Heh, VRAM quantities are insane nowadays. My current card has got only 512 MB GDDR4 RAM. Thanks for the tips.

He's not playing at 1440p, but rather 1440x900. I think that with that system and at those resolutions you're better off with a much less powerful card. I'd go for a plain 660 or even 650 Ti (Nvidia side) or a 7850 from AMD.
Unless of course you'll be changing the rest of your PC anytime soon or will be a new monitor that will allow you higher resolutions.

I also often play at 1440. but rather 1440x1080; a custom 4:3 mode.

For 1440x900 anything beyond 7850 is useless.
Actually a used 6950/5870 would even be interesting and not expensive.

Yep. I've got a GTX 460 1GB that also rocks at those resolutions. If you can find one cheap it's not a bad deal 😉.

sunaiac wrote:

For 1440x900 anything beyond 7850 is useless.
Actually a used 6950/5870 would even be interesting and not expensive.

How is anything beyond a 7850 useless? You can turn on more options and get higher framerates with a more powerful card and when you are ready to upgrade to a new monitor with more pixels, you don't have to buy a new video card to go with it.

You can play anything up to 1080p with this card. They get outdated so fast anyway that it's better to buy a new midrange one in a few years. Also, super high AA modes aren't noticable during gameplay anyway for the most part.

Used cards are great if they work btw, but the higher models draw far more power than new midrange ones, so not ideal for the OP.

sliderider wrote:

How is anything beyond a 7850 useless? You can turn on more options and get higher framerates with a more powerful card and when you are ready to upgrade to a new monitor with more pixels, you don't have to buy a new video card to go with it.

Yes, we can imagine a lot of ifs and whens to make it interesting, but a HD7850 will 60FPS any game not CPU limited on 1440x900, so why use more money ?

When the if happens or if the when happens, maybe you can buy a HD9850 for 100€ 😉

If he's sure to get an i5 and a FullHd monitor in - month, of course going higher than 7850 is a good idea.

Most 'modest' cards can play current games comfortably at medium settings. Or even when settings are at 'above average'. Or at higher resolutions with unnecessary FXAA or other AAs all set to off.

Currently I'm running a couple of humble Radeon 6950s (2GB each) in CrossfireX mode.

Other than that, other matters that can be taken into consideration :

Some charts for comparison (Taken from a review of Gigabyte GTX 680 Super OverClock) :

My monitor native resolution is 1920x1080.

I have already ordered the card with 3GB of VRAM.

No problem because I am starting to think about upgrading.

Have fun with your card mate! 😁

@Malik, some of us like all the eye candy but you are correct.

Most mainstrain GPU's can do quite well in even current games if you sacrafice some of this and especially shadows to increase the FPS rate.

But if your budget can afford it then get the fastest CPU + GPU you can find.

One thing that is nice is that even fast DDR memory modules are dirt cheap now a days.

I picked up 16GB of DDR3 for $90.00 at Newegg.

@F2bnp:

Thanks mate! I hope it works first.

@BigBodZod:

Yep, older memory is more expensive. I think DDR4 will be around here this year or so; I am thinking in getting any Intel microprocessor capable of driving DDR4. I have an i7 2700K at work and I am quite satisfied with its performance so far. Not only munching numbers; the SATA performance is awesome too.

eL_PuSHeR wrote:

@F2bnp: […]
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@F2bnp:

Thanks mate! I hope it works first.

@BigBodZod:

Yep, older memory is more expensive. I think DDR4 will be around here this year or so; I am thinking in getting any Intel microprocessor capable of driving DDR4. I have an i7 2700K at work and I am quite satisfied with its performance so far. Not only munching numbers; the SATA performance is awesome too.

For my gaming rig, I updated my old SATA HDD to an 240GB SSD.

It was a huge difference in performance.

I still run a 2TB Raid Zero array and another 1.5TB Raid Zero array for my games.

For any games that require faster I/O response then I install these onto the SSD.

Finally Steam has an option to install games onto any HDD in the system now, no longer do I have to create virtual links to them 😀

I am still using regular HDDs. My current chipset doesn't even support AHCI well. But we are derrailing the main tread. Let's discuss about gaming videocards. 😁

eL_PuSHeR wrote:

I am still using regular HDDs. My current chipset doesn't even support AHCI well. But we are derrailing the main tread. Let's discuss about gaming videocards. 😁

Sorry yes, back to the topic at hand 😉

I did setup my brothers Lanbox gaming maching with an nViidia 550 GTX as it was compact enough to fit inside.

These cases are shorter then most so you have a limitation as to the size of the GPU you can install.

So if anybody has a chassis like this or a smaller footprint case, these are great cards for what they do.

You can actually find some faster cards now that are single slot designs that take up less space and actually have better thermal envolopes too.

I'd heartily recommend a 7970 seeing as they're cheaper than a GTX680 and with current drivers run faster (at worst, about the same). My main rig has been running a Sapphire 7970 Dual OC for 9 months now and it cuts through any game like a hot knife through butter. I thought about CF'ing it, but I can't see any reason to other than e-peen. If you like Nvidia gor for a GTX670. On a budget a 7850 or 7870 is nice.

Or consider buying an old card. I bought an RMA MSI Radeon 5870 Lightning II for my backup rig for cheap and it's doing some sterling service for real cheap.

Most important thing- don't buy too much card for a system or it'll go to waste. I did a quick test of my Q6600 vs i7 3820 systems using a Radeon 6850, 5870 and 7970. The 5870 and 7970 did not register any increase in FPS on the Q6600 over the 6850.

I am aware that ATI/AMD has always offered more "bang for the buck" than nVIDIA but after having some AMD/nVidia cards I have grown accostumed to hate the Catalyst driver suite. IMHO nVIDIA drivers are better even if they also exhibit some bugs here and there.

I think AMD need to redo its drivers from scratch ASAP. And add to that the "we will put your card in legacy status" to the grief as I have stated before.

There was never anything inherently wrong with Radeon cards. At least since they got rid of their flickering AF that they had from 2000-6000. If it's only about maximum frames for the money and nothing else I would in fact recommend them too. But there's a very good reason for their cheap prices and frequent game bundles. I personally don't want to buy a new video card every few years when some jerk at AMD decides the old ones aren't worthy of new drivers anymore. Legacy my ass. 😀

My thoughts exactly. 😎