GTX 660 vs HD 7870

Hardware Hub GPU
1

My friend is buying a PC and he wants to know which of these is better:

http://www.asus.com/Graphics_Cards/HD7870DC2T2GD5/

http://www.asus.com/Graphics_Cards/GTX660DC2O2GD5/

The price difference is negligible. And those are the two best available for the money he has. The CPU is FX-8320 with 8 GB of 1600MHz RAM. Will probably overclock the CPU in the future but not the GPU. He'll also use only one display.

He plans to do gaming and doesn't plan to upgrade too much in the future - but thinks the 8 cores will be useful with the Xbone and PS4 using 8 cores.

2

It's close, but I would give it to the 7870. It would probably overclock much further than the 660. More games will be optimised for AMD in the future.

http://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/857?vs=783

3

What about the Nvidia PhysX? Is it still relevant?

4

The performance impact of PhysX would probably hurt the 660 too much. Not only that, but you can actually utilise your CPU for PhysX. It's not something that is exclusive to Nvidia. AMD are working on their own version of PhysX using Open CL, I believe.

Very few games actually use PhysX.

5

I'm sure Arma uses PhysX- doesn't it?

I asked the same question (660 vs. 7870) a while back so I'm curious as well. I'm still waiting for Cyber Monday to order my gaming PC.

6

Don't you need a GPU cooler to overclock them?

7

I've had both 660 and 7870. The 660 runs better with arma (due to physx). But in nearly every game other than one's that utilise physx 7870 will prevail. In BF3 i was getting nearly 10 fps more on the 7870.

Go with the 7870 and overclock it. The cooler will hold up very well.

8

That's unusual. Battlefield 3 is optimised for Nvidia. Would have thought it was the other way around. Maybe the 660ti is a better match

9

Every GPU has a cooler. The ASUS aftermarket cooler is recommended.

10

If you want to use PhysX, get a better card that can actually handle PhysX lol.