1st Build - Help me before i go insane!

[Rickin10]

Hi all. After some exhaustive research I've pretty much got my entire build.... with the exception of the GPU.

Over the past week I've been slowly going mad flip-flopping between various cards based on magazine reviews, forum posts, benchmarks, fanboy rants etc.. to the point where I'm genuinely lost. I kind of decided initially on a GTX 770, but the more i've looked into it the more i've got the impression there's actually too negligible difference with the 760 to justify the price difference. Part of me thinks it may be better to simply bite the bullet and get the 780 as a long-term investment....but then I just look at the price and think wtf are you thinking???

Ideally I'd like a card that offers something reasonably close to the 780 performance for somewhere around the £280 - £320 mark. I've seen comments/benchmarks stating that certain non-reference 770s come close to the stock 780, but this just seems too good to be true.

Any advice would be very welcome. Help save my sanity!

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

What are the specs of the rest of your system?? Also the R9 280X is a card you should consider IMHO.

[Rickin10]

Sorry, in my hast I forgot some important details:

Intel Core i5-4670K 3.4GHz
Cooler Master Hyper 212 EVO
Gigabyte GA-Z87X-UD3H
Crucial Ballistix Sport 8Gb
Sandisk 128GB 2.5" Solid State Disk
Western Digital Caviar Blue 1TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive
XFX 550W 80+ Bronze Certified ATX Power Supply

As for the 280x, I've been put off the red team by various reports of overheating, driver errors and inferior software to Nvidia. How true these are
I don't know. I should say Id like a quiet card.

[kalniel]

As for the 280x, I've been put off the red team by various reports of overheating, driver errors and inferior software to Nvidia. How true these are
I don't know. I should say Id like a quiet card.

Running both in this household I can certainly debunk the inferior software/drivers myth. Likewise I've not heard any reports of overheating - another card in the range, the 290, runs hot by design, but in my gfx card past the AMD cards have been far more robust when it comes to temperature. Don't forget the 280X is a rebranding of the 7970, so it's actually a very well tested card.

But if you're dead set on nVidia then I'm really impressed by the keplar cards like the 770. While the 780 is neat, I think you're wasting a lot of hardware for non-gaming stuff (which is then crippled in soft/firmware so you can't use it anyway). Future proofing is a fools game, especially for the GPU, as you're better off saving money and getting only what you need now, and upgrading later in the future if you need to, when cards are faster for the same price, so by that measure, check out the benchmarks for your favourite games/setting for the 760 and see if you'd cope.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Sorry, in my hast I forgot some important details:

Intel Core i5-4670K 3.4GHz
Cooler Master Hyper 212 EVO
Gigabyte GA-Z87X-UD3H
Crucial Ballistix Sport 8Gb
Sandisk 128GB 2.5" Solid State Disk
Western Digital Caviar Blue 1TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive
XFX 550W 80+ Bronze Certified ATX Power Supply

As for the 280x, I've been put off the red team by various reports of overheating, driver errors and inferior software to Nvidia. How true these are
I don't know. I should say Id like a quiet card.

The HD7970 and R9 280X cards are popular with crytocurrency people,and this is really taxing on cards. So far they seem perfectly fine,and unlike the Kepler cards the boost is deterministic,and not more than 50MHZ to 100MHZ,ie,performance variation under different conditions won't be big.

The R9 290 and R9 290X were probably the cards you are thinking about and even then it was in quiet mode(not standard mode which is noisier) and Nvidia supplied the AMD cards to sites,and told them to test the cards in this way(Nvidia marketing is aggressive unlike AMD). Plenty of people have them on OcUK,and seemed to be fine from what I gather in normal mode.

Even then within a month or so the aftermarket R9 290 and R9 290X cards were released making it all moot.

Also,Nvidia cards have a whole load of issues too,but they tend to be better at hiding them.

