Video Card rec please

[Gasser64]

getting a 970 with that cpu is going to be a waste of money. That cpu is going to be a bottleneck that won't allow you to get the best out of a 970.

Not necessarily, depends on what all games he's going to be playing. Not to mention, that CPU... well its not a gaming CPU. Its a dual core, which have been just completely overtaken and made obsolete by quad cores. For gaming. Almost all new games (that would benefit) can utilize quad cores. The days of most of them only being able to use 1 or 2 cores are long gone. Given these facts, it won't be long until he wants to pop a quad core in that socket, if he games much at all. It may be a moot point if he doesn't game much.

But at that point, the 970 will be just fine, I'm trying to help him plan for the future a bit, not just buy a card that will play this one game just fine, and then the next big game that he gets interested in, it falls flat on its face and he has to go through the whole thing again. Which is what will happen with the 760-770 series cards. At least with the 970, he'd be able to run the next demanding game that he gets interested in, on medium high-high settings, (though likely not max) if that is a couple years down the road. Those lower cards are going to be on medium low-medium. Nobody I know wants to look at that, might as well just go buy a console.

[FunFordCobra]

why not 6600k and the new Zl1 mobo and 960/970? That's 200+120+200/300
would be pimp tight and needs my pc fans.

[Jewrrick]

if he wants to spend the money on a 970 I suggest that. Other wise I say go with an used 770 off ebay for about $160-$170 over a 960, save about $30-$50 and get better performance. If your CPU does become the bottleneck then you can go from there. Just my $.02

[CexMashean]

His budget is $250, not only is a 970 outside of his budget, it's a card he wouldn't get the most out of.

[HarrisonTX]

His budget is $250, not only is a 970 outside of his budget, it's a card he wouldn't get the most out of.

I appreciate what you're saying, and respecting my budget, but I think in may go for a 970 and plan to upgrade the processor during cyber Monday or so. A 970 is looking like about $320, but there a TON to pick and I honestly have no clue WTF most of the numbers are when I look up 'evga 970' on new egg.

Thoughts mang?

[soap]

You don't even need a new GPU. Buy my pc fans. 50% off and they should add 50% fps gains whether they are p!ugged in or not. Buy my fans.

Hey I'm selling one of my trailers tomorrow I should be back in town late afternoon. I'll text you.

[FunFordCobra]

Sweeeet

[FunFordCobra]

I appreciate what you're saying, and respecting my budget, but I think in may go for a 970 and plan to upgrade the processor during cyber Monday or so. A 970 is looking like about $320, but there a TON to pick and I honestly have no clue WTF most of the numbers are when I look up 'evga 970' on new egg.

Thoughts mang?

This is what I would buy If I was looking for a 970.
Highest stable clock and runs very quiet. DO NOT BUY THE FTW MODELS!

http://www.evga.com/Products/Product.aspx?pn=04G-P4-2977-KR

[Jewrrick]

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814487088

This one will be $310 after $20 rebate.

[CexMashean]

If you're willing to entertain the tought of upgrading the processor later, then yea, the 970 is a good buy.

[abecx]

The GPU is placed under far more load than your CPU's when it comes to video gaming. While your CPU isn't great it wont have that much of an impact with what you're playing compared to upgrading the video card, I would be surprised if any game uses two CPU's for any noticeable duration that would cause FPS loss.

Getting a new video card wont be a waste with the CPU you're using, and you dont need to do both to get a performance gain.

[Tx Redneck]

Ty Cruz, I'd said as much outside if here. It's also an HT model i3,so 4 threads.

[abecx]

Hyperthreading is just context switching and it doesn't give you 4 available processing threads because each CPU execution pipeline is still only able to process 1 thread. Every CPU has been doing 'hyperthreading' for decades, its just a way to mimic multi processing by taking processes that are not using the CPU out of the execution pipeline and putting them on the cpu's cache while it waits to get whatever the process requested ( typically IO ) to continue processing. AKA, oh you asked for data from the hard drive, let me move you out of line and process other things until the hard drive says it has the data for you.

You're still limited to running just 2 threads concurrently, but even with that you're fine. If you were doing many small operations ( like a web or a database server ), you would only then notice the improvements of hyperthreading. I cant really think of a situation that hyperthreading would be noticeable on desktop, maybe in system response time to the user due to processing and interrupts ( aka compressing a large video or file )

[Gasser64]

Yeah its still only 2 physical cores. There are games that he'd be much better off with a quad core in that socket, but I don't know if he plays any of that. He may be one of those types that finds a game he likes every 4 years, and plays that for the next 4 years, or just 1 year and then doesn't game for 3 years. Or insert wide time span here.

[CJ]

The GPU is placed under far more load than your CPU's when it comes to video gaming. While your CPU isn't great it wont have that much of an impact with what you're playing compared to upgrading the video card, I would be surprised if any game uses two CPU's for any noticeable duration that would cause FPS loss.

Getting a new video card wont be a waste with the CPU you're using, and you dont need to do both to get a performance gain.

It depends on the game, really. Especially how well its optimized or multi threaded. I went to a 970 with a 965 BE quad core and my system was bottlenecked all to hell. I upgraded to an 8 core fx8350, and doubled my frame rate. Since amd cpus are not as efficient in single core processing, and not many games are multi threaded well, i am bottlenecked again with this 980ti and fx8350.

I believe your i3 is going to bottleneck your 970, but you will still get massive fps increases from that 560. Buy the 970, then upgrade your cpu later to the fastest your chipset supports, and it should be fine.