47 replies to this topic

[Odins Fist]

Sandpit, on 09 March 2014 - 12:41 PM, said:

I've been shopping for an entirely new pc over the past month and based on everything I've seen and read I would wait a few weeks. New models of just about everything are getting ready to drop which should result in a price reductions in older models

That and by the time MWO is optimized enough you might be happy you waited a month or two to get a better Video card then the GTX 660 Ti.

Edited by Odins Fist, 09 March 2014 - 12:52 PM.

[Artur Valour]

Thanks again guys, appreciate the advice and gotcha's on this. I am willing to spend a few extra bucks on the card to "Future Proof" it... even extending it's life a little longer. I do play skyrim too, so will have to crank the settings up on that game.

[Odins Fist]

Artur Valour, on 09 March 2014 - 01:02 PM, said:

Thanks again guys, appreciate the advice and gotcha's on this. I am willing to spend a few extra bucks on the card to "Future Proof" it... even extending it's life a little longer. I do play skyrim too, so will have to crank the settings up on that game.

Post when you do get your new Video Card, i'm curious to see what you get..
ALSO: The Company EVGA has a really good customer service team, they are great about warranties, rebates and returns.

I was going to pick up a GTX 780 a couple months back, but I started buying radiators and other stuff to get ready for a big Intel build to replace my current AMD setup..

[Armament]

I did recommend the 760 to you, but seeing as you do play Skyrim.. for an amazing experience you can't go wrong with a 770. Get the 4gb version, download a bunch of texture replacers, you will be sitting at 100fps all day.

Edited by Armament, 09 March 2014 - 01:30 PM.

[RobinSage]

This is a tough question...supporting PCI 3.0 is one part of your issue, the other one is going to be about the amount of RAM you have installed on that system.

Odin was correct about his recommendation against the 660. You can usually find the same cards for cheaper on Amazon than you can on Newegg as well. Amazon also has more enthusiast level liquid cooling and case options than Newegg does.

You can visit HARD's Amazon webstore here and search through the video cards if you'd like: http://www.hardcorpg...com/amazonstore

Aside from the plug.....our company is all about helping the gamer get the best out of their games. We've been building fully liquid cooled custom gaming rigs for over 2 decades. So, with that qualifying information I'm going to give you my most objective opinion about GPU's right now.

ATI vs. NVIDIA really has no bearing on anything. We've talked to the director for global GPU sales at both companies. If you're looking for performance on the middle to high side and at $250 bucks for max price....a new R9 270 or the GTX760 are both priced at lower than your maximum.

The performance of the new ATI R9 series is unmatched by any NVIDIA product currently in production. However, you only have 8 GB of RAM. Windows 7 and 8 use almost 4 GB. If you had a 4GB GPU card in there, your system would be very unstable. And since PCI-E 3.0 bus will be used, you will most likely bottleneck your memory. Stick with a 2GB GDDR5 card. Or even a 3GB older HD7970 would be better.

The newer ATI cards are built on a 512 bit architecture, which is faster and much more efficient under heavy load (multiscreen, 4k resolutions, streaming/broadcasting and recording multiple feeds, mining, etc). NVIDIA has the 780Ti at the top and a new TITAN coming. It cannot beat the efficiency of 2 R9 290X's on dual PCI-E 3.0 lanes. Even 3 titans are slower than 2 290X's in crossfire at 4k.

So, with that, I would say a stand alone card, it really doesn't matter, NVIDIA makes great cards, so does ATI. But whichever you settle on remember that over 3GB for video right now might hurt your system not help it. Get 16GB of ram, then grab the card that you feel most comfortable with. We recommend, ASUS and Sapphire GPU's or factory reference models. Most other manufacturers are skimping on capacitors these days.

I can give you about 100 reasons why the current ATI hardware is better than NVIDIA's current offerings, but that would start a flame war on here, and we're just helping you decide the most efficient card for your current build.

My suggestion would be a GTX760. Or a R9 270. Either one runs a 2GB memory, are DX11, PCI-E 3.0 compliant, and have similar scores for performance.

