New GFX Card for Whino

[Rhino]

Hey all,

Looks like my trusty 5yr old GTX260 wont cover it any more so looking at upgrading it

Really looking for something that's got a lot of bang for its buck and is going to last quite some time, as you can see I milked my last card for 5yrs and would like to do the same kinda thing again.
On top of bang for buck I would also like a card that is pretty quiet, spent quite a bit on making my system as quiet as possible and my GTX260 is the nosiest thing in it currently so would be nice to replace it with something quieter
Multi-monitor support is also a pretty high thing on my agenda. My current GTX260 only supports two screens which is currently what I have but ideally want more than that, so looking for 3+ screens supported really.

I've not looked into GFX cards for some time so would appreciate some advice on the matter. Not got a budget per say, but looking for something that as I said, has the most bang for its buck so if there is an expensive card out there that can justify its price, I will very well consider it but the cheaper the better really

My current system specs:
Mobo: ASUSTeK Computer Inc. - Motherboards- ASUS P8P67 PRO (REV 3.1)
CPU: Intel Core i7 2600k 3.4GHz Socket 1155 8MB Cache Processor
RAM: Corsair CMX8GX3M2A2000C9 DDR3 XMS3 (8GB)
PSU: Corsair 850W HX 80+ Gold Modular PSU
OS: Windows 7 Pro


Currently I have my eye on this MSI GTX 760 TwinFrozr OC 2GB GDDR5 card which I can get from ebuyer for 210 quid with 20 quid off. Read a couple of reviews and looks to be very quiet, has support for four screens and pretty good bang for its buck but I would really like to hear what you guys think and if there are any better alternatives
MSI GTX 760 TwinFrozr Gaming 2 GB Review | techPowerUp
http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/2013/0 ... 2gb-revie/

Cheers!

[LITOralis.nMd]

MSI twinfrozr
Gigabyte Windforce
Asus DCU2
EVGA has a few models, ACX are the most expensive due to best OC and best lifetime warranty.

Non-reference GeForce GTX 760 comparison - YouTube

[LITOralis.nMd]

Heat, Noise, And Cooling - GeForce GTX 760 Review: GK104 Shows Up (And Off) At $250

That MSI looks like one of the best options for heat/noise .
If the price is competitive, looks like a good bet.

[DesmoLocke]

The GTX 760 is a strong card and a definite best "bang for the buck" contender. It meets all your requirements and should last you a few years.

But if you can hold of purchasing till after the release of the 780 Ti and closer to Christmas, you should find better deals.

[Daniel]

I'd go for the 770 model, which will more probably last 5 years with enough power.

MSI Global N770 TF 4GD5/OC

The 2 GB model is cheaper.

[Careless]

That's the best deal you can get (if considering only nVidia)
Now you just have to find the best model to fit your needs. I heard that buying a 760 with 4GB can help you playing games at high resolution or double screens, but I've also done some research and it says that the 760 is not capable to use all of the 4GB and that 2GB is enough for hardcore gaming.


I wouldn't go higher because the price/performanse ratio goes down dramaticaly. For instance, a 780 is not worth the 500 (?) bucks/euro at this moment

[Cossack]

LITOralis.nMd;1959827']MSI twinfrozr
Gigabyte Windforce
Asus DCU2
EVGA has a few models, ACX are the most expensive due to best OC and best lifetime warranty.

Non-reference GeForce GTX 760 comparison - YouTube

What Lito says... GTX 760 is very solid card

[Rhino]

Cheers for the feedback so far guys

But if you can hold of purchasing till after the release of the 780 Ti and closer to Christmas, you should find better deals.

Do we have any idea when that will be excatly? I can hold off for a bit but buying closer to xmas is normally I find a bad idea as prices seem to hold pretty high till after that on basically everything?

I also am planning on upgrading before December but if its really worth the money or other possibilities open up I could possibly wait on it but not sure its such a good idea?

That's the best deal you can get (if considering only nVidia)

If anyone has any good AMD/ATI suggestions then I'm willing to hear them. Haven't used ATI in about 10yrs now since their drivers where just shocking back then. If they have gotten much better since then and have "more bang for their buck" than nVidia, as well as the other options then willing to consider them sure

I heard that buying a 760 with 4GB can help you playing games at high resolution or double screens, but I've also done some research and it says that the 760 is not capable to use all of the 4GB and that 2GB is enough for hardcore gaming.

