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Best nvidia card for £200?

Best Nvidia card under £200 is the GTX 660, as mentioned. It is very close in performance and price to the 7870, with the 7870 perhaps being very slightly more powerful overall.
 
Marine-RX179 said:
Well, I guess each to their own. But I think generally speaking, there are far more people and spending far more hours on playing BF3 and Starcraft II than Alan Wake or Crysis...and quite frankly speaking, by the time Crysis 3 hit, people that got 7870 OR 660 would need better graphic card to run at close to the max settings anyway...so the slightly higher memory bandwidth on the 7870 ain't gonna be saving grace when the cards don't have enough GPU grunt...

It's all about realistic expectation...if people want to future prove (if there's such a thing), then they should forget both 660 and 7870, and go for at least either a 7950 or GTX670.
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I dont see how the numbers of people playing games has any bearing on performance of future games :confused:

Guild wars 2 is newer than BF3 and is hugely popular, and performs better on AMD.

I agree with your other point regarding GPU grunt though, although people could crossfire/SLI.
 
spoffle said:
Ohh, you're quite right it is general knowledge. I've had two laptops go due to this, I was however not aware that it had been named "bumbgate", I know of it as "The nVidia defect".

Yeah, it was pretty bad, wasn't the failure rate for the laptop parts over 90% or something?
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Well it was that sensationalist Charlie (SemiAccurate) back when he used to work for the Inquirer who termed it bumbgate because he thought NV tried to hide the defect. A lot of people don't like Charlie but since I bought my 8800GT after his first story, if I had know at the time I would have bought Radeon. Not happy that the story wasn't more widely reported in other tech sites.

Not sure if it was as bad 90% though. Certain HP (DV6000) were notorious but while the chips were defective the fact that those HPs ran so hot made it worse. And HP chickened out of fixing most of those.

I think Apple were about the only OEM who did right by their customers but even in that case people were not happy since the only option they gave was to replace the defective part with the same Nvidia chip which of course failed too eventually. Some had to do this 2-3 times. But irony of irony, Nvidia are back on the Macbook Pro 2012 lineup. Strange.
 
Marine-RX179 said:
Well, I guess each to their own. But I think generally speaking, there are far more people and spending far more hours on playing BF3 and Starcraft II than Alan Wake or Crysis...and quite frankly speaking, by the time Crysis 3 hit, people that got 7870 OR 660 would need better graphic card to run at close to the max settings anyway...so the slightly higher memory bandwidth on the 7870 ain't gonna be saving grace when the cards don't have enough GPU grunt...

It's all about realistic expectation...if people want to future prove (if there's such a thing), then they should forget both 660 and 7870, and go for at least either a 7950 or GTX670.
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The 7870 has plenty of GPU and just as importantly; memory grunt. http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showthread.php?t=18437182

I play BF3 in Ultra preset 1080P 64 Player air maps all day at 60 FPS, with the clocks i'm running at it's WAY faster than a stock 7950. Granted, if you overclock a 7950 to the same level and it will eat my 7870 alive (it is the best bang for money GPU there is right now) but a 7870 with a few tweaks has the grunt to max 90% of today's games, including BF3.
 
psychodil said:
I dont see how the numbers of people playing games has any bearing on performance of future games :confused:

Guild wars 2 is newer than BF3 and is hugely popular, and performs better on AMD.
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Because it doesn't make sense to take a 7870 over the 660 if they are playing BF3 and Starcraft 2 but not playing Metro or Civ5? I'm merely comparing the probability of someone already playing BF3 and Starcraft 2 right now, and will be playing Starcraft II Heart of the Swarm the probability of someone digging out their Metro and Civ5 out to play (provide that they even own them at all) and no idea about what future games would do better on the AMD cards. The thing is even in the benchmarks of the games that the 7870 is beating the 660, the frame frame difference is so little that barely worth mentioning about. The only good reason to take the 7870 over the 660 is probably for the free game's sake I guess.

As for Guild War 2's graphic performance AMD being better than Nvidia...I'm not sure if it still applies after the recent fixes by both ArenaNet patches and Nvidia latest driver after the launch.
 
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Marine-RX179 said:
Because it doesn't make sense to take a 7870 over the 660 if they are playing BF3 and Starcraft 2 if they are not playing Metro or Civ5? I'm merely comparing the probability of someone already playing BF3 and Starcraft 2, and Starcraft II Heart of the Swarm is more of likely than someone digging out their Metro and Civ5 out to play (provide that they even own them at all). The thing is even in the benchmarks of the games that the 7870 is beating the 660, the frame frame difference is so tiny that barely worth mentioning about.

