GTX 970 vs R9 290x

[86TMH]

Planning on a GPU upgrade. Both of these seem to be a similar price and similar performance.

Any personal opinions on the better card?

Also i have a Corsair CX500M. Will i have to upgrade my PSU if i buy one of these cards?

Thanks for any help. I know very little about this topic i must admit

[rotNdude]

We won't know if that power supply can handle those cards unless you post the rest of your computer specs. The 290x consumes about 300W at its peak.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/radeon-r9-290x-hawaii-review,3650-29.html

[86TMH]

Цитата допису rotNdude:

We won't know if that power supply can handle those cards unless you post the rest of your computer specs. The 290x consumes about 300W at its peak.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/radeon-r9-290x-hawaii-review,3650-29.html

Ah sorry. My setup is pretty old.

i3 3240 3.2ghz
8gb ram
R9 270
Corsair CX500M
Motherboard: Customised ECS H61H2-MV (This was basically a desktop that i just threw a GPU and PSU into)

One thing i'm wondering is if the cards will even be supported since my motherboard only has a PCIe 2.0 slot.

I don't have the money to upgrade the CPU aswell at the moment. This is just kind of an upgrade until i actually build a better PC

[Darren]

I would go for Nvidia Geforce 970 because driver support is better and more games use Nividia Tech.

[Rove]

I think on a 500W PSU you should get the GTX 970 or a R9 380.

However you might also want to consider getting a new 850W 80 Plus Bronze or better PSU and a R9 290 for about teh same price as the GTX 970. It would give you a PSU with lots of room to grow and teh R9 290 is still a great card and comapres well to the GTX 970.

There is another card you should be considering for your current PSU. That is the AMD Radeon R9 380. For the most part it's technical stats are very similar to the GTX 970 except that it comes in both 2GB and 4GB versions instead of only 4GB, it is a little bit less power efficient and costs a whole lot ($100~) less than the GTX 970.

Compare the stats on them here:

Radeon Rx 300 series
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_AMD_graphics_processing_units#Radeon_Rx_300_Series

GeForce 900 series
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nvidia_graphics_processing_units#GeForce_900_Series

As you see the GFLOPS and texel fillrates are almost identical with a tiny win for the GTX 970 in both. The GTX 970 has small wins in memory bandwidth. The GTX 970 wins big in pixel fillrates but at the level offered by either card this doesn't matter at all for gaming.

So basically it's very close to a tie with the GTX 970 having a slight advantage in everything (that in most cases is so small you should not notice it) and a big advantage in pixel fillrate that is useless for a gamer. Do the math on how many pixels per second you'd need for 120 FPS at 4K resolution, it's not nearly as many as offered by the slower R9 380.

[Rumpelcrutchskin]

GTX 970 would work with your PSU, it takes less power then R9 290X.
It's backwards compatible with PCI-E 2.0 slot.

[Rove]

I'd also like to say that I think a R9 270 is still fine for now.

You don't really need to upgrade. Can if you want but should still be able to play with what you have for a long time to come so it's not really urgent that you upgrade.

If you wait new stuff will come and you will get a better deal.

[TrollsRoyce]

Both have a really good price performance ratio. If you want to use Shadowplay (Nvidia) and a low power consumption card take the GTX, if you need Mantle (sth. like DirectX) take the r9 but Mantle is only at less games aviable e.g. Battlefield 4. You will get about 10-15FPS more with that.

[86TMH]

Цитата допису Rove:

I'd also like to say that I think a R9 270 is still fine for now.

You don't really need to upgrade. Can if you want but should still be able to play with what you have for a long time to come so it's not really urgent that you upgrade.

If you wait new stuff will come and you will get a better deal.

Yeah it's a great card for the price but i'm a little tired of turning off shadows and things to get 60fps. And the 2 cards i mentioned are pretty reasonable prices and would breath some new life into my old pc

Thanks for the help guys. I think i'll got with the 970