emperor76
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Hi all, I will have £150 at most to spend on a graphics card in about a weeks time, I was wondering what the best graphics card for that money is, thanks in advance
NVIDIA: Asus NVIDIA GTX 960 STRIX DirectCU II OC Graphics Card - 2GB - STRIX-GTX960-DC2OC-2GD5 - Scan.co.uk
OR
MSI NVIDIA GTX 960 GAMING Graphics Card - 2GB - GTX960-GAMING2G - Scan.co.uk
(£19 over but I wanted to provide a team green option since on the whole i prefer them. Asus and MSI are my two favorite GPU board partners also)
AMD: MSI Radeon R9 380 GAMING AMD Graphics Card 2GB - R9 380 GAMING 2G - Scan.co.uk
(£8 over 150, but it's the MSI custom PCB which is a really good overclocker, besides coming factory-overclocked as is. Plus really nice Twin Frozr cooler and sweet backplate)
The R9 380 is basically a refresh of the R9 270/270X (same GPU, different PCB, new design on the cooler from MSI, Sapphire also with a slightly different cooler design).
Personally, I'd always go with NVIDIA over AMD in the future if your budget will stretch to meet NVIDIA's usually-higher price points. I would safely say that the 960, especially the STRIX or the MSI-G will out perform the radeon and stay cooler.
There would be no discernable benefit from opting AMD based on having an AMD CPU
I bought the 270X a short time ago because i needed something to game on since my GTX570 was showing it's age, and I had little funds at the time and found a good deal. In hindsight I sort of wish i'd gone for the GTX960 and spent those extra few pounds.
2GBs refers to the VRAM (frame buffer). More VRAM means you can play with higher anti-aliasing settings and at higher resolutions.
for 1080p, 2GBs is fine unless you have a huge urge to run like 8xMSAA. Basically the more anti-aliasing you want to utilise and the larger resolutions you want to play at, the more VRAM you need.
playing at 1080p, 2GBs is a decent enough frame buffer, sometimes to play games on entirely maxed settings 4GBs would be required to allow the card to render the textures fast enough to give good frame rates.
I Had a 1.5GB GTX570 until recently, then a 2GB R9 270X... and I can play some of the newest titles on medium/high without hitting the top of the frame buffer at 1080p.
Also, once you get your new card, you may want to squeeze a bit more performance out of it, because often the GPU clock is set back to an overly-safe limit to pass quality control. You play the silicon lottery when you buy a GPU as to whether you get a cracker of a chip or one that can only just run at it's stock frequency. Either way it's worth trying to eek as much out of it as you can. Performance per £ matters!
Guide I wrote (it's posted in the overclocking forum here too):=
https://jaklawrencetech.wordpress.com/2015/06/29/gpu-overclocking-how-to/
The GTX960 outperforms the graphics in a PS4 by a decent length. The only real benefit of the PS4 is that it's silent.