Upgrade Time, Perhaps? Discussion of Haswell-E Desktop Platform and Display Revisions

Jarl,

I was looking primarily at the R9 290, but I will admit I do prefer NVidia, do you know how those two cards compare to the 290? I haven't really pushed the overclocking envelope on video cards since in my experience I haven't been able to get any notable boost in performance - the cards I've bought are already overclocked from the manufacturer.

If you were looking at the 780 then here is a benchmark GPUBoss did on itvs the R9 290 Radeon R9 290 vs GeForce GTX 780 Ti, The 780 beats it but they come close to one another in most tests. Like you said before you could just upgrade the GPU or go for a whole new build altogether and get some new goodies..
 
Craig: I'm definitely not looking to spend that much up front. I'd probably be more interested in buying the 970 now and buying a second one later should I move to 4k gaming since I don't currently have a 4k monitor, or even a 2k for that matter. Wishful thinking :) Plus, the 970 has some of the nice new tech to help future proof it some.

BK: You're right, the 780Ti and the R9 290 are similar in performance, but the 970 seems to be nearly as powerful as the 780 (if not more powerful in several instances) and its far more efficient for less money. Unless there is a price drop that comes in the next 2 weeks or sooner then I doubt the 780 would be something I'd be looking at too closely. I'm pretty sold on the 970 architecture, especially since it supports HDMI 2.0 and has the other future proofing features. I imagine adding a second one to SLi would be a good upgrade a 6 months down the road or so if I end up getting a 4k display.

The problem now lies in which brand to purchase. EVGA was initially my first choice, but I've read quite a few reviews that suggest the cooler is cheap/flimsy and loud, and its output connections are not nearly as good as the reference output (only 1 DP instead of 3). The Gigabyte is the only card I've seen that has the 3 DP connections but the card is...wait for it...15.9" long! That wouldn't fit in my case unless I removed the HDD cage, and I've got 4 drives in the bays so I'd have to buy 4 5.25" adapters or buy a new case. While I'm not 100% against a new case, that'd be a lot of extra money that I don't really need to spend - money that I'd rather save for a second 970 or a beautiful display ;D
 
Yeah, hardly any reason to purchase a 295X2. Unless someone has like duel 4K monitors it has very little purpose. Still funny to think it's better then the Titan Z and it's a third the price. :lol:
 
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