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Indecisive man with £200ish for new GPU.

9TurningMirrors

9TurningMirrors

9TurningMirrors

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Joined
12 Oct 2008
Posts
286
Hey, folks.

I'm finally in a position to upgrade my PC. And I'm on holiday this week. And the wife just bought a new (if second hand) car. And I'm fed up of my poor old 8800GTX going bat-**** crazy in PS2 inventory screens. I have picked out the Board/Chip/RAM. I play PS2, Warframe and the odd MMO. Only thing I can't decide on is GPUs. I was looking to spend about £200 on that component.

Been pootling around on the forum for the last hour or so and narrowed it down to these three cards.

The MSI brand has a good reputation for build quality and quietness. The other manufacturer I haven't heard much about but a few people seem to rate them and the chip is apparently a cut down 7950.

MSI HD 7870 Black Knight.


MSI GeFore CTX 670 OC Twin Frozr Power Edition.


VTX3d HD 7870 Black Boost Edition.


I'm only playing at 1080p but I want a card that will last a good two or three years.

Thanks in advance.
 
Of those three the 670 is the most powerful, bang for buck the VTX Black boost is the best. If you can I would beg steal or borrow £59 and get the 680 Power Edition on offer before it sells out. :D
 
Hmm...the 680 looks tempting but I really don't want to spend that much on a card unless it is much, much more powerful than the 670.

Thanks for the replies, I will try and make up my mind very quickly!
 
9TurningMirrors said:
Hmm...the 680 looks tempting but I really don't want to spend that much on a card unless it is much, much more powerful than the 670.

Thanks for the replies, I will try and make up my mind very quickly!
Click to expand...

It is probably about 10% faster than the 670.

However if you want to i think you can bios flash it to a lightning and then over volt it meaning you could get some serious overclocking out of it. if you arent going to do any of that, i dont think it is worth the extra £45.
 
Ah, okay. I dont' want to go that far over £200, really. I know it isn't that much for a decent GPU but still.

The overwhelming advice seems to be for the 670GTX. Would that be better than this MSI 7950 with 3GB VRAM...on special offer this week for a penny under £200? Might be a bit more future proof?

Thank you all for your replies. The GPU is always the hardest bit for me to work out, so I really appreciate the advice.
 
I'd get a 7950 over a 670 for the same money, but the 7950 on offer has what looks to be a fairly basic cooler.

With 7000 series price cuts I imagine all the 7950s will be around £200 shortly.
 
If you play PS2 a lot then I'd go nvidia. The PhysX effects are very noticeable and it is something I miss since I went AMD in that game.
 
9TurningMirrors said:
Right...so it might be worth waiting a couple of weeks to see what happens to prices?

@Suarez7: Hheeh, I have to run with everything on absolute lowest settings to get a playable framerate. The PhysX stuff is very tempting.
Click to expand...

I don't think nvidia prices will change much, but AMD prices are coming down.

The 670 and 7950 perform similarly. The extra memory capacity and bandwidth makes the 7950 a better buy in my view but you won't get GPU accelerated PhysX of course. If that'd swing it, the 670's a good buy while it's on offer.
 
straxusii said:
If you want it to last a long while I would try and get a 3gb 7950, the extra vram will be important
Click to expand...

This. As it stands now you are more likely to run out of GPU grunt before you run out of memory, next year when higher res screens become more standard and the companies start using crazy ass textures you will want that extra vRam.

I don't think I would go back to nVidia just for the PhysX, that does not justify the price difference imo.

I went from ATI > nVidia > AMD, won't go back. I think I went from the X1950XT to the beloved 8800GTX, then to GTX260 > 7870XT...been an on off path for me :D.
 
Okay, I think I will go for a) a bit more future proofing and b) wait a couple of weeks on prices.

I've looked through all eighteen pages of this forum and this HIS HD 7950 IceQ Boost seems to be the most often recommended.

However, I've heard good things about the ASUS GPUs such as this Asus HD 7950 Direct CU II and Sapphire HD 7950 Vapor-X gets a fair amount of praise.


Apart from warranty length is there much difference between these three?

Thanks again for the advice.
 
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