Some great advice here. The bit about warranties is worth noting. I bought an EVGA card for mainly because they are considered the best manufacturer when it comes to returns and customer support. As mentioned, the warranty will cover the card, not just the first owner. There are two things I would recommend when building a gaming PC. First - don't scrimp on the PSU - get one around 500-700w and from a renown brand like Corsair, EVGA, Seasonic, Antec etc....there are plenty of others. Just avoid the cheap Chinese ones that may fail and take the whole system with it. Second - budget as much as possible for the GPU as it's the one component that makes by far the biggest difference when gaming. As you're in the UK may I suggest AVFORUMS classifieds section? It's a great site, I've been a member there for years and sold a couple of GPUs and other stuff through their classifieds. I could possibly put some feelers out to see if anyone is selling a card or you could post a 'wanted' ad?
Thanks again guys, I built my PC about 6 years ago, at the time it was a solid build, not ground breaking but solid enough to play the titles of the time. @nate, my power supply is a 580w G7 Power Extreme, no-one seems to know anything about who makes it so assume it's a cheap "avoid at all costs" brand, however, I've hunted high and low and found out it's made by a small specialist British firm called Compucase-HEC, I've actually become quite a fan, 6 years with no issues, they have a case I want later down the line too lol. The PSU I have is "pre-PCIe" but has plenty of free molex connections available for an adapter, my CPU is only a 95w TDP so, whichever card I go for, a new PSU shouldn't be a priority although I am aware that adapters aren't always a solution. @James Cook, that's a good shout with AVFORUMS, hadn't thought about that, I'll take a look and see what's about.
6 yrs is a pretty good lifespan for a build that doesnt break the bank from being bleeding edge and super high end everything. James gave a pretty good recommendation there, you might have some success going down that route. Probably better than mine honestly. I didnt realize you were in the UK, so most of the information I wrote might not be all that relevant, certainly regarding prices. I suppose the main point with your power supply is just that it has enough power. 580W is plenty even for power hungry cards and whatever else you have in your system. I was more concerned with it being a low wattage psu where a stronger gpu may make it burn... ha. If you are happy with it though, and havent had any issues with it, there probably isnt any reason to get a new one now. Perhaps down the road if you are interested in doing a whole new build, or mass upgrade. Anyways, on the bright side here... if you need a few extra bucks to get your gpu of choice, I hear that selling your kidney is quite lucrative these days. And who knows, with the left over funds you could probably even splurge on getting yourself a fancy sim racing cockpit Good luck on the hunt though. I hope you can find a gpu you're happy with.
Cheers mate, I had thought about selling a kidney but, the missus said no, also thought about selling my PS3 and golf clubs but she said no to that too 6 years ago, you could build a decent PC from the ground up, for £350 (about $700), which is what I did, today though your lucky to get a decent graphics card for half that alone. I've been gradually upgrading this year, £82 for a new motherboard, £56 for 8GB of RAM, £40ish for 2 new case fans (1x 120mm and 1x140mm) and a CPU cooler that was on sale, I broke the clear side panel "modifying" my tower when I got the new fans though so, now I just need a new case, CPU and GPU and I'd eventually like a 80+ Bronze rated (at least) PSU. Got to say though, I'm leaning towards nVidia for GPU, simply because they are more efficient in terms of power consumption.
Nvidia cards seem to play nice with ISI motor based sims. Apparently AMD drivers aren't as well optimised for this engine.
Im getting real pissed off at this bullshit planned obsolescence of the world, only cards for sale today are 960's 970's and 980's and theyre fucking USELESS compared to the older cards, sure some lower power usage and TDP but comon -.- They should be a big upgrade in performance god damnit not just paying 500+ euro for "lower heat lolz" I mean a 780Ti is equal or faster than the new gtx 980.......what...the fuck? My old and stock-as-fuck gtx 670 even beats my friends brand new factory OC 960... ITS GENERATIONS OLDER FFS!!! The old cards are where the gold is at! those old 680/770/780ti are magnificent! Absolutely beautiful cards that equal or outperforms these modern 9xx cards. Sure they generate more heat and consume more power but still... Its such unspeakable retardation to waste valuable resources on planned obsolescence just for the sake of greed, it angers me immensly This post was most likely completely useless information to everyone who reads it, in a bad mood and just needed to rant sorry ^^ TL;DR = Dont buy the Nvidia 9xx series imo, try getting your hands on an older GTX 670/680/770/780 wich will perform about the same (depending on model)
As promised, here are my graphics settings with GTX 670. Not really optimized, but framerate is ok. Lowest fps at Norisring with 20 AI is about 50, but goes up on the backstraight to about 80. But this is with quite high shadow and reflection settings, and also with motion blur. So there's a lot more room to achieve much more fps.