Cheers and good luck.

[Henchman 24]

At the $250 price point, when considering the total impact of feature benefits between ATI and nVidia...it's really hard to not pick the GTX760.

The ATIs are nice...but adaptive vsync is really nice as well, and quite frankly the lack of it or something similarly effective is a deal breaker, for me at least.

[Artur Valour]

Update - Wound up buying the GeForce 760 with 4 gigs... it didn't work with that HP motherboard... so the project turned into a complete replacement. I have replaced motherboard, added another 8 gig memory, more SSD's, New Case... all is well.
The i7-2600 is working great with the card, and I get framerates into the 100's on very high settings on some maps... usually in the 50-70 range.

So all is well, thanks everyone for the advice, warnings, recommendations. Appreciate it!

[Summon3r]

Artur Valour, on 03 April 2014 - 07:29 PM, said:

Update - Wound up buying the GeForce 760 with 4 gigs... it didn't work with that HP motherboard... so the project turned into a complete replacement. I have replaced motherboard, added another 8 gig memory, more SSD's, New Case... all is well.
The i7-2600 is working great with the card, and I get framerates into the 100's on very high settings on some maps... usually in the 50-70 range.

So all is well, thanks everyone for the advice, warnings, recommendations. Appreciate it!

thats great news glad it worked out for you, 760 is a nice card... what freq are you running the i7 at?

[Werewolf486 ScorpS]

You should wait to buy anything until the GTX800's and the R295's come out. Then you should buy the best performing card. Stop buying what gets you by now and buy something that gets you by for a few years. While you're at it you should start looking into building a new top end gaming rig that will cost you a few thousand so that you can play Star Citizen on max settings and get full enjoyment out of that game and any other game you want to play as SC will be the benchmark when it's done. Once you get a system like that then playing MWO will be better for you.

[Catamount]

Future video cards, especially those only one series down the road, are not likely to be any great upgrade.

Performance and performance/$ used to both basically be increasing geometrically. Now neither of them are even holding a linear trend. Every series is a more incremental upgrade than the last. Video cards today at the high end for single GPUs are only about three times more powerful than cards from four or five years ago (as compared to yearly doubling seen for awhile from 2009 back), and performance/$ has improved maybe 50% in that same time period (comparing, say, what a 5870 cost a few months after launch to the 270x now, again, as compared to yearly doubling from last decade).

GPUs are improving so little, they're being essentially recycled. Most of the 700 series and R9 series are just rebadges or extremely slight tweaks of their 600 and HD 7000 series predecessors, and they're selling at the same price. What a 7970 or 670 cost before is essentially what a 280x or 760/770 costs now (the 680 was often more, but Nvidia inflates the high end).

So waiting for one series won't improve the choices of what to buy significantly anymore. There's so much performance and value overlap the next series out probably won't even offer a price advantage. These latest cards haven't.

Edited by Catamount, 05 April 2014 - 05:12 AM.

[Artur Valour]

Excellent summary Catamount, thanks for the support. I am enjoying the new rig immensely. The i7 26000 with the memory and the new video card is working out great for me.

[Nick Rarang]

Artur Valour, on 03 April 2014 - 07:29 PM, said:

Update - Wound up buying the GeForce 760 with 4 gigs... it didn't work with that HP motherboard... so the project turned into a complete replacement. I have replaced motherboard, added another 8 gig memory, more SSD's, New Case... all is well.
The i7-2600 is working great with the card, and I get framerates into the 100's on very high settings on some maps... usually in the 50-70 range.

So all is well, thanks everyone for the advice, warnings, recommendations. Appreciate it!

It's nice that you got the 4GB version as I observed that MWO uses more graphics memory after the recent patch. At the same settings as before on the same maps, I noticed 1.9gb of memory; whereas it previously used 990mb. I did notice the GPU utilization improve dramatically as it mostly 99% now. I'm pretty sure future update this game would have richer texture packs.