Looks like an extra 50quid for 4GB of RAM from what I can tell. Currently my primary screen runs at 1920x1080 and secondary (which I don't currently use for 3D stuff) runs at 1680x1050 and probably wont be going for 3D surround gaming for some time, main reason for me to get more screens is just to put refs etc up on them when I'm modelling and stuff

I'd go for the 770 model, which will more probably last 5 years with enough power.

MSI Global N770 TF 4GD5/OC

The 2 GB model is cheaper.

770 looks to be around 100 quid more than the 760, is it really worth that price hike?

[Mineral]

770 is really good from what I can tell, definitely worth the price difference if you have the ability to spend a bit more. I am personally following the GPU news myself as I want to buy a new card next year. But with AMD's Mantle coming up I want to see what Nvidia's response will be. (price cuts, new cards,...)

But that's just personal I think and depends on how you like to spend your budget. But yeah, the performance difference is worth the money. Although the 760 is probably better price/performance wise. As it's pretty damn cheap

[Rhino]

Well if we also put the 770 into the loop, got two options that I can see. The first is the MIS GTX 770 TF for 305 quid (23 quid off) and the second is the Gigabyte GTX 770 OC for 300 quid (50 quid off)
MSI GTX 770 TwinFrozr Gaming 2 GB Review | techPowerUp
Gigabyte GTX 770 WindForce OC 2 GB Review | techPowerUp

Looking at reviews the Gigabyte is the better card and is also slightly cheaper, but is slightly nosier with a load noise of 33dbA compared to the MSI's 29dbA but my PSU goes up to 35dbA on full load so shouldn't be too bad.

With the 50 quid off, the Gigabyte card certainly gets more bang for its buck, in fact very slightly more then the MIS 760 so I'm pretty tempted to go with the Gigabyte GTX 770 OC if you guys think its a good deal?

Cheers!

[LITOralis.nMd]

I own a Gigabyte GTX 670 OC Windforce , with basically the exact same cooling solution.
It's really quiet during normal operation and intense gaming,

I have to manually use Nvidia Inspector and up the fan to make it audible during normal operation, and that was just to test the limits of the card. So outside of stress testing scenarios, I never hear the GPU fans. However I've never used a TwinFrozr so I can't give a first hand comparison.

The only time I've ever heard the card fans is when I first booted up the Star Citizen Alpha hangar, it has no optimization at all and every single poly was rendered in ever single frame.

[Careless]

Cheers for the feedback so far guys




If anyone has any good AMD/ATI suggestions then I'm willing to hear them. Haven't used ATI in about 10yrs now since their drivers where just shocking back then. If they have gotten much better since then and have "more bang for their buck" than nVidia, as well as the other options then willing to consider them sure

I'm not familiar with AMD, although I had an ATI card that worked fine for 5 years (until I managed to screw it up myself).

The thing is that there's a lot of critisism on the heating problems/sound that they supposedly would have.
It's so tempting to buy them because of their lower price.

Although, they seem to outperform nVidia when it comes to OpenGL related tasks such as CAD, etc. (when comparing GTX series to HD series)

Looks like an extra 50quid for 4GB of RAM from what I can tell. Currently my primary screen runs at 1920x1080 and secondary (which I don't currently use for 3D stuff) runs at 1680x1050 and probably wont be going for 3D surround gaming for some time, main reason for me to get more screens is just to put refs etc up on them when I'm modelling and stuff

770 looks to be around 100 quid more than the 760, is it really worth that price hike?

The 50 bucks/pounds/euros would be 'worth' it, but as I said; I've read numerous reviews where it's said that the 760 is not capable of using up all of the 4GB because of the 256bit bus size (I have no idea what that is lol, but it has something to do with how much memory can be processed at once).

For the comparison of 770 vs 760;
GeForce GTX 770 vs 760

I don't think it's smart to buy a 770 now. I mean ? 450 is just not worth the 5~10 fps.
I think you'd be better of buying two 760's for the same amount of money (if your mobo and PSU can handle it).

Then again, that's just my opinion (I'm also configuring a new computer for college and gaming), and I'm going for a 760.

