;@

[starkyller]

980 the 780ti is going to be discontinued

[RobinXe]

If budget is your absolute priority then you've probably made the right call in terms of card. Prices of 780Tis will probably drop now that the 980 has been released.

FWIW I was waiting for the release in order to get a 780Ti at a lower price but, given the pretty reasonably entry price for the 980, I think I might have to end up getting the new shiny!