I am about to build my new budget gaming rig. It is planned to have the following components:
Phenom X4 965
Corsair Vengance 1866MHz CAS 9
Asus M5A97 R2.0
Corsair Builder 500W
The GPU is where I cannot decide. I will be gaming on a 1920 x 1080 monitor (60Hz).
I could get a 660Ti for £220, a 670 for £300, a 7870 for £171 or a 7950 for £220.
I was wondering which one you think is the best value.. Spending less would be good, but I don't want to if I can get a worthy difference for paying more.
dude, et an amd fx-4300 or 6300, 1600 ram, and a 7870 or 7950
For a single 1920 x 1080 monitor at 60Hz, I would get the 7870. You'll be getting great performance at that resolution from the 7870. The other cards will be slightly better but not worth the extra money spent in my opinion, unless you planned to use multiple monitors or game at super high resolutions.
If you want it to be quiet and you edit on adobe premiere go with the 670 but if you are doing 3D and all you do is game then 7950 is the best for the money. Since it also does very well at high resolution becuase of the extra ram and speed. Fair warning though the 7950 will be louder and you need to watch watts I would impose getting a higher PSU maybe 650 or 700 at bronze. Good luck hunting
Imho a 7870 would be perfect for almost any game out there at 1080p.
If you want to go a little "over the top", then get a 7950 or a 660Ti. I personally own a Sapphire 7950 and I chose it 'cause in my country it was cheaper than the 660Ti, it's faster, it's got more ram, it overclocks way better, I had no use for nVidia features and wanted to mod Skyrim like crazy. But a 660Ti is also a great choice, depending on your needs.
When choosing between them the best thing you can do is read some benchmarks online to see which one performs better with the games you like and make sure of what features you will need. For example, if you want to overclock it a lot and don't need physx and stuff like that, you may want to get a 7950. In fact, I think the 660Ti would be more competitive if it was just a little bit cheaper. You'll be fine with either one, by the way.
Since you're on a budget (as I was myself) I wouldn't recommend a 670. I'm not saying it's not a good card (and I don't own one so I have no real experience with it), but judging on what I read online the relatively small performance gap between it and the 660Ti doesn't really justify the huge difference in price.
As ellogovern said, the 7950 will need a higher psu. A CX600 will be more than enough, no need to overdo it.
Good luck with your build! :)
yup, get the 7870...but try getting a better cpu though...the x4s are slow as shit...going fx will also take a couple of watts off of power consumption.
Also since your in the uk try videocardshop.co.uk cheaper than aria/ebay/amazon/ebuyer for gpu's. I got a 6870 a year ago for £140 when everyone else wanted £180+
current prices for a 7950 are £219 for new
or
a b graded stock with a year warranty (i think)
£199 - only 20 quid more than you were going to buy the 7870 for ;-)
just checked out the b graded stock it is 12m warranty plus it says thay are unused items that have been returned to factory and then brought as a job lot i dont know lol.
you could get a 6870 for £85 aswell lol
Thanks for all your help. Looks like I'll be going to get a 7870 as I have no plans on changing my monitor setup. I would look into getting an FX series chip, but I heard that their per thread performance is worse than the X4s. So wouldn't that be worse for gaming? The other option I have would be to get an i3 2120 (or similar), but I think I might miss the performance of four cores.