Help deciding on a GPU

Beta · April 5, 2015

Hey guys, I have completed most of my PC Build but I want to get a new GPU as the one I have got is rather old (Radeon HD 6670 2GB). My budget is around £200. I am running an AMD FX6300 3.8Ghz , on a GIGABYTE Motherboard (I forget the model), 8GB RAM and I have a 750W Corsair PSU. I was looking at the R9 280 or 280x. I run a Dual Screen Setup at 1680x1050 (I know a weird res) and want to play games such as Skyrim, BF3, BO2 at 60FPS on max settings (I am not too far from this), Could you please recommend a GPU for around £200 (I know R9's are $200 in US but they are more expensive in the UK), AMD or Nvidia that would sufficiently run these Games at Ultra or equivalent and ideally go above and beyond these games.

Thanks in advance.

Wirbelfeld · April 5, 2015

Hey guys, I have completed most of my PC Build but I want to get a new GPU as the one I have got is rather old (Radeon HD 6670 2GB). My budget is around £200. I am running an AMD FX6300 3.8Ghz , on a GIGABYTE Motherboard (I forget the model), 8GB RAM and I have a 750W Corsair PSU. I was looking at the R9 280 or 280x. I run a Dual Screen Setup at 1680x1050 (I know a weird res) and want to play games such as Skyrim, BF3, BO2 at 60FPS on max settings (I am not too far from this), Could you please recommend a GPU for around £200 (I know R9's are $200 in US but they are more expensive in the UK), AMD or Nvidia that would sufficiently run these Games at Ultra or equivalent and ideally go above and beyond these games.

Thanks in advance.

280x is a great GPU for the price, the 960 is garbage.

Beta · April 5, 2015

280x is a great GPU for the price, the 960 is garbage.

What amount of VRAM would you think I would need (I am not planning on running the games over 2 screens) to run those sorts of games. I was thinking 4GB to try and future proof it a little but i don't know as I am new to PC Building (This being my first build)

Wirbelfeld · April 5, 2015

What amount of VRAM would you think I would need (I am not planning on running the games over 2 screens) to run those sorts of games. I was thinking 4GB to try and future proof it a little but i don't know as I am new to PC Building (This being my first build)

2GB would be enough and 4GB is more than enough. 4GB is more for gaming @1440p

SteveGrabowski · April 5, 2015

Hey guys, I have completed most of my PC Build but I want to get a new GPU as the one I have got is rather old (Radeon HD 6670 2GB). My budget is around £200. I am running an AMD FX6300 3.8Ghz , on a GIGABYTE Motherboard (I forget the model), 8GB RAM and I have a 750W Corsair PSU. I was looking at the R9 280 or 280x. I run a Dual Screen Setup at 1680x1050 (I know a weird res) and want to play games such as Skyrim, BF3, BO2 at 60FPS on max settings (I am not too far from this), Could you please recommend a GPU for around £200 (I know R9's are $200 in US but they are more expensive in the UK), AMD or Nvidia that would sufficiently run these Games at Ultra or equivalent and ideally go above and beyond these games.

Thanks in advance.

I really don't know if I should recommend the 280x or the 960 here. Eurogamer.net did benchmarks with an i3 where they showed the AMD driver overhead overwhelmed an i3 so that much stronger AMD cards were outperformed by weaker Nvidia ones. Since only one thread is supposed to be able to communicate with the GPU in DirectX11, I would guess the situation could be even worse with an AMD CPU with weaker per core performance, but I have still not seen this benchmarked with AMD CPUs and conjecture is no replacement for actual measured performance. I'd love it if Eurogamer would do it though.

The 280x is far and away the most powerful GPU available for 200 pounds or less, but would be a worse buy than a GTX 960 if AMD CPUs have the same kind of problems Core i3s do with AMD GPUs.