The Best Budget GPU

[077tommy]

HI guys and girls, I am looking to upgrade my gpu. I currently have an xfx 6850 which is a great card but I am looking to upgrade it to a better card. My budget is around £200 (preferably lower at around £180) - what is the best card for that money;

- I want to over clock it
- It needs to be quite quiet
- I don't mind if its ATI or Nvidea

I have had a look at the msi twin forzr but it is a bit too expensive, however I have found a place where I could get a xfx 7950 for only £200. Any advice would be welcome.........

Thanks, Tom.

 

[Gregster]

YOUR BASKET
1 x Sapphire HD 7870 XT rev2.0 2048MB GDDR5 PCI-Express Graphics Card £191.99
1 x Gigabyte ATI Radeon HD 7850 OC Windforce 2X 2048MB GDDR5 PCI-Express Graphics Card £161.99
Total : £365.38 (includes shipping : £9.50).



The 7850 for the lower end and the 7870XT for the top end. I would push the £200 onto that XT card, as it is basically a 7950.

Stay away from XFX as they are rubbish if you ever have any issues.

What CPU do you use? and what Resolution do you game at?

 

[077tommy]

I have a fx-4100 overclocked to 4.5ghz and I game at 1920-1080p on games like Shogun 2 and Crysis

 

[077tommy]

Is the MSI 7870 twin frozr any good - I quite like the look of it ???

 

[Orcvader]

I would go for the 7870 XT gregster linked, it uses the same GPU core as the 7900 series and if it's like the 7950 and 7970 it should have good overclocking potential (I'm too lazy to check how well they overclock ).

Sapphire cards are also pretty quiet as well, my Sapphire 7950 has a similiar cooler (probably even the same since it has the same stickers on the fans) and even on 60% I can't hear it over the other fans in my system.

XFX on the other hand... is no where near quiet at all. Even on 40% my XFX 6850 was the loudest thing in the system.

 

[Gregster]

I have a fx-4100 overclocked to 4.5ghz and I game at 1920-1080p on games like Shogun 2 and Crysis

That CPU will be a bottleneck but with that overclock, it shouldn't be bad. If you intend to stay with that CPU for quite awhile, maybe the 7850 is a good choice however, if you intend to upgrade the CPU, I would stick with that Sapphire I linked.

My recommendations anyway

 

[weehamish]

Remember Shogun2 is 1 CPU core, a 7850 will max the game but it will still be slowed by the CPU on massive battles, its kinda dumb really as HUGE army setting with full stacks is slowed even on the best CPUs :\

Hope Rome 2 uses multicore!

 

[Martini1991]

Shogun 2 will have a fair bottleneck, even with that clock to be honest.
I mean you can easily bog down an i5 running at 4.8GHZ in some situations.

Remember Shogun2 is 1 CPU core, a 7850 will max the game but it will still be slowed by the CPU on massive battles, its kinda dumb really as HUGE army setting with full stacks is slowed even on the best CPUs :\

Hope Rome 2 uses multicore!

Shogun doesn't use 1 core? My mate noticed an upgrade on his Xeon from his 2120, by quite a decent amount.