Best Card to buy for £300

weehamish · 17 Nov 2012 at 01:44

Btw what you doing with your 560Ti? I would buy it if at decent price

weehamish · 17 Nov 2012 at 01:46

The OC bundles are cheaper then buying bit by bit and come pre OCed, best have a look at them too

squarehead94 · 17 Nov 2012 at 02:03

GTX 670 is a beast of a card, I got this from a friend, the EVGA GTX 670 SC edition 2gb, my dads got the Sapphire HD7970 3gb (Cheers grand opening, £200

) and they are similar in performance tbh.

squarehead94 · 17 Nov 2012 at 02:04

weehamish said:
Btw what you doing with your 560Ti? I would buy it if at decent price

you need to be on Members market to deal with sales and trades between members - need 1k posts to do so - just a heads up before admins warn you

squarehead94 · 17 Nov 2012 at 02:08

spoffle said:
You have to pay the nVidia tax. 7950s are cheaper but faster than GTX670s, there isn't much reason to choose a 670 over a 7950

Bit unfair a comment, seems you have a biased opinion. The GTX 670 is a very good card. and they are fairly evenly priced now. As I stated, in our house we have both 7970 3gb and gtx 670 2gb and they are both great cards. Our 7970 was £20 cheaper than the GTX 670 was (but both bought for under 230).
Its personal preference really. they are great cards and AMD has beefed up their drivers, but Nvidia were great out the box anyways.

MeMeMeMe · 17 Nov 2012 at 02:10

boobaca said:
I could ditch the solidstate and go for the 7970 easily but i read that you would get the most improvement for money with an SSD.

This is simply not true.
With your SSD you will get faster boot times (which affects you once a day), and it's true that programs installed on the drive will open more snappily.

However, a faster, more powerful graphic card will make every moment of gameplay better. And in games is where you need that performance.

An SSD is generally advised as one of the best improvements you can make on a system you already have, but that's only if it's a system that is well balanced already. When buying new, look at everything else you need, and then, only after filling all those boxes, if your budget allows, get an SSD.

boobaca · 17 Nov 2012 at 02:11

Yer ive been looking at bundles but they come with ram + cooler etc which i dont need i already have pretty decent of both.

Ive decided to just go with;

Ordering
Intel Core i5 3570K 3.4GHz
Gigabyte GA-Z77X-D3H
OCZ 120GB Agility 3 SSD
Coolermaster MegaFlow 200mm Transprent Red LED Silent Fan
Arctic Silver 5 Thermal Paste
EVGA GTX 670 FTW 2048MB

Already Have
Corsair H60 Liquid Cooling
16gb Corsair Vengeance 1600
Coolermaster Storm Enforcer
Samsung 1TB Spinpoint F3
OCZ 650w ZS

All of the items you see above , they look/sound good ?

I appreciate everybody assisting me etc im going to go with the EVGA GTX 670 2gb FTW which pecnarf recommended i know its above £300 but my current card is a EVGA and i havent found any problems with it except maybe some high temps and im used to Nvidia cards.

boobaca · 17 Nov 2012 at 02:20

ignore this , not sure how to delete comments

pecnarf · 17 Nov 2012 at 02:33

have you thought aout getting a hybrid hdd drive (sata hdd with a SSD build in) i've been told they are very good, as they move the files you use the most to the SSD part of the drvie so that they have the faster access speed.

boobaca · 17 Nov 2012 at 02:40

boobaca said:
Yer ive been looking at bundles but they come with ram + cooler etc which i dont need i already have pretty decent of both.

Ive decided to just go with;

Ordering
Intel Core i5 3570K 3.4GHz
Gigabyte GA-Z77X-D3H
OCZ 120GB Agility 3 SSD
Coolermaster MegaFlow 200mm Transprent Red LED Silent Fan
Arctic Silver 5 Thermal Paste
EVGA GTX 670 FTW 2048MB

Already Have
Corsair H60 Liquid Cooling
16gb Corsair Vengeance 1600
Coolermaster Storm Enforcer
Samsung 1TB Spinpoint F3
OCZ 650w ZS

All of the items you see above , they look/sound good ?

