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GPU for ~330-430

7950/670/7970/680 all good cards that will max BF3, the lower down the price scale will require minor overclocking to get them to the performance of the higher end cards, but you make a saving.
 
nipnosis said:
So I am looking for a GPU and I have around~330-430 to spend.

I had originally chosen this one-

YOUR BASKET
1 x Gigabyte GeForce GTX 670 Windforce 3X 2048MB GDDR5 PCI-Express Graphics Card £339.95
Total : £350.75 (includes shipping : £9.00).



But my question is, for a little extra am I able to get a much better card? Or is that one pretty decent and more would just be spending more for a little improvement?
Click to expand...

Now to answer the OP: can you get a much better card? No. The 670 is within 5% of a similarly clocked 680.

SLI/Xfire isn't just for multi-monitor. It can push you closer to the refresh rate of a 120 Hz monitor but you would be wasting your money a little if you had a 60 Hz monitor unless it's at a resolution of 2560*1440 or above.

To give you a rounded view rather than some petty bickering which you'll see above, the 7950 offers the best price to performance ratio in the high end by a good margin. At a max OC it'll be a little bit faster, even, or a bit slower than a similarly max overclocked 670 depending on the game. However, you are reliant on getting a fairly decent clocker. I don't know what the chances are of getting an overclocker which matches a 670 but I would say it's a good chance but not certain by any means.

Depending on the game as well you won't reach 120 FPS with only 1 graphics card so you can look at multi GPU's of your motherboard and PSU allow.

Again value for money first would be 7850 crossfire at the low end and 7950 crossfire at the top end. You wouldn't be able to get a decent SLI set up for your budget.

Some people prefer a brand of graphics card over another or want a feature one has which the other isn't able to run without a large hit on performance. An example would be AMD's advanced lighting in say DIRT Showdown or nVidia PhysX in Borderlands 2. If you have a preference of drivers it can often be a reason to stay with either manufacturer.

If you've got a blank slate then I personally would go 7950 crossfire. If you want a single card then I would weigh up everything and probably get a single 7950 however a 670 would be close and depending how I felt I would go this way! :D

The Gigabyte Windforce is the best 670 IMO.

Is the 670 a better all round card than the 7950? Extremely marginally but you have to consider the price difference of £60-100 depending on deals and say it's just not even close to being worth it with a blank canvas...

Hope that helps - any questions feel free to ask.
 
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I think I actually have 101 questions haha!

I'm possibly more confused now than I was. I don't really think I want to go x-fire/sli mainly for simplicity and compatibility issues.

As I said I am willing to spend circa 330-430, I am however willing to up that to say 450 for a decent deal with a performance increase.

I am getting the Benq XL2420T monitor so I guess from reading about it really looking towards nvidia gpu's.

So this is the GPU I had kind of decided on Gigabyte GeForce GTX 670 Windforce 3X 2048MB GDDR5. Would I notice major increases with this version Gigabyte GeForce GTX 680 WindForce 3x OC 2048MB GDDR5 PCI-Express Graphics Card.

Or is it worth an extra 20 for this MSI GeForce GTX 680 Lightning 2048MB GDDR5 PCI-Express Graphics Card.

Im just curious as to wether the extra 100/120 is getting me any real time notable performance? Or should I just go with the 670 and try my hand at a bit of an OC with it?

Sorry for what seems like a multitude of random questions.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Nick
 
I have a 680 Windforce and it is a superb card and I think it's the second best 680 behind only the 680 Lightning. The thing with the lightning is that yes it is undoubtedly the fastest 680 by a small ish margin but I would say that you have to be a fairly experienced user to get the most out of it. It doesn't perform worse than the Windforce or anything it's just you need to tweak a little more to gain the benefit from it.

There's only a 5% ish difference between a 670 and a 680 so I don't think it's worth it. I own two 680's so that should tell you everything you need to know! :)

I bought a 680 on release day when the 670's weren't even rumoured to be coming hence me having two of them when I decided to go SLI.

Multi-GPU isn't more difficult it's just an addition to what you do with one GPU. You do have to persevere a little more though with multi-GPU so that might not be what you want to do.
 
nipnosis said:
Im just curious as to wether the extra 100/120 is getting me any real time notable performance? Or should I just go with the 670 and try my hand at a bit of an OC with it?
Click to expand...

the 680 will only be marginally faster than the 670, get the 670, great card and the Gigabytes in particular have shown some very strong OC-ability whilst keeping cool and quiet, they were kicking about at more like £320 a while ago, I don't know why the price has shot back up
 
or get a 680 and just overclock that! Personally I am going with 680's this time around, not because I believe they are neccessarily the better card (I think there is almost nothing in it) but because I like to use 3d vision and therefore have no choice but to go with nvidia. Value for money wise I don't think you can beat the 7950 crossfire :)
 
BluSky said:
or get a 680 and just overclock that! Personally I am going with 680's this time around, not because I believe they are neccessarily the better card (I think there is almost nothing in it) but because I like to use 3d vision and therefore have no choice but to go with nvidia. Value for money wise I don't think you can beat the 7950 crossfire :)
Click to expand...

