GTX 960 or 970 or 980

[Noppius]

Mark and Psijonica,

 

thanks both of you for looking into all of this and giving me some very solid and good advice!

I will check out pricing for GTX 980 and 980 Ti and see how far i can stretch my budget. Maybe waiting for a few more months and then see if i can get a sale somewhere could help out.

 

And Psi, i'm allready spending some good money on the wife for the holidays, taking here to a amusement park that we both love for New Year's eve and we're spending what is left of the night in a very nice 4 star hotel :cool:

So she will be very happy :laugh:

 

Considering this a nice wrape up of the subject, i once more will say "Thank you" and happy holiday's everybody!!

[mark5916]

Mark and Psijonica,

 

thanks both of you for looking into all of this and giving me some very solid and good advice!

I will check out pricing for GTX 980 and 980 Ti and see how far i can stretch my budget. Maybe waiting for a few more months and then see if i can get a sale somewhere could help out.

 

And Psi, i'm allready spending some good money on the wife for the holidays, taking here to a amusement park that we both love for New Year's eve and we're spending what is left of the night in a very nice 4 star hotel :cool:

So she will be very happy :laugh:

 

Considering this a nice wrape up of the subject, i once more will say "Thank you" and happy holiday's everybody!!

 

> i'm allready spending some good money on the wife for the holidays, taking here to a amusement park that we both love for New Year's eve and we're spending what is left of the night in a very nice 4 star hotel <

 

That's very sweet from you...

 

*** Wishing you a beautiful holiday season and a new year of peace and happiness. !!! *** :smile:

 

 

 

 

[obobski]

 

 

At this point in time you will be best served by spending the extra money and buying the ASUS GTX 980. You will be happier and you will have a card that will be able to play all the new games for the next 5 years. You can buy one for 500 bucks. That is 100 dollars a year in entertainment costs. That is very cheap! That is like $8.30 a month! hahaha

 

Here's why: In 2 or 3 years you may need to upgrade other parts of your gaming rig. You just never know what may happen and what may break. What happens if you need a new motherboard? What if you want to play at 4k in 2 or 3 years? I always like to keep my options open. Spending a little extra now can keep you in that pocket of gaming happiness. IMO

 

Are you talking about the Asus 980 or 980 Ti? Because they have about 150 euro difference in pricing. And there is a limit on my budget :blush:

 

The performance gain is not high enough to justify the extra money and as i said before, i have a wife that needs to agree with me spending on the PC :laugh:

 

@Mark5916, unfortunaly i can't find a shop here that can get me that card, so that will be not an option, but thanks for looking into it for me :thumbsup:

 

 

 

 

 

At this point in time you will be best served by spending the extra money and buying the ASUS GTX 980. You will be happier and you will have a card that will be able to play all the new games for the next 5 years. You can buy one for 500 bucks. That is 100 dollars a year in entertainment costs. That is very cheap! That is like $8.30 a month! hahaha

 

Here's why: In 2 or 3 years you may need to upgrade other parts of your gaming rig. You just never know what may happen and what may break. What happens if you need a new motherboard? What if you want to play at 4k in 2 or 3 years? I always like to keep my options open. Spending a little extra now can keep you in that pocket of gaming happiness. IMO

 

Are you talking about the Asus 980 or 980 Ti? Because they have about 150 euro difference in pricing. And there is a limit on my budget :blush:

 

The performance gain is not high enough to justify the extra money and as i said before, i have a wife that needs to agree with me spending on the PC :laugh:

 

@Mark5916, unfortunaly i can't find a shop here that can get me that card, so that will be not an option, but thanks for looking into it for me :thumbsup:

 

 

Hmm, OK. You can get this with a rebate. End price: $429.99 - I thing that's a very good price for an MSI GTX 980

 

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00OD38516?keywords=GTX%20980&qid=1449491197&ref_=sr_1_2&s=pc&sr=1-2

 