[Smokeyjedi]

Nick Rarang, on 04 April 2014 - 10:20 PM, said:

It's nice that you got the 4GB version as I observed that MWO uses more graphics memory after the recent patch. At the same settings as before on the same maps, I noticed 1.9gb of memory; whereas it previously used 990mb. I did notice the GPU utilization improve dramatically as it mostly 99% now. I'm pretty sure future update this game would have richer texture packs.

well, in theory this is DX11. offloading CPU to the GPU, and making use of faster GDDR5..... this is good, but a lil worrysome as not many 1080P games can even use a full 2GB......

[Slab Squathrust]

Catamount, on 04 April 2014 - 07:24 PM, said:

GPUs are improving so little, they're being essentially recycled. Most of the 700 series and R9 series are just rebadges or extremely slight tweaks of their 600 and HD 7000 series predecessors, and they're selling at the same price. What a 7970 or 670 cost before is essentially what a 280x or 760/770 costs now (the 680 was often more, but Nvidia inflates the high end).

It seems to me that at least with nvidia, the tweaking is coming to lower power consumption. Those new maxwell 750/750ti offer amazing performance for ~60 watts of power consumption. I am an AMD fan, but I am really excited to see what they offer in the higher end maxwells. Over the life of the card, power sipping like that could lead to substantial energy savings, that naturally, could be used to buy more hardware.

[Odins Fist]

Slab Squathrust, on 09 April 2014 - 03:26 PM, said:

Those new maxwell 750/750ti offer amazing performance for ~60 watts of power consumption.

I don't want to sound mean, please don't take this as such...

I looked at the 750 ti, and I wouldn't recommend that GPU to anyone thinking of building a gaming rig, and I really wouldn't recommend it to anyone playing MWO.

It's a 60 watt card because it's powered by the motherboard, cannot be put into SLI.
Put simply it's a $160.00 budget video card that will perform like a $160.00 video card.

It also only has a 128 bit memory interface, and I can't stress enough just how bad that is.

I would recommend it for someone that does light gaming, or as a replacement for someone's onboard video that failed, I would even recommend it for someone building a HTPC (Home Theatre PC) since it has HDMI out, but that is it.

http://www.hwcompare...rce-gtx-750-ti/ <---- Click that and read

Looking at everything considering Memory Bandwith, Pixel Rate- Anti Aliasing, my old GTX 560 ti even passes the 750 ti by in more then one or two areas.

I'm not saying buy a GTX 560 ti, I'm saying do NOT buy a 750 ti, it's at best an HTPC card, it's a gamer with no legs for gaming.

Anyone that buys a 750 ti expecting an upgrade will be very unhappy with the results, unless they are coming from a 9800GTX+ or something like that.

To actually see someone's money well spent on an upgrade, I wouldn't recommend anything under a GTX 770 4gb card, especially if they want to SLI in the future and or run multiple monitors.

Two 770 4gb running 3 monitors would be nice, that's where the 4 gb of Vram comes in.
Trying to run multiple monitors on a 750 ti would be ok if you were running 2 for accounting software, or music production, that's about it.

Avoid the 650 ti, the 750 ti, and anything else with 128 bit interface when looking at a so called budget card.

Edited by Odins Fist, 09 April 2014 - 03:56 PM.

[Summon3r]

Odins Fist, on 09 April 2014 - 03:52 PM, said:

I don't want to sound mean, please don't take this as such...

I looked at the 750 ti, and I wouldn't recommend that GPU to anyone thinking of building a gaming rig, and I really wouldn't recommend it to anyone playing MWO.

It's a 60 watt card because it's powered by the motherboard, cannot be put into SLI.
Put simply it's a $160.00 budget video card that will perform like a $160.00 video card.

It also only has a 128 bit memory interface, and I can't stress enough just how bad that is.

I would recommend it for someone that does light gaming, or as a replacement for someone's onboard video that failed, I would even recommend it for someone building a HTPC (Home Theatre PC) since it has HDMI out, but that is it.

http://www.hwcompare...rce-gtx-750-ti/ <---- Click that and read

Looking at everything considering Memory Bandwith, Pixel Rate- Anti Aliasing, my old GTX 560 ti even passes the 750 ti by in more then one or two areas.

