I've been doing some research for the most optimal graphics card for my new build. And Radeon 7870's fit my budget (around 200$ for a graphics card) and I was watching different reviews and I can't compare them. What are your opinions about the 7870's and which one of them should I look up?
Note: I'm not into OC so and I want to keep temp. below or around 70*C. So far the Sapphire GHz edition was the one that caught my eye
Whatever you do, do not buy XFX version. Mine is well - pretty fucked up. It was getting immensly hot (above 90''c at times) and loud as hell with the DD cooler. Also one of the fans is starting to degrade (making louder and louder noises). So I decided not to use the warranty and see for myself what's up. I opened the card and under the plate there was WAY too many thermal pads and they were not sitting on the ram chips. After that I noticed that the heatsink is missing 1 out of 4 heatpipes. Great.
My suggestion would be, get the 7950. Prefferably Asus or Gigabyte. But if you do decide for the 7870 (which is not a bad card) make sure you get the Tahiti version as it's the same GPU as 7950 :)
7950 is a bit too costy for me. Can you tell me the advantages of the 7950 over 7870?
the performance for the price you will pay extra will be quite awesome. 7950 is just a more capable card and that extra 1 GB of memory (3GB in total) will be great for big textures and resolutions :)