[LITOralis.nMd]

How much rendering do you plan on doing?
There is VERY specific considerations regarding CUDA cores, new CUDA features, and the lack of double precision on the GTX 6XX and GTX 7XX families of GPUS you should consider.

Each rendering program has or has not been optimized to the new GTX 6XX and 7XX families of GPUS.

OpenCL: Double-Precision - GeForce GTX 760 Review: GK104 Shows Up (And Off) At $250

I do some cuda programming. There are three big differences between the 5xx and 6xx architectures:
1) 5xx shaders run at 2x speed, but there are fewer of them...this is a good for some applications, bad for others, but the 6xx chips use less power
2) the 6xx chips have reduced double-precision arithmetic units. Games do not (for the most part) use doubles, so cutting this for gaming cards again reduces the power consumption and allows other parts to run faster
3) the 6xx has new compute capabilities (look up "cuda compute capability level") mostly around scheduling. This is definitely a good thing, but most software doesn't take advantage of it yet.

I am NOT fully fluent in this bit of knowledge, I would say you should consider a used GTX 580 non ref and/or used/new Radeon 7950 with non reference cooler as you review your options... and definitely you'll need to search out benchmarks using your preferred rendering programs benchmarks.

The 670 doesn't do CUDA very well because its double precision floating point performance (FP64) has been majorly gimped by nVidia.

I believe this is because they were unhappy with the number of people buying GeForce cards instead of Quadro with the massively increased prices as a lot of people were buying, say GTX580s for games AND CUDA performance because they were just as powerful in CUDA apps as the Quadro cards.

So now they've gimped the 6 series FP64 in an attempt to get people going for Quadro cards.

So now it's a case of you have to choose, CUDA or gaming performance. Though you could always run a secondary nVidia 5 series card for CUDA peformance.

And due to that, the GTX 770 all the way down to the GTX 650 all have the same CUDA computation power, though you do need to have enough VRAM to get the entire rendered scene onto VRAM to use only GPU rendering in most 3D modelling software...
https://developer.nvidia.com/cuda-gpus

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Sorry if your head exploded somewhere in the wall of text.

[LITOralis.nMd]

ebay.co.uk has used non ref gtx 580 for as little as 150 quid,
total cost of ownership should be considered ... i.e. the electric bill.

also, AnandTech | NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680 Review: Retaking The Performance Crown

[Rhino]

How much rendering do you plan on doing?

What excatly do you mean by rendering? Do you mean rendering scenes in 3DsMax or w/e as that afaik, is mainly CPU based rendering?

But I don't do that much 3DsMax rendering, other than the odd thing and LMing which isn't that common either and when I do a massive amount of it I normally do most of the work on my spare PC.

Sorry if your head exploded somewhere in the wall of text.

Ye has a bit

[matty1053]

Go for the 770. I hear that it's a darn good GFx card.

Hey dude, I will take your 260!


My buddy has a 770, he has a sexy FPS on nearly everygame. Plus it's a good card because it will last a whie.

[ShockUnitBlack]

This is my go-to source for GPU info.

That said, I've heard Nvidia's probably going to roll out some new GPUs in the next month or so to counter the new Radeon cards, which means a price-drop should be coming soon.

[SnipeHunt]

Shouldn't you go for the 4GB model for your multiple monitor setup?

[Rhino]

Shouldn't you go for the 4GB model for your multiple monitor setup?

Looks like an extra 50quid for 4GB of RAM from what I can tell. Currently my primary screen runs at 1920x1080 and secondary (which I don't currently use for 3D stuff) runs at 1680x1050 and probably wont be going for 3D surround gaming for some time, main reason for me to get more screens is just to put refs etc up on them when I'm modelling and stuff

I also take it I would need three monitors of the same size / rez to do 3D surround gaming correct? If so then its pretty unlikely I will be getting that any time soon as it would mean buying two more monitors at the very minimum.

[SnipeHunt]

You mentioned you kept your last card for 5 years. You might find the need for larger monitors in the near future, or want to run something to the TV? I don't think the 4GB is necessarily for the surround screens, just multiple monitors each with a high res.

Its probably not necessary, but as far as bang-for-your-buck reasons it is not a lot more money for double the RAM.