Good idea to buy a single R9 290 now and another later?

Bluethulhu · January 5, 2014

I've been considering a graphics upgrade for a while now, and after seeing how much I could get for my GTX 690, I think I could buy a single R9 290 now, and another later to CF when I have more money. I would probably buy the ASUS DCU II R9 290 when it comes out because it would match my build, and I'm a fan of the DCU cooler. I'm going to be running 4 1080p monitors, most likely 3 in Eyefinity, and one for Foobar/YouTube/Netflix/etc. AMD is pretty much the only option for my current usage scenario, I've had nothing but problems with Nvidia surround, any professional application that isn't CUDA based runs like crap, and PhysX and G-Sync aren't appealing enough to me to buy a graphics card with those drawbacks. Watercooling isn't a viable option currently, I don't want to spend that extra money now. I could buy soon (1-2 months), get more money for my graphics card, but get caught in the Litecoin price inflation on AMD cards, or wait a few more months (4-6), and wait for the 800 series to (supposedly) come out, and see AMD possibly strike back and lower prices/release new cards, but get less for my 690, if I can even sell it at all. I'm not sure which is the better option.

Andrew0472 · January 5, 2014

you should probably go with the 290 now. Maxwell might be great with decent performance improvements but it will probably cost an arm and a leg like the usual nvidia launches of which prices don't fall for months so you will waiting a long time, not to mention that by the time maxwell is out/coming the 690's value will drop as it gets older