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Gtx 780 or 690 help me decide!

olliej82

olliej82

olliej82

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Joined
8 Mar 2013
Posts
338
Hi guys I've sold my hd 7970 to buy a gtx 780 however I've seen second hand gtx 690s selling for only a little more than a new 780, which would be the better buy? I realise the 780 is a new card and the 690 is a year old but I'm looking to get a card to keep me from needing to upgrade for around 3 years. My specs are i5 3570k 8gigs of ram windows 8 on an ssd and a 2tb hard drive. Thanks
 
Currently 1080p but I will in future get a 1440p monitor, as I said I'm looking to future proof my rig, if I can get stable 60fps on crysis 3 with everything maxed at 1080p I'll be happy
 
Future proofing is a very flawed concept. By the time you need the power, there'll be cheaper GPUs out that offer big performance so people who buy to future proof very often end up wasting their money.

Buy for now. You could get away with an overclocked 7950 on Crysis 3 at 1080P with everything maxed bar AA, and then save your monies for when something better comes out by the end of the year.
 
Because I stupidly bought a Matx motherboard where the pci express ports are too close together to run 2 7970s otherwise I would have although I read a lot about crossfire issues
 
Tell me about it I didn't even mean to buy a micro atx board but once I'd built it i didn't fancy dismantling it all to return the board!
 
It's not as a 7970 is a slouch at 1080p, people are often very illogical when it comes to future proofing. The idea is normally that by buying something fast, they will save money in the long run by not upgrading as often, but when you are paying beyond the point of diminishing returns for something not needed at the time just in the hope that it will keep you from upgrading as often, you end up spending more and getting less performance over than time period than simply upgrading to a good value card in a year and a half. More often, the 'future proofing' is a reason people use to justify an expensive (and often unnecessary) purchase to themselves. I would have kept that 7970 for another year and upgraded then if necessary myself.
 
It's the first pc I've built in a long time! Anyway the 7970 is gone so I need to replace it with something, I'm leaning more towards the 780 though so what do you guys suggest?
 
olliej82 said:
It's the first pc I've built in a long time! Anyway the 7970 is gone so I need to replace it with something, I'm leaning more towards the 780 though so what do you guys suggest?
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If you can justify it, go for it but the 690 is considerably quicker out of the 2.
 
olliej82 said:
@spoffle I was thinking that myself, why is that likely though? Is the newer tech in the 780 that much better and likely to be a requirement in the next gen games?
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The 780 has more VRAM and has a great memory bus, which means it has more memory bandwidth which plays a very important part in higher resolutions especially with adding AA on.

This is why I suggested you forgo spending big monies now on anything and get a 7950 because a 7950 will be fine for 1920x1080, and then when you do need more power you can upgrade, rather than spending £700+ now on a 690, or £550 on a 780 and not need the performance for quite some time.

If you get what I mean.
 
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