I am currently rocking a 6950 which is running hot and getting old.
I'm looking to upgrade the first week of April and I'm looking for suggestions on the best card within a £400 ($600) budget. Preferably a card that has a good balance of NOISE to TEMP.
Current system is 16Gb of vengeance RAM and a 3570k clocked @ 4.5GHz
My monitor is a Catleap Yamakasi which I love, which is of course 2560x1440.
I'm currently playing Battlefield, World of Warcraft and will be playing all major releases this year.
Any and all input is greatly appreciated.
Thanks :)
well... both Battlefield and WoW are CPU bound games... meaning a GPU improvement will be unlikely to improve your performance at that resolution. A higher CPU overclock however might yield some solid results.
If your heart is set on a new GPU... look at a HD 7870 XT or a HD 7950... generally the consensus is those are right in the sweet spot for price/performance.
If you're set on spending that much scratch then just get a 7970... best card out there short of a 690
Battlefield 3 is CPU/GPU whore....
The more cards you add, the higher the risk of bottlenecking the CPU in BF3, it requires the right mixture of CPU/GPU horsepower.
2560x1440 is not a problem for 480/580/670/680
7870/7950/7970
Any of those will give you good performance at that resolution.
as to the noise side of your question... there are several GPUs out there with non-standard GPU coolers which bring down the noise. Understand that the "standard" axial style coolers on both the NVidia and Radeon base models are rather loud. Generally this generation around (HD 7xxx or 6xx GTX) the Radeon GPUs run a bit hotter then the NVidia ones... and as a result the NVidia cards generally run a little bit quieter.
That said, the difference in noise is not that pronounced. Generally within 5dbs. The premium you can pay for a GPU with a "different" cooling solution attached by the company sometimes isn't worth it, as you usually can get specific aftermarket cooling solutions for individual cards that not only work better then the GPU manufacturer's designs, but usually cost a deal less. That said there are some solid options out there since noise is a concern. For example, any Artic Accelero will generally be much more effective then the GPU company's design, and much more quiet... any one of their aftermarket GPU coolers will be worth the money to use on a reference card version of the gpu you chose. It will also likely be far cheaper then any comparable cooler (if one such exists) that the gpu manufacturers produce.
That said, here are some quieter options for each of the cards if you don't want to mess with the GPU cooling solutions.
- Sapphire HD 7870 XT
- Powercolor HD 7870 LE Myst Edition
- Asus HD 7950 DirectCUII
- Powercolor HD 7950 PCS
- Sapphire HD 7970 Dual-X
- XFX HD 7970 Black Edition Double D
The reference 7970 is a hoover in sound, and heats up like an oven.
The Gigabyte Windforce and Asus DCUII cards are the quietest and coolest you can get, Sapphire and MSI arent too far behind them either.
is it just me or do all reference amd cards perform similar to a hair dryer?
https://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=GX-031-KF&groupid=701&catid=1914&subcat=2294
Got my eyes on that one, any thoughts on KFA2? Not really had any experience with that brand... Any thoughts?
Get this. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814161426
think you can do better for the $$ with a 7950 or 7970... then the 670... and the 7870 XT will destroy any 7850 out there for just a few dollars more.
Generally, single fan GPUs tend to be louder because they tend to need to spin faster to cool the gpu, whether they're axial or otherwise... If you want a nvidia 670... i'd go with an Asus DirectCUII; wether for a Radeon or Nvidia, it's one of the quietest coolers you can get your hands on.