Lower midrange (sub $200) graphics card choice?

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I'm replacing a dying HD 4850, but I haven't really been paying attention to the market lately, so hoping for some quick opinions. Tried looking at reviews, but driver evolution and price changes makes gleaming a clear recommendation from those hard to do. Results seem to be all over the place.

Options and relative pricing (please, no "for just a little bit more you could get", the top range of the listed range already includes that logic...) are as following:

  • 100 - HD 7790 1GB. Bioshock Infinite + Far Cry Blood Dragon.
  • 100 - GTX 650 TI Boost 1GB. No bundle, lower clocked RAM (5GHz) than 2GB version.
  • 124 - GTX 650 TI Boost 2GB. Assassins Creed 3.
  • 135 - HD 7850 2GB. Bioshock Infinite + Tomb Raider.
  • 140 - GTX 660 2GB. Assassins Creed 3 + Metro Last Light.

No competitive FPS multiplayer and a general inclination towards slower paced gaming. Not one of the "anything below 60FPS v-synced is unplayable" crowd. Basically want bang for buck and as hassle free 1080P gaming as possible (with decent settings) going forward.

The rest of the PC is an Phenom II 965BE, 970 chipset motherboard, 8GB DDR3 1600, 500W Seasonic PSU.
 
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I got a PII 965 also with 16GB, and I recently went from a 7950 to a 6970...and I haven't noticed a whole ton of difference tbh.

The 7950 was overkill as hell for me gaming at 1920x1080, the 6970 has seemed more than up to the task.

Not sure if that helps or not, but I've been looking into midrange cards again myself. I'm dying to try out a midrange nVidia, the most recent nV card I've played with is still an 8800 GTX. :oops:

EDITED BITS: Actually it's a 6950 I flashed into a 6970, just to be all accurate and stuff. ;)
 
Does nVidia have any cards you can flash up into a better card? A stupid question and I thought this a good place to find an answer for it...
 
I've used faster cards than the 4850 during the past 5 years, but for the past couple I've been back to the "old girl" and haven't been paying attention. Just got to a "critical mass" of impulse-driven steam purchases that I haven't played for performance reasons. Indies and oldies cleared out of the backlog, so time for an upgrade again.

I figured the TI Boost and up would be as fast as a HD 6970 for all practical purposes. The HD 7790, maybe not so; but it seems to hold up remarkably well in most titles while less so elsewhere. Neither it nor the TI boost seems at all consistent.

(PS: As for unlockable Nvidia GPUs. I though NV40 was the last one.)
 
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Pick the one with the right free games I guess. I kinda like the 660 because it's a GK106 with nothing disabled (like that matters in practice lol).
 
If you can wait a little longer, try grabbing an Nvidia 760 used, they will be close to your $200 cap and are very good bang for the buck.
 
Thanks for the input. Used market doesn't work too well around here, so waiting for a second hand 760 is not really an option.

And while 1GB might be good enough for my needs today, it might not be too forward looking at no huge added cost.

So, I guess I'm deciding between the HD 7850 and the GTX 660. Leaning towards the latter. (Nvidia products have been relatively better priced here as of late. While options like the HD 7850 have stabilized or risen slightly over the past couple of months, the 660 has dropped substantially during the same timeframe.)

Anywhoo. Thinking of picking up this one: Card looks nice, and people generally seem to be happy with this particular model.
 
I think I saw something about AMD having DX 11.2 features in their current GCN cards. I would suggest them just because all the consoles have AMD GPUs so you should get better optimization and future-proofing.
 
It's a tough call between the 660 and the 7850 IMO. I cannot find the 7790 worth it, it seems to always trail the 650Ti and cost more, and that's coming from a guy who has owned an AMD video card for the last four generations (3850, 4850, 5850, and now 7970.)

At this moment, the coin toss for me would either be total shipped price or the bundled games.
 
