GTX 680 or Radeon 7970?

Im looking to get a good graphics card for my new PC build, i dont want to spend much more than 500. Should I go with the 680 or 7970, and what brand.

Personally I would go for the 680. I think the performance is a little better and nvidea has also released drivers that boost the performance similar to what the AMD drivers did, atleast from what I know.

and as to the brand. I would go for either ASUS, Gigabyte or MSI. and get one of the models with a non-reference cooler. (depends on your case, if you have a small case with limited cooling, then a standard blower-style cooler is probably best) fx MSI Ligthning/Twin Frozr, Asus Direct CU2. alot of other brands also has good GPU's with good coolers, but these are probably some of my first choices.

i agree ^

the performance is better... on certain games, me myself would go with the 680 aswell, you know come for the heat then when that isn't a problem stay for teh CUDA, but if dual GPUing, then don't get the AMD cards unless they release the right drivers. It all depends on what your doing really, I always seem to buy AMD for the cheaper price, but yet would probably be better with an Nvidia card

i hvae had both a 680 and 7970 I am sticking by the 7970 side as the price is lower and performance is pretty equal dependant on games. i have found also that the 7970 is better at overclocking too which is a great bonues for even more performance. 

Edit* forgot to ask what resolution and if you game only use photoshop and the likes.

For the expensive, multiple screens I own, I get AMD. For the gaming rigs I build for my friends I buy nvidia.

AMD did have driver issues, especially for movie codecs, but they fixed all that. Corssfire is still a gripe with me, but so is SLi. I dont like getting the best new game out and having to wait a month to get the SLi/crossfire profiles so I can use both cards, is just stupid. Nvidia usually keeps ontop of stuff like that so it isnt an issue but not always. AMD are shocking at keeping uptodate with crossfire profiles and its usually the indie games I get annoyed with the most.

But! TBH, get the one you think has the best cooling, clocks and price.

I split hairs cos I'm an obsecure nerd, with a wooden pc, and have 4 monitors, doing all sorts of crazy shit. From building my own linux OS, to virtualising a gaming system (Xen + VT-d passthroughs to my gpu) , to photo editing and video encoding...

If you arent going to tell me ur specific needs, get the cheapest one for dollars with the best bang.

Agreed with zwan ^^^^^^

Excellent points Zwan but don't forget AMD made huge improvements recently in their drivers with the 12.11 beta.  It looks like AMDs driver team is finally starting to get things right.