Quote:
Originally Posted by JinX11
So, when I built my rig back in 2009, ATI Radeon 5850 video cards were kind of the rage. My recollection was that it was around $300 per card; I got two.
Even though my rig is holding up really well, I'm getting the itch to build a new one soon. Any recommendations for best bang-for-the-buck video cards? I'd be in the $150-350 range.
I'd say without a doubt the 7950 is the best 'bang for your buck'. It's only 5-10% slower than the 7970 at the same clocks and if you get the Sapphire version like the one linked below, you can get a pretty nice overclock without much difficulty. At $280 including rebate, I doubt there's a better deal around.
http://www.amazon.com/Sapphire-DL-DV...words=amd+7950
The 760 is a very good choice as well and is slightly cheaper from what I can tell. From the few reviews it actually appears to be slightly faster at stock clocks than than 7950. I would imagine the 7950 to have more overclocking headroom on average however due to it being voltage unlocked (for select manufacturers anyways, Sapphire and MSI among them), and the 7950 comes with a bigger memory bus and an extra GB of VRAM which may come in handy soon as games continue to become more and more demanding. If you don't want to have to upgrade your card for a while, I think the 7950 is more 'future proof' than the 760. I personally have a 690 and am thinking of selling in the near future and getting a 780 for just this reason, though I'll probably hold off on that for a while.
Quote:
Originally Posted by weevil
Little bit of an over-generalization. Not many games would be bottleknecked due to some cheap DDR3 sticks for example, most of the gaming benchmarks I've seen only show differences of less than a frame per second between low end DDR3 1033 and high end like DDR3 2800 - really only an issue with things like video encoding and 3D modelling. And cases are only an issue performance-wise in terms of their airflow design, and I've found the price of the case usually has little bearing on this. And not many games are bottlenecked from any dual-core+ desktop CPU made in the last generation or written to really take serious advantage of multi-threading. So I think your argument only applies to storage and video cards, and you can get away with a cheap 64 gig SSD for your OS and a few games and keep the rest on separate HDDs. After that, your most price efficient upgrade is easily the video card.
The mobo and PSU are bit of a special case, you're not really going to find any performance differences between different models, it's a case of feature sets and reliability, and with both of these you tend to get what you pay for. Anything under $100 for a PSU is asking for trouble in my experience, and mobo reliability is so random between models even from the same manufacturer that price isn't always a good guide.
Good post, agree with all of it. Things like RAM and hard drives don't really have a noticeable impact on performance in most cases, even SSDs. What matters more than anything is your CPU and GPU, as they can easily bottleneck one another if one is way better than the other. PSU's and motherboards are fairly random in terms of reliability, just pick one that's well reviewed and by a decent manufacturer and you should be fine. Of course in the case of the mobo you also need to make sure it has all of the features you're looking for, and is compatible with the rest of your setup. This shouldn't be too hard, just ask around if you're not sure.