The 7790 seems to be consistently faster than the 650Ti (but not the 650 Ti Boost, which is more akin to being a "660 LE"). At their current prices, neither of these seem worth the money in their 2GB iterations compared to the 660 and the 7850, though.

The somewhat larger feature set for the GCN cards an superior compute abilities might be a factor, but are there more than a couple showing a decisive advantage, and will a 7850 have enough grunt to take advantage of such future features anyway? It's not like there aren't a couple of games that decisively prefers Nvidia hardware today as well.

And yes; I am indeed close to flipping a coin.
 
Just thinking out loud, since I"ve been on the DAMMIT side of the fence for so long, I'll probably flip back over to the NV world on my next upgrade -- which shouldn't happen for a while. I ran the NV train all the way from Riva128 to the Ti4200 days, then went ATI with the softmodded 9500np thru x1850 days, then back again with the NV7950, and then back to AMD with all the previous stuff.

I like going back and forth, I feel it gives some "balance" to your perception of each product line. I haven't been back in a while, and I need to...
 
The 7790 has the highest perf per watt ratio of all GPUs, and contains the same GCN revision as in the consoles (not that I know if it contains any single new minor feature, lol)

I find the 7790 2GB to be a great option but it's too expensive and too rare.
You do save some minor money from power saving and a low watt card is easier to sell or re-use. Else I like the GTX 660 too.
 
The reviews I saw didn't place it at a significant power advantage to the 650Ti, surely a few watts (perhaps more than a dozen), but even if current electricity bills doubled, the consumption difference between the two for a machine at "full power" all day every day for a year would be a few dollars at absolute worst.

This whole Perf Per Watt business really only makes sense when there's a truly significant difference (halving of power at same perf, or doubling of perf at half power) or in seriously power constrained devices like pretty much anything mobile. A dozen watts on an AC-powered device that otherwise would consume several hundred watts at full load is rounding error.
 
Davros said:
You'd be crazy to buy any other card
http://www.ebay.com/itm/Gigabyte-GT...xDVI-I-HDMI-DSUB-ATX-Video-Card-/350751690655
Click to expand...

"You save:
$2,608.20" :oops:

you can save a lot of money buying this card!



660 for 140 looks tempting, but so does the 650 ti for $100,
it's probably the best performance vs price card of the bunch, but, in vram limited games things can change quickly towards the 2GB version...

the 7790 offers by far the lowest power usage, if you want something which is a little faster than a 5870, using less power than a 5770 (or 6950 and 6770) this card is great...

the 7850 should be the most fun to overclock.
 
These days I would go for something with at least 2GB on board. The new consoles should push VRAM usage up way beyond today's standards.
Even 2GB may be tight in some next gen games, although I think by the time that happens we'll all be upgrading to GTX900/HD9K series cards.
 
You guys are too funny... :)

Anywhoo. Decided to hold off for a little while. The good old 4850 wasn't as dead as I thought (just the default Win8 drivers causing all kinds of shimmering issues) and I don't have as much time for gaming as I thought I'd have just about now.

Also saw a "weekend deal" (that I just missed) akin to this one on a 7870, so there might be some decent pricing coming up when the "back to school advertising" start ramping up over the coming weeks.
 
Never use default Windows video drivers... I think they only exist so you can see the screen long enough to install the real ones.
 
In general, I'd agree. However, for older cards, it often (well, up until now) seemed just as advisable to leave well enough alone. It's not as if any amount of tweaking or changing settings are going to get a 4850 (or even older, hell I have an AGP 3850 happily running Win 7) up to playing any games that are out of it's league anyways.

I had noticed that on my old Win 7 setup the drivers MS gives you for legacy cards are more or less the same as you'd get with the latest legacy Catalysts. Just sans the CCC/AVCC (or whatever it is called these days). Initially, that seemed to be the case for Windows 8 as well (atikmdag.sys had the same version information), so when I first installed Win 8 I just didn't consider it a priority. On closer inspection, the files aren't identical, though; and the default Win 8 drivers have texture shimmering/dots/noise all over the place.
 
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