So lately, I've been kicking around the idea of building a new gaming desktop instead of saving for the Ecotec swap on my miata like I should be. Now, I've built systems before, I'm not new to hardware or anything, but it's been a few years since I built a gaming rig, and the graphics card market is strange now.
I'm leaning towards a Nvidia GTX graphics card, because I love their software, and most games I play are geared towards Nvidia. But I'm confused, aside from $100+, whats the real difference between say, a 4gb GTX 960 and a 4gb GTX 970?
Thinking MSI Z97 motherboard with an I5 4690K and 32gb Ram, and eyeballing a modular 700 watt powersupply, I don't know if I'l overclock or not, but I like having the option.
Or is this more of a 2013 to 2015 model, new paint, newer date, same car and I should just go cheaper?
System goals, just in case, are 1080P gaming and HD video playing.
revrico wrote: whats the real difference between say, a 4gb GTX 960 and a 4gb GTX 970?
The 970 has double the transistors in the GPU, and also double the memory bandwidth. It's basically twice as fast.
Rufledt
UltraDork
3/27/16 11:31 p.m.
yeah 970 performs much better in back to back tests. MUCH better. I was looking at a 960 as well, but for the same price, the radeon R9 380x significantly outperforms the 960. it doesn't perform as well as a 970, however. Also, radeon tends to update drivers over time, so their cards get much faster as time goes on due to driver improvements, vs. nvidia which also updates drivers, but doens't tend to increase performance as much over time. The drawback is my current radeon card (the R9 380x) has some issues i've never had with any nvidia cards, namely conflicts between drivers and certain programs, but the performance has been phenomenal.
Toms Hardware always seems to be a good source of info:
Best Graphics Cards for the Money
I was kicking around the R9, but AMD really left a bad taste in my mouth with the catalyst software, and it seems I get more game ready updates for Nvidia.
I finally, this is a heavily debated yet uninformed topic, found the bit about a 128 v 256 bus. Since I'm not in a real big hurry to build this, I guess I can just keep an eye out for sales. I've seen AMD has a new chipset coming, so I'm hoping that will bring pricedrops across the market.
At least processors and ram have stabilized, that was such a pain in the 90s and early 2000s
