Death of one of my HD7770 ... time to move on!

[jalmir]

So I had 2 Asus HD7770 Direct CU in crossfire, on of them died last week, I know a 7770 with only 1GB of VRAM isn't anything amazing but it was enough for me!

So now with only one 7770 I obviously had to scale down the quality in all my games, and to be honest, I didn't like it, AT ALL!!!

So now I'm looking for a replacement, to do what I did with the 7770; buy only one card and when I feel I need more power in 2-3 years, buy a second one for (this time) a SLI setup!

I had my eyes on the new 950, but seeing as you can get a 960 for only a few dollars more I will definately go with a 960. But since I don't have the money now it'll have to wait after the holiday season, so sadly, begining of 2016! :dots:

I was thinking about the EVGA Superclocked, specifically the 4GB version since it's only 40$ more and it'll have a longer life (I'm guessing in a few years a 2GB card will start to trail behind).



BTW, I'm not biased toward AMD or Nvidia, so if you guys have better ideas, let me know!

BTW my current setup (C2Q) will be upgraded to a LGA1150 setup (already have a Z87-A and 8GB DDR3, only missing the CPU).

 

[Bond007]

Given the time before you buy I think your best bet is to do nothing for now. The whole market could change between now and then. IMO if your putting the money down for a 4gb Gtx 960 you might as well go for a 970...a 960 is substantially slower. Right now the best deals to be had are used r9 280x...great fps/$ and can be found used for <$150.

 

[Beaverton]

The R9 380 4gb would be a better alternative to the 960. They're roughly the same price and the 380 performs better than the 960.

 

[jalmir]

Actually the 960 seems better priced for now at 270$
Choose A Video Card - PCPartPicker Canada

As for the 970, that's completely out of my budget at 400$ ... My budget is around 250$ for the GPU, it would be bigger but I will need a 4690K also!!!

But bond007 has a good point, early 2016 is far away and things could change, but until then the money I'm saving will be toward a 960 or a 380 if the prices are similar and around 250 Canadian pesos...


Edit: as for getting a used GPU, that's a possibility we'll see I guess.

 

[Bond007]

Edit: as for getting a used GPU, that's a possibility we'll see I guess.

Not a bad idea if you can afford it sooner than later. I grabbed my 280x used and the fps/$ is great. For the price they can be found it's great if you could upgrade sooner than the new year. Otherwise wait and see what the new year brings.

 

[jalmir]

I actually could buy it now, but the thing is I'm leaving for China and will be gone 3 weeks (Nov. 1st to Nov. 22nd) ... Then it'll be Christmas and God knows how much money I spend during that period (just travel expenses are high when family is 300 to 650 km away!!!).

So right now I'm keeping my money and I'll see how much I can spend when all that will be over!

Plus I'll probably have a few things to sell on eBay from my trip to China, so that should help also!

 

[sweenytodd]

If you can wait then go for Black Friday Sales.

 

[MARSTG]

You might be amazed to find out how much the CPU is holding you back. Get a Pentium G3250 and give it a go with one card alone. You should see quite the difference. Unless you play FarCry4 you shouldn't have any issues.

 

[jalmir]

You might be amazed to find out how much the CPU is holding you back. Get a Pentium G3250 and give it a go with one card alone. You should see quite the difference. Unless you play FarCry4 you shouldn't have any issues.

Thanks for the suggestion but nah, I'm not gonna start spending bits of money here and there on "lower than I want" parts only to have to spend more money down the road to upgrade "again" ... been there, done that, not gonna do that mistake again!

It's either I buy what I'm looking for or I don't buy anything. Upgrading by increments is just a waste of money IMO!

 

[Dragonstongue]

The cpu def makes a difference (though spending the $ why in the hell would one go Pentium when there are i3 and i5 to choose from with very little "fear" of bottlenecking?) as far as scaling and letting the gpu breathe better, sometimes just the bump to say win10 make a massive performance difference, even more so with lesser powered chips, though not sure in a C2Q case, I would imagine 20+% extra performance in all things on the "base" end.

I know one of my buddies 955 stock with R9-285 (upgraded from 7870) was wanted to go intel for the performance "problems" as he felt was always "sluggish" (though he was one of the better score whores in BC2-BF3-BF4)
he went to win10, for him, night and day and said if I would have known this I would have upgraded to it sooner and kept the 7870, myself I use almost the same system 955 clocked 3.8+ 7870, 8gb ddr3 1800 some odd SSD primary and secondary, but still using win7 64 and works well for me.

I want to go win10 but waiting for them to make install process simpler for an in-place usb key style install, let alone the whole forced updates etc, got this running well would hate to spend hours of my time and many GB of data cap to find out will not work for me due to bad or unusable forced driver.

If it were my coin looking for a new gpu, IMHO I would stick with Radeon, Nvidia seems all that (till up and fail for no reason even when should be fine, temps etc were never the issue) the more $$$ they make the worse they get, just from my own and close friends experience Radeons last longer, I rather spend a bit extra power maybe warmer but know card will not up and die with no warning. AMD supports more in regard to DX10-11-12, win10, Vulkan etc then Nvidia does possibly more so come next year, that is unless you plan on shelling out top dollars for "features" that not every game uses in top end cards lining their pockets, in some cases actually makes performance worse (gameworks comes to mind)

Your $, but if you might be waiting that long, I would give AMD the benefit of the doubt and try to support them if it makes sense to do so at the time, as far as I have seen unless one is talking the highest end, AMD always has an answer in one way or another even the whole power, temperature, drivers is blown out of proportion.

As for the pricing, that might be $270 BEFORE MIR never count on that as the price, period, as not a 100% will work every time even though it should.
I use shopbot.ca.
example R9 285 - Price Comparison - Canada
285 which is virtually identical to the 380, using those MIR as an example, are cheaper then 960s by $10-$30.

I think the thing generally that raised price for 380 vs 285 was just a modernized cooler in some cases, but for vast majority of other ones, well they have to make $.
folks more likely to buy a 380 then a 285 cause number is higher even when actually given performance at same clock is margin of error ~2%.