Just thing about it... :wink: (it's 90 bucks more (only) than the MSI GTX 970)

 

 

I think my point is if you are going to buy a card my advice is to start at a gtx 980 as a starting point. As it has been pointed out, it is not that much more money but in the long term you will be happier. Your wife will be happier and after you buy it for yourself I also recommend you work some overtime to buy her something special, like a spa gift card so you can play on your new video card while she bathes in mud and gets a pedicure :wink:

 

If you were to ask me 2 years ago I would be saying buy a 970 as it really was the best bang for your buck but I am telling you that in a couple of years those 970s will be huffing and puffing. A 980 gtx will soon be minimum specs. The new generation of gaming computers are being made and parts are just now being released.Nvidia's newest GTX is so crazy that the existing motherboards are not even able to take full advantage. The next few years will be a giant leap forward in PC gaming technology so that is why I am advising you to start at a gtx 980 minimum! Seriously, save your money until you can afford it. Spendinding all that money on a new rig with a 970 in it... you'll regret it in a few years when you can't play the new games.

 

Titan Z is older than the 900 series - its based on Kepler, and is roughly a dual-GPU GTX 780 board. It is hilariously over-priced (at $2999 original MSRP - its something of a limited edition card) relative to its performance (similar to SLI 780 or Ti). As far as "980 will be the minimum in a few years" - recent history (say from 2008 to present) would counter-indicate this, as high-end graphics cards even from a few years ago are still very competent by modern standards; the need to constantly upgrade every 6 months just isn't as strong as it once was (say back in 2003). Even by historic standards, however, the TOTL graphics cards are never the best buy though, because the "killer next gen" card usually offered features and capabilities that the older cards lacked; sticking to the mid-range to upper-mid-range is the best value-for-money and long-game strategy, as you end up spending $200-300 every 2-3 years as opposed to $500-900 every 3-4 years. There's very little overall difference between the 970 and 980, and if something were released that 970 were incompatible with, 980 won't be far behind - it is only slightly faster (and before anyone jumps on me "but man, its like 30% faster!!!" -> I'm talking orders of magnitude difference here, and that simply doesn't exist between those cards, or last gen's top cards, or the gen before that's top cards; this is due both to rebranding and overall stagnation in performance increases for computing (which is true of both CPU and GPU - I'm not at all seeing "giant leap forward in the next few years" by any stretch of the imagination - Intel has "wowed" us with SIX generations of equivalent performance, AMD hasn't released new CPUs in almost as long, nVidia has been slowly re-packing and re-releasing largely the same hardware with minor improvements (and tons of driver lockouts to deliniate their product lines), and ATi has been slowly refining and polishing largely the same hardware over the last 3-4 years; the only "big gains" I've noticed are with regard to integrated graphics and the new generation of game consoles (which are already ~2 years old!)). Finally, looking at historic examples (even if we go back to the much faster moving early 2000s), game developers do not target the top 1% of users - they try to target the widest range of users, and the range of hardware that even "system killer" games would run on is extremely large. Ignoring horribly optimized port nightmares, there has not been a time since the late 1990s where a gaming computer absolutely required having all TOTL parts to play contemporaneous games, and in recent years (last ~8 years) the stagnation has led to a situation where upgrades are largely unimportant from "generation" to "generation" as very little (if anything) is improved to any significant degree.

 

That said, if "future proof" is a big concern (personally I'd throw this entire concept out the window - its a myth you can spend a heap of money trying to chase, and end up with very little to show for it), I'd completely write-off the GTX 900 series as it has recently come out that in addition to the memory bug on the GTX 970, nVidia lied about full DX12 support (and attempted to coerce/bribe benchmark makers to cover it up). Currently, GCN is the only platform with complete DX12 support, but with no real-world DX12 games available it is impossible to say if current GCN parts (e.g. 290/390X) will be competent for future games (e.g. lets hypothetically say Fallout 5 comes out in 2018, and is DX12, would the 290X be able to run it at a good level, just because it supports the feature-set? it may or it may not; first-gen DX10 and (especially) 11 cards aged very well as DX10 games began to come to the market (e.g. Radeon 4870 and GeForce 480 are still competent for many modern games, at least those they support), but first-gen DX9 cards aged very poorly as DX9 games began to come to the market (anyone remember GeForce FX?)). Price-to-performance is also better on the Radeon, especially with the Fury at ~$500 being competitive not only with the 980/980 Ti but also the Titan X in many benchmarks.

