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Gaming graphics card for £200~

gamerremag

gamerremag

gamerremag

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Joined
30 Dec 2014
Posts
43
I use a 40" Samsung TV as a monitor if that's a factor to be considered.

Looking for the best possible NVIDIA card for around that range. Am I safe thinking for that money I could have something that would give little restrictions?
 
£200 is a poorly served price point by Nvidia. The 970 is much much better than the 960 but costs £270. Maybe some 780s can still be found around the £200 mark but really AMD 290s are the only decent card near that price.

If you only want Nvidia then I'd suggest searching for a 780, 770s are discontinued now, or going for a 760 to tide you over as they perform close to a 960 and cost £140.
 
I can stretch to £270 if the extra £70 quid is really worth it. If that £270 got me a card I could run games at ultra or at least high settings smoothly I'd be happy paying that price.
 
970s can run in ultra quite easily at 1080p at 60-90fps. The thing to be aware of is not to enable any settings that demand a minimum 4GB of ram, treat it like a 3.5GB card.

970s are quite expensive for the performance and some models have coil whine but they are very good overclockers and even then only use as much power as a 290.

Really there a huge gap waiting for a 960Ti (or 370X) to plug.
 
i5 processor (6*** range)
8mb of RAM

Don't think the mobo matters much but it's just a simple Gigabyte one with enough bits to fit a gpu cpu and ram on, is currently doing me well with dying light and my ****** £50 radeon, just doesn't have that shiney crisp sexiness.
 
Zethor said:
Get the 290. No point spending an extra £70 for 5-10% extra performance in some games.
Click to expand...

If you like NVIDIA you have to pay the premium ;)

If you prefer NVIDIA the 970 is still a smashing card at 1080p even though the price/performance of the 290 is better. It still performs on par with a Titan at 1080p so that's nothing to sniff at either.
 
RanxZy said:
If you prefer NVIDIA the 970 is still a smashing card at 1080p even though the price/performance of the 290 is better. It still performs on par with a Titan at 1080p so that's nothing to sniff at either.
Click to expand...
Having same frame rate and having same smoothness as the Titan are two different thing :p
 
RanxZy said:
If you like NVIDIA you have to pay the premium ;)

If you prefer NVIDIA the 970 is still a smashing card at 1080p even though the price/performance of the 290 is better. It still performs on par with a Titan at 1080p so that's nothing to sniff at either.
Click to expand...

Wait so if the performance of the 290 is better then I'll be going for that. NVIDIA I've just never heard a bad thing about, AMD on the other hand...
 
gamerremag said:
Wait so if the performance of the 290 is better then I'll be going for that. NVIDIA I've just never heard a bad thing about, AMD on the other hand...
Click to expand...
Performance wise, the 290 and the 970 are about the same, but the few points is that :
1. the 970 is around 40-50% more expensive than the 290
2. 290 consume more power and runs hotter
3. 290 has 4GB of memory at full speed, while the 970's 4GB does not (only up to 3.5GB is at full speed).
 
Being really helpful guys, I appreciate it.

Is more power consumption a big deal? Do I basically just need to pay closer attention to keeping my hardware cool? 290 is winning so far.
 
gamerremag said:
Being really helpful guys, I appreciate it.

Is more power consumption a big deal? Do I basically just need to pay closer attention to keeping my hardware cool? 290 is winning so far.
Click to expand...

No, the power consumption and heat are generally overstated, there most certainly is a difference, but generally nowhere near as much as people like to chalk on about.
The coolers on the 290 however are generally better though to combat this. I have my Tri-X 290 (this, the Vapor-X and the powercolor are the best cooled 290's imo go for the Tri-X) running at 1100/1500 and undervolted by 6mV and my cards fans go up to 45% at 80c, during gaming it gets around 78c and the fans are audible.

That being said, if I run this baby at all stock, it never gets past 75 and is damn near silent. (Just check some Tri-X 290 reviews, this thing is amazing)

If you have a PSU that is at least 500W you will be fine with a 290 as long as you aren't doing LN2 level overclocking, although personally I would go with a 550W+ just so the PSU runs a bit better.

Power consumption you are looking at between 40-100W difference depending on who you ask and benchmark etc.. although if you run very stressful applications (crysis 3, GPGPU stuff etc) and start to OC the 970 it starts drawing almost as much power as a 290, nvidia's TDP are massively overstated and really go out of whack when you start that stuff.
At stock a 970 has more of an advantage though, being close to what nvidia claim, stock 290 is around 240-260W with stock 970 being like 160-200.
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/nvidia-geforce-gtx-980-970-maxwell,3941-12.html
http://www.anandtech.com/show/8568/the-geforce-gtx-970-review-feat-evga/16 //Ignore the 290/X results.. these are stock cards which are very terrible
That being said, R9 290(X)'s also really guzzle power if you overclock them (albeit, you have to overclock them to very high levels): http://www.tweaktown.com/tweakipedi...rclocked-power-consumption-numbers/index.html
I have 2 running on an 850W and measured during stress tests I get ~800 pulled at the wall so ~720W for my system (see sig), I would guess a decent overclocked 290 is around 300W, which is quite a lot, but given that overclocked 970's are in the 250W range, its hardly a massive power increase. Never measured this rig at stock so I don't have those numbers sorry.
 
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gamerremag said:
Being really helpful guys, I appreciate it.

Is more power consumption a big deal? Do I basically just need to pay closer attention to keeping my hardware cool? 290 is winning so far.
Click to expand...
Other than a few quid high in the electricity bill in a year, and slightly more waste heat it will generate and get exhaust from your PC into your room, there's really not much of an issue...the important thing is though you need a capable and reliable 550W+ PSU for the 290.

If your PSU is good enough for the 290, it would be a better choice than the more expensive 970.

Also forgotten about the "Freesync" feature...new monitors are starting to support this feature (adapative-sync to be exact), and with AMD cards there's no price premium to use this feature if you have a capable monitor; for Nvidia's equivalent "G-sync", they implement the adaptive-sync via a proprietary approach which require the manufacturers fitting of one of their Nvidia Gsync module onto the monitors, and basically jack up the cost/price of the monitor by roughly £150-£200 to use the same feature on the Nvidia graphic cards.

In the long run, there will be far more Freesync (Adaptive-sync) monitors than Gsync monitors to choose from, as manufacturers don't not require to pay extra for adding the Freesync fuction, unlike Gsync where they have to pay for the license and adding the Gysnc module to their monitors.
 
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Some strange advice being given here. You are gaming at 1080p so that's the resolution to consider:

1. 3.5/4GB are both more than enough for 90% of games for this year and possibly the next.
2. AMD cards scale better at higher resolutions but at 1080p, the 970 is comparable with, if not better than, the R9 290X. See here: http://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/1355?vs=1056
3. Nvidia have superior drivers and support to AMD, whether that's worth a premium is entirely on you.
4. The 970 is better than the 290 at 1080p in almost every game.
5. The reduction in noise/power/heat output is not insignificant.
6. The 970 will have FULL support for DX12.
 
There's currently an MSI 290X for £240 on OCers. From what I've heard the cooler isn't as good as the Sapphires/PCS coolers, but still good.
 
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