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1080p Upgrade - Which Card ?

You know, Guys,

This is a bit off topic, but I hear all the time, stuff like a 280x or equilivant is pleanty for 1080.

My 2x 7950's blow away a single 980 in benchmarks, and one 280x is around the same speed as one of my 7950s.
And its still no where near enough to power a really heavy graphical game with everything on ultra and 4x AA as a minimum.
So when people say one 280x is pleanty enough for 1080, which is half of my gpu power, what games are you playing, snakes and ladders online?

Probibly the only reason I haven't gone 4k yet is because, if one 290x cannot power 1080, then two most definitely wont cope with the load of 4x more resolution.

And ill be buying one 390x for "only" 1080. lol (provided one 390x is etleast almost 2x the power of my current crossfire setup)
 
Goody_GTI said:
The PSU is 450w, I'll post a pic soon but I think it's half decent
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GTX 960 is perfect for your PSU, met 400W minimum requirement and only need 1 x 6 or 8 pin PCIE power cable. R9 285 don't do you any good as it required 500W minimum and 2 x 6 pin PCIE power cables.

With Nvidia driver, your CPU wont be bottlenecked as the driver reduced CPU overheads. AMD driver are terrible at it but rely on Mantle instead to do same job removed CPU overheads on low end CPUs.

GTX 960 has hardware HEVC while R9 285 did not have it plus GTX 960 has silent 0dB fans at idle while R9 285 fans still running at idle.
 
AthlonXP1800 said:
With Nvidia driver, your CPU wont be bottlenecked as the driver reduced CPU overheads. AMD driver are terrible at it but rely on Mantle instead to do same job removed CPU overheads on low end CPUs.
Click to expand...

We're not talking about quad sli here, cpu bottlenecks shouldnt be a concern for the OP with his CPU.
 
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james.miller said:
We're not talking about quad sli here, cpu bottlenecks shouldnt be a concern for the OP with his CPU.
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Exactly!

Cannot believe so many people going crazy recommending all these cards completely ignoring the CPU. All of the graphic card in the list will get bottlenecked (badly in some case) by that CPU.

In fact I recall a member who was using just a 7790 with the A10 (which is faster) and he was already getting bottlenecked.

If OP's friend is not going to upgrade his CPU along with his platform anytime soon, there should be no reason to get anything more than a 7850/265/750Ti. Fundamentally the A8-5500 would be the biggest bottleneck that's not allow decent frame rate, and even tossing a 980 at it isn't going to help resolving that issue.
 
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Thanks for the input, as per the OP I'm really not up to speed with AMD so wasn't sure how good the CPU is.

For info this is the motherboard:

http://uk.msi.com/product/mb/FM2A55ME33.html#hero-specification


If there's zero point getting anything bigger than a 750ti, OTHER THAN future proofing another build (which I might try and get him to do anyway!), then I'll go for one of these.

Otherwise, I think I'll opt for the Gigabyte 960
 
Think I'm going to get him a 750ti - as per the above anything more than that is pointless until he upgrades the rest of his pc

Anything has to be better than the current on board graphics :-)
 
Goody_GTI said:
Think I'm going to get him a 750ti - as per the above anything more than that is pointless until he upgrades the rest of his pc

Anything has to be better than the current on board graphics :-)
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The FM2 platform in a way is really for people just to buy the APU and use it as is. Its CPUs are simply not as fast as the mainstream CPU, so they won't not keep up with even the slightles more powerful card.

And overclocked A10 CPU quad-core would be more or less around the same level of performance as the good old overclocked Core2Quad back in the days, but that's about it. It will be fast enough for light gamings, but it would struggle to hold minimum frame rate higher than 20-25fps in the more modern demanding game titles. Anyone that want consistent frame rate of at least 40+ minimum frame rate for games in general, they'd need at least Intel i5 CPU.
 
IceShock said:
So when people say one 280x is pleanty enough for 1080, which is half of my gpu power, what games are you playing, snakes and ladders
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One 280x is enough to play the vast majority of games with plenty of eye candy options ticked at 1080p. It'll be enough for the vast majority of people who don't want to peg the game at 143fps with the aa slider all the way up.
 
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