Hi,
I come to you with a question. I am currently thinking about upgrading my 3-months-old PC with a budget GTX 950 and I would like to know if I should wait a couple of months for Pascal GPUs to come down in price, or should I buy an R9-390 or similar high-end card. What would the Pascal offer me on the gaming side?
I have a R9 390, it's a very nice card
But if you can afford to wait then there's no harm in it. The prices for the 390 won't go up with the new generation out. You can always just buy a 390 later if none of the new cars suit you.
So it's wait until april to see? I'd love to up my game later this year (money is a big issue), so I'm not sure if the price point for an entry-level Pascal will be worth it. I'm not one for early adoption, after all, I've got an FM2 mobo socket :-D
So I think I'll watch NVidia show their hand and then buy a cheaper 390. Any other cards in the Maxwell area that are better? R9 Fury perhaps? R9 Nano?
I would go 390 as it has DX12 support.
If you want Nvidia you have to wait. I am looking at the history of them "downgrading" their older products through software. (the 780ti should be faster than the 960)
Edit: The Fury is a really awesome card (overkill for 1080p). If you can get a Fury or Nano for cheap, go for it!
Its really depending on how much you value your money compared to better performance now. You will probably have better deals if you wait until release, even if it's just getting second hand cards from people who are upgrading from already good cards.
i would personaly wait for the newer cards.
Pascal or Polaris.
Waiting until launch is a must, I'll have money first in Q3 2016. I'll probably buy a nano or something... Any other cards I should look for?
I´m not sure, but i have seen rumors about AMD might launch Polaris pretty quickly.
I don't really know that much about the upcoming cards, but if I was in your position. then I would wait until about a month after release day, look at ebay and what you can get for what you have. You will be able to get a really good deal for an almost new card. Its crazy how many people are willing to sell a perfectly good card just so they can have the newest thing.
Might be a good plan, although the R9 Nano has gone down to 531$ where I am. As well as being pretty darn good price (it was about 800$ previously in the same shop), it's good to have a new card because warranty, immediate replacement and other services alza.cz provides. I'll probably wait until early-adopters turn their backs towards maxwell and pay alza a visit. Are there any better gaming cards out there? I'm really not sure what to look for, so I look for GBs.
The nano will drop even further when Polaris comes out, provided there are no better Polaris or Pascal alternatives, grab a nano.
Perfect. Will do. It looks great and it won't ruin the aesthetics of my Alea M50 case. It'll all be small and cute. I've got a 520W PSU from Corsair, will it be enough? The GTX950 is basically a no-brainer, it's terrific on power, but what about the R9 Nano?
That's more than enough power for an FM2 CPU + nano/950.
Splendid :-) thank you. After I buy the Nano (I'm sold now, all things about it look like a great improvement), I'll probably try to passthrough PCIe so I can run games under Linux, although I'm not sure if my CPU can handle it, but that's for another time. Thank you, guys! All of you!
I just looked at the AMD website, and they say that the required PSU is at least 600W. Is that a deal-breaker, if I have the 520W PSU? My other setup is the X4 860K Black edition, 8GB of RAM, 5 fans and 1 HDD and front case peripherals. Will it still run, or will it flop?
Should be fine max load would be arround 400W so you are mostly good.
Yeah, but the Nano has basicly 1 con.
And that is thermal throttling.
Also a Nano paired with a athlon 860K, i´m not sure if that combo would be worth it tbh.
So from Maxwell and similar gen cards, would you recommend the R9 390? That may be a little hard on the PSU, though. I don't want to have the bleeding edge because it's bleeding edge, I want something powerful that will fit my build nicely. I know a little bottlenecking from the CPU is to be expected, but why wouldn't it be worth it? What would you recommend?
The best gpu to pair with your current athlon 860K to get the most efficiency out of the gpu on 1080p.
Will probably be a R9-380 (X) 4Gb or a GTX960 4GB.
If you allready have a GTX950 atm?
Then i would recommend just save a bit more money to do a bigger upgrade lateron.
OK, I'll probably do that. I'm thinking of doing a CPU upgrade first, seeing as my GPU is not really that bad off at the moment. I'll up my CPU to probably an Octa-core once I get paid for a book I'm doing now, swap out the whole mobo and CPU, give the old ones to my GF (her PC is shite) and afterwards I'll do a bigger upgrade of the GPU. I know it's hopping between 2 bottlenecks, but whatever, I can roll with it.
Speaking of upgrading, I now realized how good it would be for me to go 4K for most of my work (writing, mostly). So I'm thinking of buying a 4K monitor, something cheap, but 4K nonetheless for my usual work. I could open 4 Word windows at once and have each at fullHD. What would the gaming be like? I'm not a madman, I don't want to squeeze 4K out of a 950, but if I play at 1080p, will the monitor itself cause trouble? I'm not sure about that, instinct tells me it shouldn't, but I want to be completely sure.
I'm really considering the R9 380 or 390 now, found a SAPPHIRE NITRO R9 380X (sorry for capitals, copy-paste) and it's looking pretty affordable.
Will the CPU upgrade be worth it for approx. 250$ if I get an AMD FX-8350 and a fitting gigabyte motherboard?