If I am not looking to be overclocking from what the card comes with is there any advantage of getting one brand over another?
The aftermarket cooling solution and that some cards come factory overclocked.
ok so out of these 2 graphics cards which would be the better one in your personal opinion?
http://www.umart.com.au/pro/products_listnew.phtml?id=10&id2=247&bid=6&sid=89515
http://www.umart.com.au/pro/products_review.phtml?id=10&bid=6&id2=247&sid=91618
I would go for an ASUS DirectCU II, or MSI Power Edition. The performance of the coolers are phenormenal compared to the reference designed cooler. The PCB is also completely re-designed with their own higher quality components on them.
You can also buy a reference card and throw your own cooler aftermarket cooler on it. Artic VGA coolers are really nice.
The coolers are all pretty good and any overclocking that is done on the card is useually light and can be done for free so realy the only thing to differentiate manufactures is warrenty.
For AMD get XFX they generaly have small overclocks, decent coolers, are useually one of the cheapest and have are the only AMD cards that have a lifetime warrenty.
in my opinion i always go for MSI twin forzr, my next in line is asus directCU. i find the cooling of these is jsut immence compared to the reference coolers, in terms if each other theres not TOO much difference.
MSI
asus
as you can see from them same GPU pretty much same speeds. only difference is cooler and software so you just gotta see what you prefer. :)