Nothing wrong with your decision at all :)
 
nipnosis said:
So really the only issue with AMD would be worse 3d? I really don't get on with 3d anyway so that doesn't really bother me actually.

So you guys think 2 of these http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=GX-304-SP&groupid=701&catid=56&subcat=1673 Would be a pretty decent set up??

I know I am pushing my budget but I feel if this is going to be a good improvement it will be worth it.
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Yes they would be fine, and would give excellent performance. Im not a great fan of Sapphire cards but they seem decent if you can put up with the blue PCB's :)
 
nipnosis said:
Is there a better option than the sapphire? I kind of just picked the highest clock speed.
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Probably not a better option for crossfire. The MSI twin frozr cards are also very good but you would need to overclock a little to match the sapphires performance. I think the sapphires run a bit cooler too which is a bonus for crossfire.
 
nipnosis said:
A bit more looking about and think it's between a single one of these two.

YOUR BASKET
1 x MSI GeForce GTX 680 Lightning 2048MB GDDR5 PCI-Express Graphics Card £449.99
1 x MSI HD 7970 Lightning 3072MB GDDR5 PCI-Express Graphics Card **OcUK Exclusive** with FREE Sleeping Dogs PC Game £359.99
Total : £821.98 (includes shipping : £10.00).



There seems to be a big price diff though and is there a difference between mini display port and normal?
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The cards are about even depending on the game at a max OC. So it's up to you if you want to pay the extra for nVidia for whatever reason :).
 
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So I would need to spend nearly what I would be saving to get 120hz compatibility? Is that the same with all AMD? DO Nvidia come 120Hz ready?

Just wanted to say thanks for this Rusty, really helping me out here!
 
nipnosis said:
A bit more looking about and think it's between a single one of these two.

YOUR BASKET
1 x MSI GeForce GTX 680 Lightning 2048MB GDDR5 PCI-Express Graphics Card £449.99
1 x MSI HD 7970 Lightning 3072MB GDDR5 PCI-Express Graphics Card **OcUK Exclusive** with FREE Sleeping Dogs PC Game £359.99
Total : £821.98 (includes shipping : £10.00).



There seems to be a big price diff though and is there a difference between mini display port and normal?
Click to expand...

You will never see £100's worth of performance over a 7950 there.

A 7950 with a moderate overclock (say 1Ghz core which they all seem to do) will get you faster than 7970 performance. for £100 less. 7970s do of course overclock, but at the same clockspeed a 7970 will be less than 5% faster than a 7950, such a small amount you'd never notice the difference.

It's very much a waste of money in my opinion to go for a 7970.
 
nipnosis said:
So I would need to spend nearly what I would be saving to get 120hz compatibility? Is that the same with all AMD? DO Nvidia come 120Hz ready?

Just wanted to say thanks for this Rusty, really helping me out here!
Click to expand...

Nah not all of them. Just the 7970 Lightning has no connection for 120 Hz which is full fat DisplayPort or Dual-Link DVI. Other 7970's all carry the necessary connections.

The 7970 lightning has single link DVI and mDP as you have seen. :)

It's bad - there's no excuse for MSI to put such shoddy connectors on the 7970 Lightning.

Not that you are, but if you wanted to go triple screen on 7970 lightnings then the adaptor costs would be ludicrous (3 of those adapters I linked above). Big balls up on that front by MSI.

No worries mate - happy to help :).

Honestly though if I were you I'd save your money and get a 7950. There's about 10% between the 7950 and 680 when overclocked. To put that in context you're looking at the difference between say 73 FPS and 80 FPS for what is essentially about £200 more. It is an extremely large price premium for such a small difference.

If overclocking is not gonna be your thing then the 670 is the best all round option as previously discussed.
 
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For full displayport you don't need that expensive adapter, because the signal is exactly the same and it's just the port that's different you just need a cheap mini displayport to displayport cable or adapter. You can get them for about £6.

Rusty's advice regarding that is incorrect, there's nothing wrong with the displayport outputs on the Lightning 7970. They'll all do 120Hz as displayport does without those silly expensive adapters.

No AMD cards now carry full sized displayport ports, they're all mini ones. Functionality is identical, but you can get more in to a smaller space, which is why they're used and they'll all do 120hz fine.

Those expensive adapters are ONLY for converting a displayport output (be it mini or full sized) into a dual link DVI output, that's it.
 
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