Advice on pricing a gaming pc

Blackjack_Davy

Personally I go for an R9 390 instead of an 970 its slightly faster has 8gb Vram and is usually cheaper. You'll need 600w PSU though. Oh and it doesn't suffer from the 3.5gb/slow 0.5gb Vram issues Nvidia saddled the 970 with.

Cisco001 wrote: »

Overclockers usually more expensive

You get a good warranty though and the staff have a quick and easy turnaround on faulty goods if something should go wrong.

God I sound like a sales rep for them...

PenguinJim

gonzo127 wrote: »

my apologies on the 960 to 970 comment, im sure i had read the reviews which showed only a small margin difference, but hey ho, guess my mind is playing tricks

Could be the 950 to the 960 you were looking at?

GunJack wrote: »

DO NOT skimp on the power supply if you're going for a card like the 970...you'll need a MINIMUM 500W PSU to run one of them, bigger would be better (600W plus)...

No, that's wrong. The 970 is extraordinarily power-efficient. They will work fine with a decent 450W PSU. More watts doesn't automatically make a PSU better - quality is far more important than quantity. Get a decent brand PSU with good reviews and at least a Bronze rating.

Blackjack_Davy wrote: »

Personally I go for an R9 390 instead of an 970 its slightly faster has 8gb Vram and is usually cheaper. You'll need 600w PSU though. Oh and it doesn't suffer from the 3.5gb/slow 0.5gb Vram issues Nvidia saddled the 970 with.

"Issues" that don't affect any of the benchmarks and therefore don't affect the reviews the 970 originally received (which were very positive). It still overclocks to near-980 performance, too.

The idea that 8GB of VRAM will make a difference during the next few years is optimistic - we've only just started to make use of more than 2GB, and we can historically see that increasing VRAM requirements are coming after increasingly long periods of time. By the time 4GB is a practical bottleneck, the 390 will be a relatively slow card anyway. The misconception that more than 4GB is useful seems to stem from the fact that some programs shift more data into VRAM than they're actually going to use, so you can (for example) have an 8GB graphics card saying it's using 5.3GB, while an otherwise-identical 4GB card will still provide identical performance. In other words, a card will look like it's using more than 4GB, but it's not actually getting a performance benefit from it. Kudos to AMD - it was a smart move to put 8GB on the 390 and 390x, but it was a marketing move rather than a performance benefit. (Not having a go at you - it's a very common misconception.)

Still, the 390 isn't bad - except the Linux performance is a joke (and presumably will be the same for SteamOS) and it's a much hotter and more power-hungry card than the 970. The game performance at 1080P and 1440P is identical between the 390 and 970 (in fact, even the £100-more 390x rarely beats the 970 at 1080P), and the 970 has the benefits of much lower power/heat, not needing a more powerful (more expensive) PSU, as well as generally being a better overclocker. So the £236 970 is a better buy than the £240 390 in the UK at the moment - and personally, I'd even recommend trying to get a bargain 290X rather than a 390: identical performance and potentially much cheaper. (You'll still need a quality PSU for a 290x, though!)

Yes, see if you can find a £190 (or cheaper!) AMD 290x - otherwise, the 970 is a better bet (based on today's prices).