The GTX660TI,GTX760 and Geforce Titan reference coolers cause throttling over extended periods,especially the GTX760. Only a few European sites bothered to test them in this more challenging way. I would only consider the GTX760 with a decent cooler after seeing this:

http://translate.google.com/translat...t%2Findex8.php

That is a 137MHZ downclock after 15 minutes.

Most tests in reviews are 30 to 60 second runs on an open air bench.

I use a GTX660 myself but Nvidia enabled low power limits on the model,so it could not compete with higher end models,meaning boost really was not massively changing performance(but I still made sure I got a decent cooler).

[Rickin10]

Thanks for the responses. I wondered how valid a lot of the criticism of the AMD was - as I said I think I've accumulated more information over the last few weeks than I have in some years!

I guess I'm really looking for the best bang-for-buck 1080 card that will run quiet and let me play the vast majority of games for the immediate future (particularly looking foward to the Witcher 3) at the highest settings. I will be using mods and emulators, plus doing work on photoshop if that's relevant.

Btw, does the rest of my build look good?

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

The R9 270X is roughly around HD7950 level performance,and the GTX760 is around 10% faster than it,and the R9 280X and GTX770 are around 15% to 20% faster than the GTX760 IIRC.

Edit!!

If you are using mods,I suggest the R9 280X might be a good choice. I mod Skyrim quite a bit,and mods can eat through VRAM.

The latest version of Adobe CS is OpenCL accelerated and OpenCL performance is better on the sub £300 AMD cards than the Nvidia ones.

[kalniel]

Rest of the build looks sweet - you could push for a bigger SSD these days perhaps, but I've been fine on a 120gb one for years now.

I agree with Cat that the 280X is probably your best choice, just a bit frustrating that prices seem a bit higher than they might have been (albeit still much lower than when it original came out as the 7970). If you can be patient they'll drop again.

[Rickin10]

If i do go with the 280x (or for any other cards) are there any significant benefits to going with non-reference cards? I'm rather confused by conflicting views. I've read/heard that some can run more advanced stock cards close, ie ithe Zotac 770 Amp coming close to the 780. the Sapphire 280x Toxic running the 290 close. Whilst other sources say the custom cards only offer an couple of fps.

[kalniel]

If i do go with the 280x (or for any other cards) are there any significant benefits to going with non-reference cards? I'm rather confused by conflicting views. I've read/heard that some can run more advanced stock cards close, ie ithe Zotac 770 Amp coming close to the 780. the Sapphire 280x Toxic running the 290 close. Whilst other sources say the custom cards only offer an couple of fps.

I don't think you can buy a 280X reference card can you?

Do you mean factory overclocked vs reference speeds? That's up to you - I think a 280X or 770 is already fast enough and doesn't need overclocking at the moment, but if you want to overclock in the short term then buying a factory overclocked card might get you some piece of mind regarding warranty.

Always worth checking what coolers come with the cards though - this is usually a well debated topic so there's plenty of information out there already.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

The Gigabyte R9 280X is around £240 and has UK based RMA,but it is noisy under load according to some reviews.

[shaithis]

AMD has a bad rep due to a few engines that they haven't fixed their drivers for (or have fixed now but took so long people can't forget!).....I know I always had issues with AMD drivers and blizzard games causing corrupt mouse cursors until finally you had no cursor, I also have issues in FIFA I don't get on nVidia cards......
The overheating is a myth though IMO, probably drawn from the fact that most AMD cards are noticeably noisier then nvidia cards and until recently nvidia was normally a step ahead on the lithography.

I also wouldn't expect prices to drop much, higher-end AMD cards are all holding their price now due to coin mining :S

[Rickin10]

Does anyone know where 280xs are actually in stock? I can't find them anywhere.

[Sevenofclubs]

Scan has the powercolor 280x for £233 on today only.

[Tknibbs31]

Don't be scared off amd cards because once the non reference cards come out people will soon forget about that and amd usually offer more VRAM on their cards which is a good thing for high res/ multiple screen gaming and you will see the benefits