In August I will have the money to get a new GPU, my budget will be $220 (possibly a bit more we will see). What I am looking for more than anything is vendor/card manufacturer recommendations, which vendor you would recommend. I am not looking for the get whatever is cheapest argument, I'm being a bit picky here so I am more than willing to spend all my money on a card if I can trust that it will perform.
What I am looking for is
Overclock ability/stability
Cooler performance (not looking for quiet)
Support if something possibly went wrong
Feature sets
I prefer AMD, but if I can be convinced to go to green, so be it. My usual go to is Sapphire's Vapor-X cards but I would like another opinion.
Also for those of you who color match: my board has red accents and my RAM is blue
Thank you all for the responses and putting up with my bat-shit crazy :)
I like MSI's Gaming cooler, unfortunately if you don't have a horizontal motherboard all you will see is the highly reflective MSI logo on the top of the card instead of the black fans and red accents. The reflection is not a bad thing, its quite nice, even in the dark with small amounts of light I can clearly see the logo.
I like Sapphire too, all my video cards were from them. MSI has some huge fans, those cool very well, and a very nice color scheme (red and black). And Gigabyte's tri cooled 270X is a monster of a card.
I don't think that overclockability is vendor dependent, it is more dependent on the luck of the draw (unless we're talking about OC versions, which are cherry picked to achieve good overclocks). My own opinion is that as long as you get a card with a custom PCB there won't be any difference between vendors.
If I may, the best card you can buy within your budget is the R9 280 (non X). AMD beats NVIDIA at price-to-performance ratio at every price point below $400, with the exception of the GTX 770 which is about $350 MSRP because it has no competing AMD product (the closest rivals are R9 280X at $300 and R9 290 at $400). And AMD has better support for linux.
The vendor might indeed have an impact on overclockability. The cooling solution is vital (though all the older cards have good temperatures) and other components on the PCB are also chosen by the vendor (voltage controls for example). I have had good experiences with all the above mentioned vendors. Go AMD if you are into price/performance. If you need the hardware H264 encoding, go Nvidia (thats not really worth it imo)
I would like to get an R9 280 but its a little bit too far out of my price range. Thanks for the thought I will be on the lookout for a 280 in my budget when the time comes.
Edit: after checking pcpartpicker the 280 might be a viable option because I did see several that were close enough to price range, thank you for bringing this to my attention.
I am not too sure about Club cards. From what I have read from reviews of previous XFX graphics cards, they seem to give great results and be pretty dependable. From afar the card looks basic but after looking at it the mat black finish is a nice touch.