I appreciate everybody assisting me etc im going to go with the EVGA GTX 670 2gb FTW which pecnarf recommended i know its above £300 but my current card is a EVGA and i havent found any problems with it except maybe some high temps and im used to Nvidia cards.

i think im just going to go with this , ive worked it out at £20 more than my budget , im sure ild behow to pull the extra cash from somewhere

grizzla · 17 Nov 2012 at 02:46

Hmm thanks for the replies, plenty of info to mull over. Am i right in thinking a 4GB GTX 670 wont do much for me as i game at 1920*1200?

arc@css · 17 Nov 2012 at 09:18

grizzla said:
Hmm thanks for the replies, plenty of info to mull over. Am i right in thinking a 4GB GTX 670 wont do much for me as i game at 1920*1200?

Waste of money at that res. Save yourself some cash and drop down to a 2gb model. 4gb is only going to show benefits when using multi-monitor / very high res.

@ OP :

Do you need all that ram? Fine if you're doing rendering / editing, but no need if it's just for gaming.

spoffle · 17 Nov 2012 at 11:10

squarehead94 said:
Bit unfair a comment, seems you have a biased opinion. The GTX 670 is a very good card. and they are fairly evenly priced now. As I stated, in our house we have both 7970 3gb and gtx 670 2gb and they are both great cards. Our 7970 was £20 cheaper than the GTX 670 was (but both bought for under 230).
Its personal preference really. they are great cards and AMD has beefed up their drivers, but Nvidia were great out the box anyways.

Biased in what way? I never said the 670 was bad. Your example of the price doesn't really count either because under 230 isn't a price many people could get a 670 or 7970 for.

670s are more expensive than they should be considering their performance. If you can get 680 performance from a 7950, then for most people any cards above s 7950 in price has poor value.

It was also asked why the 670 was more expensive despite the lower performance, if it's not nvidia tax being the reason, what is it?

@grizzla you can choose what ever card you want but is worth you knowing that if you spend £300 on a GTX670 you are spending more money for less performance. 7950s now offer more performance than GTX670s for less money. There's been a few people around here that have swapped 2 GTX680s for two 7950s and got a lot more performance for close to half the price. It's nuts when you put it in to that perspective.

Mojo · 17 Nov 2012 at 14:39

The 670 is a great card, but a 7950 will equal/beat it out of the box for £50 quid less and overclock better than it. No-brainer really!

rolypolyman · 17 Nov 2012 at 16:55

Spent a lot of yesterday trying to find a 670 near to the price of the Gigabyte Windforce X3 7950, only one was the Pov and I wasn't prepared to take a chance on that brand, so I bought the Amd GByte 7950, I'm crazy really because at 1920 X 1080 my 7850 was coping easily, however I will be giving Metro 2033 a go shortly and the extra grunt should come in handy.

grizzla · 17 Nov 2012 at 21:53

such a quandry, all the benchamrks i have seen show the 670 beating the 7950 and in some cases the 7970 (and 680). Im not fussy which i go for just want the best possible, i was leaning for 670 but what i have read here points to the 7950, do the new drivers really have that much of a boost, impressive. I am now thinking about this would that be worth the extra spend over the 7950/670. I tend to play BF3 mostly.

Sayso · 17 Nov 2012 at 22:34

I went for the 7970 vapour ghz addition last week when it was £330...its now £400 ???? WTF whats going on with the pricing are OC putting the prices of AMD cards up due to the new drivers?

spoffle · 17 Nov 2012 at 22:40

grizzla said:
such a quandry, all the benchamrks i have seen show the 670 beating the 7950 and in some cases the 7970 (and 680). Im not fussy which i go for just want the best possible, i was leaning for 670 but what i have read here points to the 7950, do the new drivers really have that much of a boost, impressive. I am now thinking about this would that be worth the extra spend over the 7950/670. I tend to play BF3 mostly.

The new drivers have made quite the difference, before though the 7950s were about even with the 670s. The new drivers have changed things around. It's why you can see so many people saying that they just can't justify recommendations of 670s and 680s.

grizzla · 18 Nov 2012 at 15:52

i have seen that AMD will be releasing new cards in jan/feb potentially would it be worth waiting and either getting one of the new ones/a current one at reduced price. Just wondering whether a price drop of current cards when new ones come out would be significantly less than current price, although currently get free games?

Geo-Gamer · 18 Nov 2012 at 20:30

grizzla said:
i have seen that AMD will be releasing new cards in jan/feb potentially would it be worth waiting and either getting one of the new ones/a current one at reduced price. Just wondering whether a price drop of current cards when new ones come out would be significantly less than current price, although currently get free games?

The 79xx series have really dropped down in the past 2 months I doubt they will drop anymore. £250 for a 7950 is crazy cheap.