Which card and how to tell if reference.

[Rockstar09]

Hey guys,

After a lot of thought I have decided purely for gaming I would not benefit much by upgrading from my current setup (X58, 6Gig (trichan), Bloomfield i7 950) to a Haswell setup.

So I have decided with GTA 5 on the horizon to swap my graphics card for something with a bit more go, Currently running a HD6970 and I have the choice of going for a R9 290X or a GTX 980.

The AMD is £260 or the Nvidia is £400

I will be overclocking my CPU so as to avoid bottlenecking the GPU too much, I would like to know which of those two cards you would go for, I would like to run GTA5 at least close to maxed out in 2560x1440.

Thoughts?

Also a side question there's a EVGA GTX980 on "the bay" right now, how on earth can I tell if it is reference or not (the current owner obviously isn't going to take the heatsink off and measure it for me) as I would be installing my Arctic Xtreme III on it.

Thanks guys.

 

[KillBoY_UK]

if you have the model (ACX/SC etc) then http://www.coolingconfigurator.com/ will tell you if the card (or at least the PCB) is reference

 

[ShivP]

Which EVGA card is it? Coolingconfigurator.com is a good site to check if it is reference or not.

 

[Rockstar09]

Forgive me for being dim but I found the card is listed as ACX 2.0 which I assumed was just the cooler on it, I found EVGA AXC 2.0 on the coolingconfig website but I'm unclear as to what the website results are suggesting.

 

[ShivP]

ACX 2.0 doesn't look reference to me, can anyone confirm?

 

[Rockstar09]

Oh wait I see the little logo, It is reference! Good site. Thankyou

 

[Rockstar09]

There's a little semi transparent logo on the Coolingconfigurator site that says confirmed as reference by EK

 

[ShivP]

Ah I see, cool, so you should be good to go

Which link are you using there? This?

http://www.coolingconfigurator.com/step1_complist?gpu_gpus=1511

 

[Rockstar09]

So what are peoples opinions on these two cards, is the extra 140 smackers worth it for the 980 over the 290x.

 

[Gilbert89]

Just a heads up I believe stating the name of a competitor is against the forum rules, perhaps a good idea to remove the actual name.

 

[Rockstar09]

Thanks, Altered wording.