finally time to upgrade, best value?

[piscian18]

It's strange you know as a mid-level gamer the industries been pretty damn slow. I've been running my goofy little 760 and gtx 460's sli for 4 friggin years and just this year I'm having to go medium level settings.

So right now my 460's are gone and I'm running a GTX570. using Battlefield 4 as a standard and I just want high settings not ultra 16x whatever, what's the best value right now? I noticed mention that bitcoins gone or soon to be and miners are dumping boxes so a ton of 270x cards can be had cheaply. Is that a huge upgrade or should I go higher? where does the stupid money start? Gaming at 1080p.

 

[Araxie]

At this Point i would not buy anything less than a GTX 770 or a R9 280X. .. being the GTX 780 and R9 290 the sweet spot.. anything less and the next year you will be struggling as you are now.. btw if your sig its actual overclock that i5 760.. You Will hold back seriously any recent card

 

[GRAFiZ]

Find a pair of cheap GTX 660's and run them in SLI. Depending on the application you'll be sitting somewhere between a 680 and 780 in performance. All for $350 or less.

 

[Nahawand]

At this Point i would not buy anything less than a GTX 770 or a R9 280X. .. being the GTX 780 and R9 290 the sweet spot.. anything less and the next year you will be struggling as you are now.. btw if your sig its actual overclock that i5 760.. You Will hold back seriously any recent card

Second that both on the 780, 290 and on the overclock even with 3.9 on my i5 750, I still hold back these old 480's in some games try getting a nice 4.0 overclock on it, and grab a 780 pre overclocked thing is a beast.

 

[psyclist]

Get a used 290 for $300, and overclock your machine! (make sure you have decent cooling before OCing) For BF4 you can run mantle and it will help with the weaker CPU, boom, you can now run ultra settings

 

[exlink]

Find a pair of cheap GTX 660's and run them in SLI. Depending on the application you'll be sitting somewhere between a 680 and 780 in performance. All for $350 or less.

I would advise against this. Even though SLI has been worked on quite a bit and is in a very good state, there are still situations where multi-GPUs struggle. Scaling is entirely dependent on the program, you can get anywhere from negative scaling (lose performance) to 100% scaling, its a crapshoot. Multi-GPU's also generally create more heat and use more power than their similar performance single GPU solution. And while micro-stutter seems to be a thing of the past in most situations, it still rears its ugly head up here and there. The only time I ever find the multi-GPU option viable is if you run triple monitors/high resolution (1440p+) and invest in two high-end cards, or as an upgrade path for an existing single GPU.

My personal recommendation would be a GTX 780. I bought my brand new one for $430 last December, but I've seen used ones go for $380-400 around here. More than enough to max nearly all games at 1080p.

 

[rhansen5_99]

I never had any issues with a 7970ghz at 1080p on any of the games I tried even cranking up all the settings. Might be a good idea to look for one of those used off mining rig as it is basically a 280x. That being said you can find brand new 290's if you look at close to 300$.

 

[Soulwrath]

Currently in a rig i have a i5-750 @ 4.0 Ghz with a 7970 (equivalent r9 280x) no bottleneck

you should be fine but have adequate cooling/ air flow - you could pick up a R9 290 for $300 but just know that the GPU WILL GET HOT