MSI or EVGA

[Piemanfood]

GTX 970 or the MSI R9 390. Both are pretty close in price but I was wondering which is better for mainly gaming.

[The Cool n00B]

390.

[Enderman]

well the 390 almost always performs better, the 970 uses less power and runs cooler/quieter and has shadowplay
choose whichever you prefer

[App4that]

Depends on the games you play, for Gameworks games you want the 970. For everything else you want the 390

[Trey222]

I would go with the 390 slightly faster however it is hotter and uses more power than the 970.

[Piemanfood]

I am leaning quite a bit more now towards the 390 since it does have more VRAM, also it being a bit more hotter, louder, and using more power doesn't really bother me. It does to seem to run better than the 970.

[SteveGrabowski0]

390 will likely be better over the long term, as AMD cards always are. The 970 is usually better with games at launch, and often wins in games that really stress the CPU and are well paraelleized, like GTA V, Witcher 3, and Fallout 4. Of course this is at 1080p. If you want 1440p the 390 is hands down better. 390 vs 970 at 1080p is basically a tug of war between stronger hardware (390) vs lower overhead in the DirectX11 drivers (970), sometimes one side wins, sometimes the other.

[SteveGrabowski0]

6 minutes ago, Piemanfood said:

I am leaning quite a bit more now towards the 390 since it does have more VRAM, also it being a bit more hotter, louder, and using more power doesn't really bother me. It does to seem to run better than the 970.

It's not really the extra vram, I think it's more the quality of the vram on it. The 390's vram got a hefty overclock vs the 290. 390s tend to have great coolers so they're not necessarily hotter or louder than 970s. But they do dump significantly more heat into your case, not a big deal though as long as you have reasonable airflow (e.g., a decent front intake fan and a back exhaust, nothing fancy).

[dfg666]

.......

[Qyoon]

idk where you live but MSI Support sucks in Europe , so would say EVGA for Europe.

Considering both cards.

Imo R9 390 is sightly more powefull but GTX970 is more balanced.

[App4that]

35 minutes ago, dfg666 said:

For everything else? There's like so little triple A games out there without GameWorks on it. I mean let's be real here, majority of PC gamers want high quality 60 FPS+ gameplay experience, who the hell turns on HairWorks / other GameWorks features just to cripple their performance in trade of hair, godray quality? Not to mention for those who have a lower budget and are deciding between a 960 and 380... Pretty obvious to pick a 380 at this point. The only reason to pick a 960 

 

" With the Radeon R9 Fury X you can see that turning on HairWorks drastically affects performance. Turning on Low HairWorks decreases performance by 13%, and turning on High HairWorks decreases performance by 20%. We also see a drastic performance drop on the GeForce GTX 980 Ti. We see a drop of 12% on Low HairWorks and 21% on High HairWorks. It seems both cards are about equal on the performance drop enabling HairWorks. There doesn't seem to be any bias between HairWorks performing better on either video card."

First off, this is about the 390/970. Stay on target.

Second, Hairworks works on both. Weapon effects only works on Nvidia cards. You lose out on setting by buying a AMD card if you play Gameworks titles.

Third, I owned a 390. Hitting 60fps means little if it's stuttering. 

Forth, the 970 places less of a load on the CPU in CPU intensive games when compared to the 390. That's a difference of drivers.

Which brings us to

Fifth, day one drivers. Only on Nvidia.