 

I'm not at all trying to be a "Radeon fanboy" - I preference whatever gives the best performance for the money, and has the best feature support. Currently that's Radeon. In the past it has been GeForce, Radeon, Voodoo, etc. In the future it may be GeForce again, or it may be Radeon, or it may be Intel, who knows - let tomorrow worry about itself.

[Noppius]

 

 

> i'm allready spending some good money on the wife for the holidays, taking here to a amusement park that we both love for New Year's eve and we're spending what is left of the night in a very nice 4 star hotel <

 

That's very sweet from you...

 

*** Wishing you a beautiful holiday season and a new year of peace and happiness. !!! *** :smile:

 

 

 

Yea, i'm a sweet guy :laugh:

 

And thanks for the early holidy wishes! Hope you have the same for many years to come!!

 

Now, i have been reading up on a lot of articles about gtx 970 and 980, looking up price ranges and availability in my reagion to make a well informed decision.

And i kind of agree with Obobski about the future proof thing. I run now a i5 CPU and it's doing great. But buying a top of the line GPU will make it not last longer. So seeing the budget thing, the needed powersupply for 980 and 980Ti (more then what i have installed atm so would need a new power supply too) and the "what's-the-future-gonna-be" situation, i'm settling for a 970.

And yes Obobski, i know that Nvidia is not the best at this moment money/value ratio, but i'm using Shadowplay for my own fun and some (very little) Youtube things and i want to keep using that so it's gonna be a Nvidia brand card :blush:

 

So once more, thanks for all the good advice, help and well intended suggestions. I'm a happy gamer knowing that there will always be a better card and a faster PC then what i have, but i'm able to play the games i like the way i like to play them!

Have a wonderfull holiday season and happy gaming to everybody!!

Edited December 10, 2015 by Noppius

[mark5916]

Just buy the GTX 970 and keep it as much as possible. It makes a well balanced system with your i5.

 

If you don't play at 4K, at resolutions up to 1080p and maybe 1440p on some games, this setup will serve you well.

 

After a couple of years (i guess in the next 3 years) you could go with an better CPU and GPU configuration. Until then, newer hardware will arrive for sure.

 

Pascal next year and Volta in 2018. As intel concerns *Kaby Lake Family Processor is on the way (probably 2017), and also the most awaited and promising **AMD Zen processor.

 

So the wisest choice would be, not to spend a huge amount of money on todays hardware.

 

-----------------

 

* with additional PCI-Express lanes to fully support the upcoming Optane Storage from Intel that uses 3DX Point memory. The platform also supports Thunderbolt 3, PCI-e SSDs and USB 3.1 controllers.

 

** With an vastly improvement on IPC and performance over the older Bulldozer core. (that couldn't keep well enough against similar Intel CPUs anyway)

 

-----------------

 

Best wishes from Greece... :wink:

Edited December 10, 2015 by mark5916

[obobski]

I think for today, in 2015 (almost 2016 already), there isn't anything significantly "wrong" with GTX 970 as a choice, especially if you use/need nVidia-unique features (like Shadowplay, PhysX, Gameworks, etc). Most contemporary games are still relying on DirectX 9, and those that use DirectX 10 or 11 features are not unsupported by Maxwell, so it's not like you're left out in the cold "looking backwards." In the future it may become more of a liability, but I agree with mark5916 about "waiting out" newer hardware, and would go back to my previous point about upgrades every 2-3 years as opposed to spending significantly more money every 3-4 years. It is likely that "next gen" graphics from both nVidia and AMD will be much better candidates for future DX12 games, and future games in general (I can't imagine nVidia repeating all of the mistakes and problems of Maxwell again (then again, "we" said the same thing about GeForce FX ten years ago, and Maxwell is basically GeForce FX for a new generation), and AMD is on solid ground with GCN moving forwards), and with any luck a more competitive AMD will kick Intel in the pants and we'll finally see CPU performance start growing again (after 5-6 generations of "same old, same old").

