AMD takes aim at Nvidia's GTX 970 and cuts R9 290X price

[Medallish]

Slightly unrelated but I'm really tempted to go out and get a MSI Lightning 290X, I wish someone would do a review of it with the latest drivers, I see people all over the place saying the 970 is faster than a 290X and then post a link of a non-reference factory overclocked 970 compared to a stock 290X reviewed ages ago.

[ZaO]

Slightly unrelated but I'm really tempted to go out and get a MSI Lightning 290X, I wish someone would do a review of it with the latest drivers, I see people all over the place saying the 970 is faster than a 290X and then post a link of a non-reference factory overclocked 970 compared to a stock 290X reviewed ages ago.

Try posting on the Amd forum. I'm pretty sure you'll find a member there willing to show you what it can do with new drivers, if you can't already find something with a web search.. Anandtech and Tomshardware have lots of benchmarks. But I can't remember if they specify which drivers are used in their tests. They probably do. Worth a look

[shaithis]

Might be worth looking through http://forums.hexus.net/hexus-review...-progress.html

While it only has the 290 and not the 290x it's about improvements in drivers, you could probably extrapolate the differences from other reviews.

[hoggie]

^
Ha,very true,that made me lol

[BlazerCA]

If I had to choose between them, I would go AMD, only because I have always run Radeon in my systems. But I am curently very happy with my two R 280X's. They play any game at the highest resolution with all the bells and whistles turned on.

[Sumanji]

Having been out of the PC hardware game for many years, it's refreshing to see that:

• nVidia/ATi fanboi battles are still commonplace
• Both teams still involved in healthy amounts of 'benchmarketing'
• ATi still have crappy Linux drivers

Yeah, I'm still using "ATi"... old school?

[ZaO]

Having been out of the PC hardware game for many years, it's refreshing to see that:

• nVidia/ATi fanboi battles are still commonplace
• Both teams still involved in healthy amounts of 'benchmarketing'
• ATi still have crappy Linux drivers

Yeah, I'm still using "ATi"... old school?

I've got to say, Fanboy battles are so low level, and even, rare on this forum. But, elsewhere, it still rages on, yes lol... But stuff like that and the console wars is just kids really. They'll always be like that!

I had to work very hard to stop saying ATI! I only managed to stop it last year haha..

[Sumanji]

Perhaps the wrong place to ask but...

I should be getting my old desktop back after using a Razer Blade 14 as my main/gaming PC for the last 18 months. I don't really want to upgrade the core components yet (see my sys specs), but was thinking I'd have a crack at overclocking my C2D. If I can hit >4.2 GHz, would it be worth upgrading the graphics card?

Or should I just hold off until next year and do a full system overhaul? I'd love to give AMD a whirl if Zen is able to get them back on performance parity with Intel!

[ZaO]

Perhaps the wrong place to ask but...

I should be getting my old desktop back after using a Razer Blade 14 as my main/gaming PC for the last 18 months. I don't really want to upgrade the core components yet (see my sys specs), but was thinking I'd have a crack at overclocking my C2D. If I can hit >4.2 GHz, would it be worth upgrading the graphics card?

Or should I just hold off until next year and do a full system overhaul? I'd love to give AMD a whirl if Zen is able to get them back on performance parity with Intel!

Probably the wrong thread yeh.. But anyway - I wouldn't bother upgrading that rig at all. Doesn't mean you shouldn't. But I wouldn't recommend going far with a gpu upgrade on a dual core chip, even with high clock speeds. I reckon you should just do a new build when you can. Everything depends on how much money you can piece together at any one time. Maybe you want to get a good gpu now, even though it'll be bottlenecked like crazy, then do the rest in stages. Your call really..

[crossy]

Perhaps the wrong place to ask but... I should be getting my old desktop back after using a Razer Blade 14 as my main/gaming PC for the last 18 months. I don't really want to upgrade the core components yet (see my sys specs), but was thinking I'd have a crack at overclocking my C2D. If I can hit >4.2 GHz, would it be worth upgrading the graphics card? Or should I just hold off until next year and do a full system overhaul? I'd love to give AMD a whirl if Zen is able to get them back on performance parity with Intel!

Yes, it's probably the wrong place to ask, but if you don't try...

Looking at the spec and you're low on RAM, disk, processor and graphics. So if you're really price constrained then sure going from the 260 to something better would be good. (not sure if this'll get me banned, but I've got a Geforce SOC460 in the loft that you can have for the price of postage - contact me separately if interested). To put it into context the laptop I use as my Ubuntu system is a pretty good match performance etc wise and that's a eBay'd Dell D620.

Definitely have a go at O/Cind the C2D - it's not worth a heck of a lot so not really much to lose. If it was me, then I'd either look at a ground-up new build (perhaps reuse the PSU, case etc?) or buy in a pre-built box and figure on upgrades when funds permit. From what I've read/seen, if you get an AMD APU-based one then you'll get pretty good graphics performance although the CPU power possibly isn't as good as a range-equivalent Intel i3 or bottom-of-the-heap i5, (but still very respectable).