Upgrade from XFX AMD Radeon HD7870 2GB Double Dissipation Edition

Hi,

Can anyone share some thoughts on a decent upgrade up to maybe £250 from the XFX AMD Radeon HD7870 2GB Double Dissipation Edition?

Ideally I'd like something quiet that will comfortably run most RTS games on full settings, but also be comfortable running FPS.

System specs are basically

Intel Core i7 2700k
2GB XFX HD7870 Core Edition DD
8GB Corsair Vengeance 1866
Asus P8Z77-V Z77 MoBo
512GB Crucial MX100 x 2

Any help welcome, been out of the building game for a couple of years, made the mistake of buying an EVGA GeForce GTX 750Ti FTW with ACX Cooling 2GB which it seems is 25% slower :wallbash:

If I had £250 to spend on a card today and not a penny more it would be an AMD R9 280X.

You are in the R9 280X/GTX 770/R9 290 area in order of price, think of 280X as £220, 770 as £220 also, and R9 290 at around the £280 mark (The excellent Sapphire Tri-X version is available for £283 on Scan).

If £250 is the roof then the superior buy in opinion is the R9 280X, it trades blows with the GTX 770 in a number of games but has the edge with VRAM, and also actual performance in several applications, the 770 affords you Nvidia features such as Shadowplay gameplay recording, PhysX etc, and also the opportunity to buy from EVGA and enjoy their stellar warranty, those are its advantages in my opinion.

However if you can push just that little bit extra to £283 and take the R9 290 you have a noticably more powerful card with the potential for a very strong Crossfire configuration later down the line, the R9 290 is superior in price/performance to the GTX 780 which follows the GTX 770 at around the £360 price point, and it even performs similarly even beating it in some applications with lots of blows traded with the higher priced card from Nvidia.

There you have a price grouping and some input on the cards, if you can push to the R9 290 I do recommend doing so, starting with the strongest single GPU solution you can is in my opinion the best strategy, and the Sapphire Tri-X version of the card is second only to Sapphire's Vapor-X card in terms of cooling performance.

If you were willing to spend a little more, you could get the "Sapphire AMD R9 290 TRI-X " which is regarded as the best r9 290. if not id, recommend the "Asus R9 280X DirectCU II TOP" which is less......
:)

Sorry just realized this is an old post...........

Check out this page - http://www.dabs.com/used-stock/compo...-and-i-o/11021 - its used stock so it is quite often just returned stock but can also be refurbs. There is a Gigabyte R9 290 there for £242.40. Also gigabyte 280X for £150.
There are some 7970s there too.

They all come with 6 month warranties.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by BrandonP

Sorry just realized this is an old post...........

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Damn you necroposter! haha ;)

So, the 280X has been a disaster. Scan RMA'd as it was flickering, then sent it back and told me it was fine. It's continued to flicker regardless, on three different machines even with clean installs of OS and Drivers.

Clearly the last time I buy ATI, ever.

Which exact one did you buy? And does it flicker during games or only on desktop?

Flicker is next to never due to the GPU itself, and tends to be common to certain brands/models.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by LCpl75

So, the 280X has been a disaster. Scan RMA'd as it was flickering, then sent it back and told me it was fine. It's continued to flicker regardless, on three different machines even with clean installs of OS and Drivers.

Clearly the last time I buy ATI, ever.

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Did you try obvious things like using a different monitor cable, or maybe changing inputs (e.g. from DVI to HDMI)?

Quote:

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Originally Posted by MrJim

Did you try obvious things like using a different monitor cable, or maybe changing inputs (e.g. from DVI to HDMI)?

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Also, was OverDrive activated?

What type of connection was used? (VGA, DVI, HDMI, DP)

Tried a different kind of connection? (VGA->DVI, DVI->HDMI)

Tried different cable used for the same connection? (New VGA, or HDMI cable)

Tried different display? (Analogue monitor, digital monitor, TV)

Last two cases of flickering for me were down to cheap HDMI cable (eventually died,no connection possible with it any more) and an unshielded cheap thin VGA cable (after exchanging for a different one, the signal quality improved quite a bit).