My cap of the price range for video cards is $500 +/- $10
Here are the specs for the rest of the system: Dan's System
Pretty much what I'm using the system for is:
Photoshop
Illustrator
Manga Studio
Sketchup
Blender
3ds Max (No heavy rendering or modeling)
Poser
Skyrim
Civ 4
And a Heavily modded version of Star Trek Bridge Commander.
I'm stuck on the idea of going with AMD for the graphics cards but I have heard you get the most performance for the money. So what does any one have an opinion on which one I should go with or even if there is a Nvidia card that will blow these two away at a similar price.
if you have the money for an R9 290 get it. The 290 will have better performance. Also more VRAM does not mean better performance, the 6GB on the 280x is really designed for crossfire. If it were my choice I'd get the R9 290
I'd grab a 290, but not that 290. I've seen the Sapphire Tri-x really close to that 500 mark lately, and it should outperform the MSI. I've read a couple of reviews saying there are a couple instability issues with it as compared to the gigabyte and sapphire offerings. However, if you cant find the others that one should be just fine too. I was looking at grabbing it the other day.
Actually I did have another question my cpu is an 8350fx on a sabertooth 990fx and i was wondering if getting the stronger graphics card will result in any bottle necking?
The 280X won't be able to utlize 6GB of vram unless you are running multi monitor setup, and even then it's kind of a waste. For 30 bucks more, it makes a lot of sense to get the r9 290, and that MSI model is a really good card too. You should be able to get a decent overclock out of it in the future.