Hi Guys, I've just built a PC and now it's time to choose the GPU and get saving. I have my price bracket around the £240 - £250 mark. I have my heart mainly set on the GTX 660Ti by EVGA, but I know you guy's won't recommend rubbish so I guess I'll listen to what others have to say about other cards before blowing my money on this, I never know, I could get a lot more and save a few pounds.
I've seen this card aswell for like £20 less than EVGA, what do we all think on Asus cards?
Well, you have to keep in mind NVIDIA and AMD don't actually make any cards them selves, they produces the technology that goes into cards that are then manufactured by partners like MSI, Asus and so on....and as their technology are quite different. some thing nVidia do better, and others AMD have the edge. It come down to what people want to do with there computers as to what the better card is.
For example CUDA cores, this is NVIDIA's parallel computing architecture and is really handy speeding up things like Adobe creative suite, but not used at all in gaming. Ergo, people working with Adobe lots should consider NVIDIA cards.
trouble is people can get a little to invested in a brand, and it blinds them to what tool is actually best for the job.
Its a case of working out what your going t be doing with your GPU, and when it comes to games only its hard to beat the 7950 for price/performance compared to the NVIDIA cards.
If you were going to play games and do a whole lot of work in Adobe after effects id say get the 660ti as the frame rate hit you will take in games is not huge and the advantages of Cuda would probably outweigh it.
id go for the 7950, at stock it competes with the GTX 660 Ti and for the large part beats it, but overclocked its then in battle with the GTX 670 a lot of the time.
Now the games I mostly play will be BF3, ARMA2 / DayZ, and stuff along those lines. Thing is Linus found some different results although the 660Ti doesn't come far behind at all. I'm so confused what to get lmao.
But........if you wanted to save some money and dont want to mess around with overclocking to much, out the box a 7870 Tahiti LE is worth a look is trading blows with the 7950 at only £177.60!!!!!
It get a little spicy and only has a single fan....but out the box it getting some amazing FPS for the £.
Dont get me wrong, the 660TI is a brilliant card (though not the best for overclocking by most accounts), but even in that video the 7950 beats it, and since the new driver updates I think the gap is a little wider in the 7950s favour.
You wont be unhappy with ether card, but if money is a real issue Id look at the £177 7870 Tahiti LE video below.
I dont think the I5 supports ram over 1.5v. Also if you are concerned about price why would you be getting the beast? If you had money to burn they i would say sure get all top tier parts but you can get perfectly good quality ram for around half the price.
I have already bought these parts and have them running fine, Also the RAM was sold as 1866MHz "Compatible with intel 3rd gen processors". I didn't know it was 1.65v untill it was actually installed on the motherboard, but luckily for me it runs fine at 1600MHz @ 1.5v, and apparently the 3rd Gen Ivy's support RAM @1.5v +/- 0.05v, so running it at 1.55v allows me to get it to run 1866MHz stable, and not pose a risk to the processor.
I made a thread on it here: http://teksyndicate.com/forum/other-hardware/165v-ram-3570k-would-some-help-please/129897