Im looking at upgrading my GPU soon and im in the market at about 300-400 USD and this evening I found that newegg has refurbished HD 7990s for sale at about 300$ depending on the make. Right now im using an i7 4770k with a r9 270x. Any thoughts on going with that path?
Meh. It is a dual GPU card. Basically the same as running two 7970/280Xs in Crossfire. They are really long, hot and loud and drink the power. Plus you have the inherent issues of running two GPUs. Plus, you really don't need that much power.
If you wanted, for a little more, you could get two R9 290s. Or just one. Or a GTX 970.
Really long, yes, but hot and loud? The 7990 actually runs fairly cool and quiet, being around 82C max on stock settings and 55dB at load. That's pretty much the same as a reference GTX 780 Ti, and sure as hell a lot quieter than the reference R9 290.
Back to the question though:
If you have two PCI-E to use, go for two 7970/280Xs and reap the benefits of a few extra frames. If you only have one PCI-E, a 7990 might not be a bad choice.
There is always the GTX 970, but with the rumor mill running non-stop about "GM200" I'd wait before buying as it could become more available at agreeable prices soon-ish.
Its not really much of an upgrade to me though. if you had like 50 bucks extra I would look at a gtx 970 but if you want to go amd just grab a r9 290
I went from 6970 back to 5970 back in the 7970's reign as GPU king days. back when everybody was playing BF3. Boy was it bad, AMD never really supported the 5000s series after their 7000 series and every nvidia patch the competitive benchmarks got closer or better. I also didn't realized later that 5970 didn't have enough vram and was stuttering I had to upgrade from a quad core to 1090T to alleviate the bottleneck and yea it was truly a bottleneck compared to the 100+ forum bottleneck topics here.
It depends on what games you play. If you're in to BF4 or something that takes advantage of crossfire sure. But if you play a myriad of games and 2 or 3 of them doesn't have SLI/Crossfire then I would suggest against it.
For me I played SC2, Dota 2 and Diablo 3 back then and all of them didn't support crossfire. Once I got bored of BF3 there wasn't any game that I played that used it so it eventually sold it.
A 270x to 290x or 970/780 isn't that good of an upgrade. Sure you get 10-30% increase on some games but I would just wait 2 more months for that new AMD GPU to hit the market. Expect like 290x and 970s to drop 50 to 100 dollars during that month.Keep in mind ur not benefiting much going from 60 fps to 120 fps unless u have a 120 hz or more monitor.