General Discussions

I currently have a AMD Radon R9 280X. I just upgraded my processor from a i5 to i7 4790K. Now looking to upgrade my graphics card. What is the next tier card? I'm not doing 4k and not interested in using multiple cards. I have looked around but with everything being labeled so different it's hard to find a common standard to judge by.

I'm looking in the $400-500 range and hoping to make it last for a few years. I'm mainly interested in performance. Are there any cards in my range that are worth getting (meaning out perform my current card) or should I keep what I got?

Thought I'd come here since you guys would know more about the issue than I. In case you couldn't tell I've only been on PC a few months. Thanks in advance for your input.

There's a good discussion on the new NVidia 900 series cards here you might read over:

[url]cheathappens.com/show_board2.asp?headID=123841&titleID=8463'>Link

Then have a look at this chart for "High End Videocards - Updated 13th of November 2014"

[url]videocardbenchmark.net/high_end_gpus.html'>Link

I bought a GTX Titan Black to get the 6GB VRam on a single card and it kills everything I play but it was fairly pricey. I think right now the GeForce GTX 980 card is the way to go for a single card. Would be a nice compliment to your new processor and make a really sweet rig. I don't know if or when there will be a GTX 980 Ti but you might check if there's any new info for releasing that model as yet.

Hope that info will be of some help to you.





[Edited by element5, 11/14/2014 12:59:35 AM]

I eventually bought the dream pc I wanted like I stated in the last post, pic's here:Link

So as you can see I had no choice but to buy the 980 since haswell-e processors dont have integrated gpu, I can honestly say that so far this card is the best card I ever had.
I still think it's a hoax and it does performes pretty much like the 780ti, but it's much cooler and power efficient and not a single problem or issues like tdr's which I had tons of with my older gtx770 and gtx780ti and you can even find a lot of threads about those issues with the 700 series.
As of today there isnt a single gpu card which can run all games on ultra settings and above 60 fps, accept that.
If you're a pedant and you want to play top notch graphics titles on ultra settings and above 60 fps think about SLI configuration.

didn't know you upgraded your rig bro

looks awesome, nice stuff indeed

btw tomorrow i am getting also a 980 ^^ Link

and i added a new cpu waterblock
Link

now lets see what this new 980 does with assassin unity

@Kingkob That's a dandy. Now you can dload that ultra texture pack for Mordor. Nice rig bro.

@Jackbig My Titan Black is an EVGA also, great stuff. I've never had a minute's problem with EVGA.

Gentlemen.... Start your engines.

Thanks guys it's always great to see there are enthusiastic out there like me.
Jack congrats on your decision, the cooler looks awesome, I think I made a little mistake with my cooler, it cools my cpu just fine but I didnt know that haswell-e are a bit hotter than mainstream cpu's especially when idle and that causes my cooler fans to be tad noisy..
Btw guys about Evga, they are probably the best cards manufactures in the world right now, I wanted so much to buy my 980 from Evga but there is not one to be found over here, I think they stopped importing to my country.

That or maybe they're just backed up trying to keep up with the demand there must be now for the 900 series cards.

So what brand did you go with then? For the noise, do you have any sound dampening insulation inside your case? That's something you could add to it if the sound continues to bother you.

You'll probably be so into your games you won't even notice the world around you.

I went with Asus like my mobo brand, I'll never go near Gigabyte again my both last cards were Gigabyte windfoce and altough they were beasts I had lots of issues with them and even physical issues with the windforce coolers, fans started to rattle after heavy use for a while.

The issue with the cooler noise doesnt bother me at all while gaming or while the cpu is in full load doing something else, the noise bothers me during idle time when making simple tasks.
You see there is something really strange about these cpu's with dd4 xmp profile.
If everything is on default on bios without xmp or any oc on the cpu my idle temp is about 28-30c and peaks over doing simple tasks to 40-42c, so I dont hear the cooler fans at all.
The problem rises after applying the xmp profile which for some weird reason slightly overclocks the cpu by rasing it bclk to 125mhz and lowering the multiplier to 29 on all six cores which resaults in slightly oc'd cpu from 3600mhz to 3625mhz.
But this werid method causes the cpu to act really odd only on idle, on load it acts the same way without the xmp profile and the fans rpm are consistent.
When idle the cpu is 10c hotter and peaks on simple tasks from 41-42c to 51-52c, that causes the cooler fans to constantly accelerate when 51-52 and slow down when 41-42, that's the noise that drives me mad.
I hope you understood when xmp is off and the temps peak from 30 to 40 there is almost no change in fans rpm in those kind of temps but when the cpu seats when idle on temps that constitute a turning point for the fans than it really becomes annoying.

[Edited by kingkob, 11/15/2014 2:48:00 AM]