I'm not saying buy a GTX 560 ti, I'm saying do NOT buy a 750 ti, it's at best an HTPC card, it's a gamer with no legs for gaming.

Anyone that buys a 750 ti expecting an upgrade will be very unhappy with the results, unless they are coming from a 9800GTX+ or something like that.

To actually see someone's money well spent on an upgrade, I wouldn't recommend anything under a GTX 770 4gb card, especially if they want to SLI in the future and or run multiple monitors.

Two 770 4gb running 3 monitors would be nice, that's where the 4 gb of Vram comes in.
Trying to run multiple monitors on a 750 ti would be ok if you were running 2 for accounting software, or music production, that's about it.

Avoid the 650 ti, the 750 ti, and anything else with 128 bit interface when looking at a so called budget card.

agree totally, that being said though the 760 is actually a very decent card for people that cant afford to go higher.

[Maxxximal]

i7-4770 with 650 Ti Boost - Just OK
Got a steal of a deal on the new (non reference) Visiontek R9 290 ($300) sold my old card for $110 and am very happy with my $190 upgrade.

I can play the game all dialed up and it is smooth.

Slahne

[Catamount]

Slab Squathrust, on 09 April 2014 - 03:26 PM, said:

It seems to me that at least with nvidia, the tweaking is coming to lower power consumption. Those new maxwell 750/750ti offer amazing performance for ~60 watts of power consumption. I am an AMD fan, but I am really excited to see what they offer in the higher end maxwells. Over the life of the card, power sipping like that could lead to substantial energy savings, that naturally, could be used to buy more hardware.

Basically, past video card progress, at least for a number of generations, came from two places. First, the fabrication process would be shrunk, so less power was required for performance. Then, TDP was increased. The combination of the two allowed cards to double in performance every generation. Then TDP hit a wall so new processes had to give their performance/watt gain, but with cards staying at similar TDP as before, so performance slowed, and new die shrinks were coming slower and slower.

Now, we're at a point with fabrication that smaller processes have introduced a new problem of lower and lower voltage tolerances. So the new process allows one to make a card that gives the same performance on less power, but then that card can only tolerate less power in the first place, so efficiency goes up, yes, but absolute performance does not.

So absolute performance is just going nowhere fast.

[Slab Squathrust]

Odins Fist, on 09 April 2014 - 03:52 PM, said:

I don't want to sound mean, please don't take this as such...

I looked at the 750 ti, and I wouldn't recommend that GPU to anyone thinking of building a gaming rig, and I really wouldn't recommend it to anyone playing MWO.

It's a 60 watt card because it's powered by the motherboard, cannot be put into SLI.
Put simply it's a $160.00 budget video card that will perform like a $160.00 video card.
.................................................
Condensed for space.

You need to reread my comment. Never did I recommend this gpu as an upgrade to the OP. I was responding to catamounts comment regarding the evolution of gpu performance vs power consumption. These are the first releases of the maxwell arcitecture. Expect bigger and better things from their big brothers (800 series). I was merely impressed with what these cards could do with only 60 watts of power draw. Further some of the higher end ones do allow for a separate PCI 6 pin power connection.
http://www.newegg.co...N82E16814487028

For the record I run dual R9 290Xs in my desktop.

Edited by Slab Squathrust, 09 April 2014 - 11:14 PM.

[Summon3r]

Slab Squathrust, on 09 April 2014 - 11:07 PM, said:

You need to reread my comment. Never did I recommend this gpu as an upgrade to the OP. I was responding to catamounts comment regarding the evolution of gpu performance vs power consumption. These are the first releases of the maxwell arcitecture. Expect bigger and better things from their big brothers (800 series). I was merely impressed with what these cards could do with only 60 watts of power draw. Further some of the higher end ones do allow for a separate PCI 6 pin power connection.
http://www.newegg.co...N82E16814487028

For the record I run dual R9 290Xs in my desktop.

omg dual 290x? hows the heat? not they ever work very hard id imagine lol