As for Guild War 2's graphic performance AMD being better than Nvidia...I'm not sure if it still applies after the recent fixes by both ArenaNet patches and Nvidia latest driver after the launch.
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I think this has been said before, it only makes sense if all you play is BF3 and Starcraft 2, and will for as long as you have the card, that's also providing AMD make no further improvements to there Drivers for BF3.

Besides that what is wrong with 60 FPS? All 7870's will do 1150 / 1400. that's 55 FPS and if the 12.9 Drivers hold true even that will jump to 60 FPS.
 
humbug said:
I think this has been said before, it only makes sense if all you play is BF3 and Starcraft 2, and will for as long as you have the card, that's also providing AMD make no further improvements to there Drivers for BF3.

Besides that what is wrong with 60 FPS? All 7870's will do 1150 / 1400. that's 55 FPS and if the 12.9 Drivers hold true even that will jump to 60 FPS.
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May be the question be turn around and asked like this...is there any reason to take the 7870 over the 660? While you might say "all you play is BF3 and Starcraft 2", at least it is a reason that apply for people that are playing this two games...but for what games that people are playing at the moment should they take the 7870 over the 660? How many people are playing Metro2033, Civ5, Alan Wake at the moment?

I'm in no way bashing 7870, I'm just saying from the only real notable advantage that the 7870 has over the 660 at the moment is the slightly higher memory bandwidth that may or may not benefit the games that's coming and the "possibility" of widening the gap between it and the 660. If the 660 was actually more expensive, then the situation would be different...but at the moment, both cards are around the same price...
 
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dave_beast said:
Not since 12.8 AMD driver it doesn't mate, they're effectively the same perf now.
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I updated to 12.8, and now the powerplay is acting crazy (had no problem before)...hope they bring out 12.9 and fix this soon...

And no offense...I haven't seen any review that support your claim. Please provide links to show this if you have any.
 
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Marine-RX179 said:
May be the question be turn around and asked like this...is there any reason to take the 7870 over the 660? While you might say "all you play is BF3 and Starcraft 2", at least it is a reason that apply for people that are playing this two games...but for what games that people are playing at the moment should they take the 7870 over the 660? How many people are playing Metro2033, Civ5, Alan Wake at the moment?

I'm in no way bashing 7870, I'm just saying from the only real notable advantage that the 7870 has over the 660 at the moment is the slightly higher memory bandwidth that may or may not benefit the games that's coming and the "possibility" of widening the gap between it and the 660. If the 660 was actually more expensive, then the situation would be different...but at the moment, both cards are around the same price...
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I do think 32 Colour fill ROP's on the 7870 and a 256Bit Memory bus vs 24 ROP's and 192Bit on the GTX 660 matters in the longer run, less chance of a texture fill bottleneck
 
humbug said:
I do think 32 Colour fill ROP's on the 7870 and a 256Bit Memory bus vs 24 ROP's and 192Bit on the GTX 660 matters in the longer run, less chance of a texture fill bottleneck
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So trading current confirmed better performance for future "possible" better performance? I mean if I don't play BF3 or Starcraft II, then getting either 7870 or 660 wouldn't matter if I was to buy one of them right now.
 
Marine-RX179 said:
So trading current confirmed better performance for future "possible" better performance? I mean if I don't play BF3 or Starcraft II, then getting either 7870 or 660 wouldn't matter if I was to buy one of them right now.
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I just think where they are about equal on the GPU i'd prefer to have the one with the faster Memory Bandwidth, the GPU is the GPU and where that has the Graphics processing power it is where it is.

Knowing if in the future i run into a game that has a lot of texture and starts taxing my ROP's and Memory i would be more comfortable with the one that can handle the higher amount.
 
TheRealDeal said:
Pretty nice review comparing similarly priced gtx660 v 7870oc. The 7870 holds a performance advantage in most games tested. BF3 performance is almost equal. They also include a 7850 with core@1000 which is about a match for the gtx660.

http://www.hardocp.com/article/2012/09/13/asus_geforce_gtx_660_directcu_ii_video_card_review/1
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I guess its true that AMD have now caught up and surpassed nvidia performance finally in bf3.

Wonder why it took so long? Was it a case of AMD were just slow or was it a case of nvidia working with the devs and making it a TWIMTBP game?
 
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