That's not bad at all, another world compared to mine lol. Thank you very much for providing them, you've given me plenty to think about.
as AMD launches a new lineup of cards next week, that may affect prices in the next months, too. @Öberg while it's good to hear that past cards make you happy, your conclusion in my opinion is a bit off, so I want to provide a different perspective, from an engineer working for such a hardware company. It is really expensive to design new chips as well as building them. There is only a handful of companies in the world that can produce latest technology chips (Intel, TSMC, Samsung, Global Foundries), and also few that can design such chips (Intel is one of the few who produce and design). Given those very few chip makers (foundries) the capacities are very sparse, for example TSMC produces chips for Apple, NVIDIA, AMD and other companies in parallel. Say Apple brings out a new product, other companies may suffer if they want to produce chips in that timeframe as the capacity just isn't there. Because of that sparsity it is simply not economical to produce "older chips", because there is barely enough room for the new chips due to how insanely expensive the whole production of new technology chips is, only over time it becomes cheaper. Modern GPUs are the most complex chips created, there are no other chips with more transistors. This takes a lot of effort and years to make. By the time a product comes out, more years have gone into the chip then the time since the last product, so it may seem like "gen T GPU came out, now we start with gen T+1". However, that is not true at all, the chip is in development longer than that and multiple generations may be worked on in parallel. NVIDIA spends more than a billion dollars per year on research & development to improve the customer experience, improving the hardware and software. So the GM2xx chip series (960, 970, 980) has seen a lot of engineering effort internally, as did previous, and delivers more than just saving power, this may not be visible in all games as the hardware in general has become so fast over the years that being CPU bound again is often a problem. So when people say their framerate improved in Windows10, that's due to win10 having a better driver model for modern GPUs, meaning less CPU time spent. It's also the reason we get those new "lower-level" apis (dx12, vulkan, metal), that fit better to how GPUs work today. Another consequence is that we also have that DSR, 4k downsampling and such, to generate more GPU work and improve quality independent of CPU work. Typically that's something where you should see a difference from older generations to newer ones and also the reason why many benchmarks test those high resolutions today. So GPU programming techniques is not just about shaders, it's a lot about how you use the graphics apis to make sure the GPU doesn't starve from work. If you remember some of the Unreal4 demos that took multiple cards in SLI to run efficiently now being able to run with single card, that shows the true potential of the new chips. So it's really more than "just" heat savings (power/heat is really a major limiter in computing, so improving that has top priority and is hard), even if it may not be visible in all games at 1080p. No one forces you to upgrade from a system that works well for your needs. Some more details around chip design and production: http://techreport.com/review/28126/semiconductors-from-idea-to-product
I have Vsync on @ 5760x1080 resolution. I get smoother video on my 60hz gaming monitors, lower temps, less stress on the card and I don't get the micro stutter/stutter when transitioning from 125 fps to 70 fps (@ 1920x1080). How much input lag are we talking about? A blink of an eye? Maybe 2 blinks? What did you use to measure input lag in your "tests"? If the input lag equals 2 or more seconds per lap, I'll turn Vsync off. I have seen REALLY FAST drivers using TV's as their monitor. TV's usually have atrocious input lag compared to gaming monitors. Until I can match those guys with my 2ms gaming monitors, I don't think a blink of an eye is going to matter much. But if someone knows how much of a difference Vsync on vs off really is (actual data), I'd really like to know.
WUT?!!! damn it! I just had a water cooled GTX 980ti delivered! I'm returning it for a 670 I'm kidding - I've had days like you're having! Everyday, I struggle with "should I keep my 6970's? Or should I buy a water cooled GTX 980ti? I must be having a worse day I actually read your entire post. Put in some fast laps. You'll feel better. It works for me....and I still have my 6970's.
I always use vsync and I play on a LCD TV which I assume has a fair bit of input lag to begin with. The lag is not something I really notice hence it doesn't bother me. Screen tear is more distracting to me so I'd rather go for the smooth 60fps experience with a touch of lag.
I brought a Gtx750ti on the weekend as the gt720 I had wasn't cutting it. Finally got it working yesterday and very happy with it so far. Got quite a few settings maxed out and all the eye candy on so now the game looks really good and feels way more immersive!
About time AMD really went after Nvidia and their piss-take prices. The new range of cards sound promising and are very reasonably priced. The FuryX looks like it will go head-to-head with the Titan X for a much lower price. Good stuff.
Sorry gents, it's been pointed out that I got the price point wrong, could have sworn I heard $600. Prices are actually: FuryX: $649 Fury $549 Sorry about the mix up, still, very good prices in my opinion.