My next £250 upgrade, just GPU?

[Scainer]

since they seem to be close in performance

Spot on, or a few FPS depending on which game. AMD or nVidia fanboys can both produce statistics favouring their love.

In my mind 'mantle' was what I thought was going to be a game changer but seeing that AMD have confirmed its a PC only API, its just a niche option and not essential.
I think i've made myself clear that I don't buy into all the RAM propaganda, but the major consideration would be the drivers. Games will mainly be made for consoles (its where the money is) and the ports will be a hell of a lot better than the last five years. With AMD powering the consoles I would expect the drivers to be, lets say easier for AMD hardware on the PC (optimisation), meaning nVidia will likely more of the time have to play catchup with new games, (edit) Other than games they partner with.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Architecture analysis - R9 280X

The R9 280X is almost identical to the incumbent Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition (GE) from an architectural standpoint. In fact it should be marginally slower as its core speed runs at a maximum 1,000MHz, compared a possible 1,050MHz for the core-boosting HD 7970 GE.

The HD7970GE is at a base clockspeed of 1GHZ with boosting upto 1.05GHZ under certain conditions. All the R9 280X and HD7970 cards I listed run at that clockspeed or higher.

Thank you all very much, I see I have stirred up a debate on which GPU.... but it is good to see that, as i thought it is the GPU which will make the difference...cheers

I will look into the 770 options and the R9 280X and since they seem to be close in performance I will perhaps make my decision based on heat/power (as my PC is in a cupboard i am aware of the limitations on my PSU)

An Antec TPN 650W can run a system with a R9 290X or Geforce Titan even under Furmark with an overclocked six core Core i7 on socket 2011 based platform. Any single GPU card will run fine. In those situations you are drawing under 500W at the wall and well under that for any game in the worst case scenario. Considering no PSU is 100% efficient,the actual load on your PSU is much lower and you are using a Core i5 3570K which is far more efficient than socket 2011 CPUs.

Looking at my current system which is a Xeon E3-1220 and a GTX660 it consumes around 170W to 196W at the wall using an old HX520W,while running Crysis3 or Tombraider,which push both the CPU and GPU.

[bluepumpkin]

Thanks for the information about the power, good to know (i am a bit nervous after my motherboard failure). I think I will opt for a Radeon 280X, I use Steam exclusively for my gaming so the advantage of having that drivers via Steam is also with 1/2fps...thank you all for helping

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

MSI probably have the highest failure rate of any motherboard company,especially for the cheaper AMD ones. If your PSU was the cause of your motherboard failure then it would not matter what graphics card you use,as it probably would kill that too. Your PSU is a good model,so it is unlikely it is the problem unless you were unlucky to get one with a manufacturing defect,or simple have poor wiring in your house.

I assume this is your PSU:

http://store.antec.com/Product/power...5-23652-2.aspx

My mate has a TPN 550W,which has been stellar so far. They are both Seasonic M12 based PSUs. My Corsair HX520W is based on an earlier iteration of the Seasonic M12 platform and is over six years old.

[Sheen]

I had to made exactly the same choice, and I chose GTX770. Performance wise both are similar on stock clocks, and OC of specyfic brands will make the difference. gtx770 will be cooler and require less energy than amd with similar coolers. With Nvidia you will get vouchers for 3 games which you can easily sell for around £35-45.