Associate
- Joined
- 27 Mar 2013
- Posts
- 18
Hey guys, I've recently decided that I'm going to gradually be upgrading my rig this year, ending with replacing the motherboard and CPU with Intel's new Haswell chips in the summer, currently running a sandy bridge i5 and i'd rather skip the ivy bridge generation and wait for the next one now seeming it's so close.
More immediately however, I'm struggling to pick a GPU to replace my much loved ASUS GTX560 direct CU. It's been a good card, but it's starting to show its age now in the current market.
I think it's worth mentioning that my resolution will not be higher than 1680x1050, as I'm not interested in running a larger monitor let alone several at once. I consider myself a framerate kind of guy, I prefer perfect smoothness to perfect graphics quality, so I don't think I'd benefit much from over 3gb of VRAM (baring in mind I will be running a heavily modded Skyrim and Fallout 4 however so I'm still unsure).
Considering I don't want to spend over £500 I think my best choices are the following.
ASUS GTX680 DIRECTCU II OC - around £450
Gigabyte Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition 3GB Graphics Card - Around £400
Both of these cards I think will be enough to run the newest games on high to ultra for at least 16 months (baring the incoming next generation of consoles), but I'm undecided as to which one is better.
At the moment i'm leaning towards the GTX side of things because I want the card to last at least 3 years before I need to upgrade and have heard that they're more reliable. Since I'm a student I don't want to risk manually overclocking and messing around with coolants in-case I blow something up
If it's worth mentioning, I'm really not to bothered about noise.
Oh, I'm also planning on getting a SSD for about £150 to install my OS, Skyrim, Fallout 4 (when released) and The Sims on.
Tips and suggestions would be really appreciated. If you can vouch from personal experience that would be even better.
PS
Also, I have 750w power supply, will this be enough to run these cards?
My current motherboard is a ASUS P8 Z68-V is this ok?
More immediately however, I'm struggling to pick a GPU to replace my much loved ASUS GTX560 direct CU. It's been a good card, but it's starting to show its age now in the current market.
I think it's worth mentioning that my resolution will not be higher than 1680x1050, as I'm not interested in running a larger monitor let alone several at once. I consider myself a framerate kind of guy, I prefer perfect smoothness to perfect graphics quality, so I don't think I'd benefit much from over 3gb of VRAM (baring in mind I will be running a heavily modded Skyrim and Fallout 4 however so I'm still unsure).
Considering I don't want to spend over £500 I think my best choices are the following.
ASUS GTX680 DIRECTCU II OC - around £450
Gigabyte Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition 3GB Graphics Card - Around £400
Both of these cards I think will be enough to run the newest games on high to ultra for at least 16 months (baring the incoming next generation of consoles), but I'm undecided as to which one is better.
At the moment i'm leaning towards the GTX side of things because I want the card to last at least 3 years before I need to upgrade and have heard that they're more reliable. Since I'm a student I don't want to risk manually overclocking and messing around with coolants in-case I blow something up
If it's worth mentioning, I'm really not to bothered about noise.
Oh, I'm also planning on getting a SSD for about £150 to install my OS, Skyrim, Fallout 4 (when released) and The Sims on.
Tips and suggestions would be really appreciated. If you can vouch from personal experience that would be even better.
PS
Also, I have 750w power supply, will this be enough to run these cards?
My current motherboard is a ASUS P8 Z68-V is this ok?
Last edited:
![[TW]Sponge](/styles/overclockers/avatars/6.png){kind=avatar}