[Noppius]

Thanks for the help people!

 

I'm now settled on a GTX 970 for my new GPU. This card will give me a very good game experience for the next few years and when it gets old, the whole system will be aged enough to justify a new set.

Now i'm gonna hunt the best price for this card and have a great time gaming :laugh:

[obobski]

Before you go off looking for the cheapest possible option, I'd suggest just skipping to the front of the line and getting an EVGA. They have one of, if not the, best warranties in the business, and generally offer OC'd cards with improved cooling (read: quieter + cooler all at once). PNY and Asus aren't bad either; I'd personally avoid MSI (their customer support can range from mediocre to god awful IME).

 

This EVGA looks to be among the least expensive on Amazon too, and it comes with an upgraded cooler and overclock:

http://www.amazon.com/EVGA-GeForce-Quieter-Graphics-04G-P4-2974-KR/dp/B00NVODXR4/

 

While looking for that, I found this 980 for $459 AR, but I'm not terribly familiar with Gigabyte:

http://www.amazon.com/Gigabyte-GeForce-GDDR5-Graphics-GV-N980WF3-4GD/dp/B015NEB7BS/

 

Just something to think about more than anything else - it looks like its cheaper than other 980s at least.

[Noppius]

Before you go off looking for the cheapest possible option, I'd suggest just skipping to the front of the line and getting an EVGA. They have one of, if not the, best warranties in the business, and generally offer OC'd cards with improved cooling (read: quieter + cooler all at once). PNY and Asus aren't bad either; I'd personally avoid MSI (their customer support can range from mediocre to god awful IME).

 

This EVGA looks to be among the least expensive on Amazon too, and it comes with an upgraded cooler and overclock:

http://www.amazon.com/EVGA-GeForce-Quieter-Graphics-04G-P4-2974-KR/dp/B00NVODXR4/

 

While looking for that, I found this 980 for $459 AR, but I'm not terribly familiar with Gigabyte:

http://www.amazon.com/Gigabyte-GeForce-GDDR5-Graphics-GV-N980WF3-4GD/dp/B015NEB7BS/

 

Just something to think about more than anything else - it looks like its cheaper than other 980s at least.

Hey Obobski,

 

i was not clear on my previous comment. What i intended to say was that i would see what card is the best and THEN i would see what shop could give me the best price for that card.

Unfortunaly i'm living in Europe (Belgium) and the card you suggested is not availeble here. So if you have any other good suggestions?

EVGA is not that populair in Europe it seems, not much offering from that brand. I was original interested in the MSI brand but after seeing how many people have complaints about their customer service, it will not be my first choice anymore.

 

Thanks for the help!

[obobski]

 

Hey Obobski,

 

i was not clear on my previous comment. What i intended to say was that i would see what card is the best and THEN i would see what shop could give me the best price for that card.

Unfortunaly i'm living in Europe (Belgium) and the card you suggested is not availeble here. So if you have any other good suggestions?

EVGA is not that populair in Europe it seems, not much offering from that brand. I was original interested in the MSI brand but after seeing how many people have complaints about their customer service, it will not be my first choice anymore.

 

Thanks for the help!

 

 

Don't you have Leadtek or Gainward in Europe? Both of those had very good reputations when they still sold in the US. PNY has also been good, in my experience, but they tend to have more basic packages/cards. Asus is also a good choice for basically any component type they make.

Edited December 14, 2015 by obobski