Help choosing between R9 280 or R9 380

Hardware GPU
21

I would look and see if theres ram somewhere else that would work as well as if you can get an older SSD. I my rig I have a mix of some Samsung ram that was in another machine (4GB that you can buy for like 10 bucks) and some G.Skill ram that I wouldn't have been able to get otherwise (normal looking dimms but overclockable).

For an OS drive I have a samsun P800 64GB SSD. 30 GB for windows, 26 GB for linux, and the rest of the space is linux swap space. The SSD is purely to boot from and to store updates. Each side only uses 8 GB with windows 10 on one side and Linux on the other. You might find it helpful to do it that way especially if you have High RPM HDD's. Most of the HDD's in my system I already had, I only bought one. You could probably find a 64 GB SSD for 25-40 (based on USD) or at least not for very much. At the same time to find a 750 GB drive and use a laptop hard drive you might have lying around would work just fine. Theres a lot of cash you can save :P

22

190 dollars for 280 is too much. I would start at 290 380 390 / 970 . My tri ox has never been above 50 ish degrees at ultra.

23

The ram is like the smallest issue. The ram prices are great. Second hand ram is often more expensive than brand new. No matter they fallow the rule 40% lower price then the one you bought it. Still, ram is really cheap right now.
@veseliqloss, I see what you mean about the motherboard. My motherboard is more expensive than my cpu and ram combined, so I see what you mean.

2 Likes
24

Good advice, thank you :)

Although i am not a big fan of using both Linux and Windows on the same HDD/SSD. It's ... messy.
That's why i use Кubuntu on my laptop and Windows on PC. The programs i use for design are no-go on Linux.