Best GPU for around $200?
I currently have two 5770s in Crossfire, and at least one of them is flaking out on me. Here's some artifact porn from Civ V, and another of Chrome starting to Zalgo. I might be able to get away with using just one of them if I determine only one is dying, but at 1440p that's kind of pushing it.
I've looked around a little bit, and it looks like an R9 280 might be the best buy. Does that seem about right? Any particular models or alternatives to suggest?
Relevant system specs: i5 2500K @ 3.6Ghz, Z68 mobo, 24gb RAM, 600W PSU, 2560x1440 monitor.
PS: I could never get Crossfire in Civ V to work in Windows 7, but it worked out of the box in Windows 8, which I installed last week. And now my glitch rate is increasing. Such sad.
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Should point you in the right direction: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/gaming-graphics-card-review,3107.html
I am really happy with my HD 7950, I think it was about 219 last I looked.
I could possibly sell you my hd 7950 for somewhat cheap. I'm probably upgrading soon because I want a card with 3 display ports, and knowing I could sell it to an IC person would probably make me do as much.
How cheap is cheap?
I'd probably be interested. Which specific card is it? I need to look up the length to make sure it'll fit in my case.
http://www.gigabyte.com/products/product-page.aspx?pid=4121#ov
Sadly I do not know the revision but I believe dimensions are the same for both:
H=38 mm, L=285 mm, W=126 mm
I bought it 4/3/2013. So It's 1.5 years old. I've never overclocked it or tried tweaking things. It has the same FX1 BIOS that it came with. It's more or less dust free as I keep my case cool and tidy.
I'd give it to an Icrontian for $100, but you would have to wait on me to get a new card and the card I want is sold out everywhere so I'm not sure when I'm going to get it.
Sounds good to me. Let me know when you're ready to part with it.
I've had to RMA two Gigabyte R9 280Xs so far and the third is having issues as well. It's an awesome card when it works but for some reason it really dislikes going from idle to load. Down clocking and going with out CCC are the only ways I've turned it into being semi stable...
This sounds like an issue for @Thrax
Sounds like an issue for Gigabyte. But I am curious to know what the specific symptoms and behaviors are. I find it very difficult to believe three consecutive GPUs with a mature, time-tested design would exhibit the same issue. Not outside the realm of possibility, mind you, but the odds are vanishing.
I just picked up a couple R9 285's to crossfire. The card is feature rich and they just marked them down to $229. I got mine for $219 per off NCIXUS. There are 280's for less and the first spec that is going to jump out is RAM at 2GB vs. 3GB but the newer architecture of the 285 is more efficient at managing the buffer and I can't see any reason to give up freesync, truaudio, and a much better tessellation engine for just a couple dollars. I'd suggest the R9 285.
Also, frankly I've had a ton of bad luck with Gigabyte graphics boards. Seems like each time I specked them into a system came back to bite me. It's strange because they have been my favorite motherboard brand for the last five or six years, but their GPU design is meh..... Sapphire boards are of varying quality. On the lower end they are hit and miss, on their higher end Vapor X and Toxic product they seem to be dependable. I have only dabbled in XFX but I have not had any trouble there and they offer a lifetime warranty. Asus in my opinion consistently makes the GPU's with the best build quality in the industry. Anyone that has seen a lot of PCB's can tell the quality of the circuit work, the rigidity of the board, the quality of the cooling solution. Asus makes some dependable GPU's.
I've had one issue with this Gigabyte card but I assumed it was software/driver related. When I first got the card my monitors would on occasion not come out of sleep mode. That stopped happening what seems like a year ago, so I assume a driver update fixed it. The other issue I have is just recently TF2 started stalling on me for a solid 30 seconds about once every half hour. This started a month ago or so. It eventually comes back to life and I can do other stuff while TF2 stalls...but this issue also just recently appeared -- so again I assume software problem.
Regardless if Gigabyte is a meh card there is no pressure to buy it. I'm going to get a new card either way, I'm waiting on Amazon to tell me when it is stocked and shipped. I already ordered it. Also, Garg, if you buy this off me and it ends up being problematic I'll refund you. No big deal.
On that note the only Asus graphics card I ever had was garbage but that was 8 years ago. Everyone has different experiences with different stuff, and none of us can claim statistical relevance given our small collections of hardware.
I think the biggest culprit is cruft hanging around from driver installs. @Thrax once posted a link to a driver cleaning thing that worked well for me.
@Gargoyle
My steam install and all my games are on an old Crucial M4 ssd. Going over event viewer I realized today the reason TF2 has stalled on me recently, and even more recently that steam itself is constantly stalling, is that the ssd is going kaput. IAstor has to try and reboot it about 30 times in a row to get it to come back to life and that takes nearly a minute each time.
I am going to have to spend $200 on a new drive and sadly that cancels out my new video card budget until December. The card I wanted is still out of stock so I just cancelled the order and I can no longer sell the 7950, at least not for a few months.
Sorry
S'aright @PirateNinja. I've got dying parts, too, so I feel the pain. I hope my new Crucial SSD holds up - how long did you have your M4?
At this point I'm leaning towards the R9 285, since my next base system will be Broadwell, and I'm wanting to keep the overall wattage low and build a quieter system.
I bought this M4 December '11. Smart reports 11000 power on hours. It's the second M4 I've had die on me. I think the M4 was sort of a buggy model though, it went through a lot of firmware updates. I'm sure the newer Crucial models will fare better.
I have an M500 from Crucial, so far no problems after a year and three months of heavy use.
This is good for sweeping your old graphics drivers clean. - http://www.guru3d.com/content-page/guru3d-driver-sweeper.html
The first card ran fine for a few hours then would artifact brielfly and crash the display driver. All benchmarks ran fine so I returned it confused. They had the same problem until running heaven for about an hour which led to massive artifacts and a complete system crash.
The second card had similar issues in terms of crashing the display driver but wasn't artifacting until I a quick run of 3D mark. Artifacts galore (I have a video of it) and that led me to returning yet another card which leads me to...
Card number three will only work provided it's down clocked to 1000mhz and only without CCC. Crashes still happen on almost a daily basis but it's not a typical crash per say. More like all display stops showing up and left with a black screen.
Heat isn't an issue, I've cleaned all drivers before new installs (using a separate utility), happens with multiple games as well as AutoCAD. Honestly I'm so incredibly frustrated and will probably never buy another AMD/ATI card again...
Since you're having such similar problems across boards, I'd start investigating a possible chipset/PCIe controller issue.
What motherboard are you running?
Just ordered an R9 285 from Newegg on a Cyber Monday deal. Thanks everybody!
awww yisssss
We need a "Bought His Shit™" badge.
You might make it look like a * glasses * shilling