So I've got a budget of around $400 USD for a graphics card around Black Friday. This is my current setup:
http://pcpartpicker.com/p/20tSa
I would go with an R9 290, but I don't want a super loud GPU.
I'm deciding between a GTX 770 2GB and a R9 280X 3GB. What GPU should I get?
personally I would wait until there are non reference R9 290's out and get one of those since the 770 and 280x have a gpu core that is a little old now and the 290 is much more powerful for $100 more.
I agree with this. GTX770 uses the same GK104 core from the GTX680 but with faster memory and the R9 280X is essentially a re-branded HD7970GE. R9 290 is $399.99, is pretty much on par with the GTX780 stock-for-stock. I'm running a custom aftermarket cooler on my R9 290X which itself runs hotter than the 290, and in load it only hits ~57-62c while only producing 17 decibels of sound. The reference cooler is the issue not the card itself, so wait for aftermarket coolers to hit sometimes this or next month and pick one up. :)
I also agree with this.
+1
Thanks guys. Guess I'll keep holding out and hopefully there'll be after market coolers for the R9 290 when Christmas rolls around.
Non reference for the 290 and 290x are coming late November last i heard
AMD GTX290, water cooled. If nVidia a radeon HD 780GHz edition.
I would wait for the aftermarket 290's to come out and then see how loud they are. I they are still loud, a Gtx 760 is your best bet.
can you show us some benchmarks?And what clock speed did you manage to achieve with the aftermarket cooler
Wat.
Why simply jump all the way down to a GTX760? That's quiet a huge step down from the 290. In any case in that Price/Performance category I'd recommend an HD7950 before I'd recommend a GTX760. HD7950 matches it at stock, has 1GB MORE VRAM which will be helpful in up coming titles as games are using higher and higher res textures, and it overclocks much better.
R9 280X would be what I'd recommend as the next logical step down if 290 doesn't play out well with aftermarket cooler. For much the same reasons as the previous points between the last two cards I was comparing (Unless obviously you get a 4GB GTX770 which is somewhat overpriced).
But I doubt that'll be the case, I have an aftermarket cooler on my much hotter running 290X and it runs between 57 and 60C in load and makes 17 decibels of noise at load. As I said, the 290s problem isn't the card itself, its entirely the stock cooler. I don't know how they effed it up so badly because when taking it apart it looks pretty well build. I ran it for a bit and if you try to make it run games at 70-75C the fan hits like 75% and sounds like a bloody hair dryer.
Get GTX 770
No because I'm lazy as shit and I'll just report to you what I see on GPU-Z the info I have, here is a picture though. The white fan is unplugged because it actually hit my finger and broke a blade xD. As for OCing 1100Mhz on the standard 1.15v that it raises it to with the stock bios. I'll be putting some better fans on it and seeing what I can do with a custom bios. Doesn't get hotter than 65C overclocked while gaming in BF4 at 1440p @ Ultra, it also stabilized at 67C in Heaven 4.0 maxed as well with 8X AA on a hotter day, so take that for what it's worth. For all intents and purposes to me it's silent with this fan which only has like a 0.7mm H2O static pressure rating. I have two Akasa Viper 140mm fans (3.2mm H2O) OTW so lets see how it can do then with that headroom. As is I can't feel any airflow coming out the other end of the heatsink. Hopefully quadrupling the static pressure will help. xD
You are seriously going to have to run some benchmarks for us soon. I am really interested in what a properly cooled 290x can do. How about running Unigine, 3D mark, and reporting some game framerates?
That sounds awfully a lot like work. But Okay.jpg I guess. xD
Heaven 4.0 1920x1080 8xAA Ultra/Extreme:
w/ upped voltage bios at 1150MHz, 1449 Score 57.5 FPS.
w/ stock bios at 1100Mhz 56.1FPS 1413 score.
MetroLL Benchmark, DX11, Very High Quality, 16x AF, Very High Tesselation, and Normal Motion Blur (All at 1150MHz custom bios, haven't yet benchmarked with 1100MHz):
@ 1080p w/ SSAA (no PhysX) I got 48.52FPS
@ 1440p w/o SSAA (no PhysX) I got 53.29FPS.
In all cases, because I have yet to put on GPU memory heatsinks, I can only run 4900Mhz(/1225MHz) on the memory, it black screens otherwise. Something I also noticed if I tried to OC my memory with the stock cooler. Possibly due to issues that seam to be common with cards that come with Elpedia memory instead of Hynix. I have a 4.4Ghz 2500K and 8GB of 1066Mhz DDR3 ram in my system. My fans are really making this cooler inefficient though when I raise voltages (which until MSI Afterburner or Sapphire Trixx update, this custom bios is the only way I can raise voltage that I know of), it's able to extract much of the heat but these fans are piss poor at dissipating so the heat just keeps building up. You can tell by just looking at how the temps build and feeling the lack of airflow through the fins. Until then this is all I can offer and I'll be running the stock bios, I'll let you know how it goes though as the fans should be here tomorrow. Also I'm not sure if my card is a very good overclocker compared to some results I've seen, not as bad as Linus's but still. I seem to need a bit more voltage to get the same clocks as others I've seen in discussions regarding the custom bioses, maybe the lower temps are helping in the case of those will full cover blocks obtain that. In any case, I'm happy with it at 1100MHz, It's like a 40% gain in performance over my overclocked HD7970 in at least heaven 4.0 where I got 40FPS under the same settings. Not bad, and it stays cool enough and very quiet so whatever. :)
Higher FPS in LL with a higher resolution? That is weird. I think that you have a bottleneck somewhere else in your system. Those numbers just don't quite seem right to me.
How about you drop a few thousand dollars on a whole new rig to get some definitively unbottlenecked results? ;)
Thanks for doing the work, man. Seeing your awesome 290x set up is making me want to drop some money myself. The 290 (non x) is looking pretty good.
EDIT: Have you done any cooling on the memory modules themselves? That might help to keep things stable with higher memory clocks.
1080p w/ SSAA actually upscales the res more than 2.5k then downscales it. That process is more demanding than running straight 2560x1440. It's normal and is the case on every card I've tested it on. :)
Highly doubt there is a bottleneck in my system, 2500K @ 4.4GHz isn't going to bottleneck an R9 290X...
Edit: to be precise 2X SSAA renders Last Light at 2688x1512 on the GPU before resizing the image to 1920x1080
Yea I will get some cooling the memory, this VRM cooler is ghetto rigged on there at the moment, I'm waiting for Swiftech to make one of their full cover heatsink things they always make so I can take it off and just cool the whole board.
Yeah, I just overlooked the SSAA. Comparing to the results here, it seems like you have a really nice 290x as even at stock it beats what they got.
http://www.overclockersclub.com/reviews/powercolor_r9_290x_oc/12.htm