We are looking to buy a graphics card for our son for Christmas but there seems so many around. His current card is a Radeon HD6870 with 1Gb of Gddr5 memory. There are so many cards around that we are stuck and don't want to get this wrong. His system is as follows...

 

AMD FX 8 core CPU

16gb DDR3 1366 Ram

1Gb hard drive

Asus M5A97 evo R2.0 Mother board

Windows 7 64bit

 

Any pointers would be great - I have been reading a few things online but non the wiser things like more Gddr 5 Ram memory doesn't mean a decent card so thought I would ask on here - Many thanks.

Edited 24 November, 201411 yr by justinbarrow

You won't do better than this for the money....

http://www.briskoda.net/forums/topic/334881-ati-7970-3gb-graphics-cards-with-hdmi-displayport-and-dvi-super-quick/?hl=%2B7970#entry4030576

The main question is what is your budget?

 

Phil

don't want to go overkill on price probably around £200 - £250  forgot to add he has a Corsair 1,000 watt power supply - Had a look at this as it should of been over £200 

 

http://www.amazon.co.uk/SAPPHIRE-AMD-Graphics-Card-DDR5/dp/B00IRTXPBM/ref=sr_1_15?ie=UTF8&qid=1416863879&sr=8-15&keywords=graphics+card

 

The other one was Nvidia GTX 760 2gb Gddr ram 

If a card is PCI Express 3.0 will it be backward compatible with his board as his PCI Express slots are 2.0 and not 3.0?

Justin, the one you linked to is just a re-branded version of what Yeti_Man is selling. If your son knows his stuff he may wonder why its not the 280. But the actual framerate difference (important bit in games) would be 2% at best.


EDIT: infact yeti_mans have a mild overclock from the factory (think turbo boost) which means its probably closer to the R9 280X than the 280.  What kind of games does he play? It can make a difference as to what is best to buy.

EDIT 2: this may help also http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/gaming-graphics-card-review,review-32899.html

Thanks Robt100 - He plays stuff like Call of Duty Ghosts and Advance Warfare fifa 15 and skyrim things like that really.

I can confirm that a PCI 3.0 card will run perfectly fine on a PCI 2.0 bus, I have an Asus K7260X OC I recently fitted with no real issues (other than fouling the ide cable for the old DVD drive).

Might be worth waiting for the Black Friday deals. I would suspect they'll be clearing out a lot of this year's stock of components so you might get a deal.

Also, as another point, check it'd fit! Not sure how you can do that without him knowing, but most modern cards are about 12 inches long . I know I had a 6850 before my 7970 and the size difference is quite impressive.

Ask him - He may have a preference.

pound for pound, one of these is the best you can get right now, and will keep him happy for a good couple of years, plus he can select a free game

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/productlist.php?catid=1914&groupid=701&sortby=priceAsc&subid=1010

pound for pound, one of these is the best you can get right now, and will keep him happy for a good couple of years, plus he can select a free game

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/productlist.php?catid=1914&groupid=701&sortby=priceAsc&subid=1010

 

This!  

 

The 970 and 980 GTX has just made pretty much every enthusiast graphics card redundant.. 

 

The 970 is very very capable, and can easily handle games unless you have a mahoosive 4k monitor.

 

Although you havent mentioned if his system has a SSD drive installed - which by far is the single best improvement for any machine.. and prices are tumbling (i picked up a 512GB one from amazon today for £120)

Just saw this and thought of this thread:

 

http://www.ebuyer.com/519311-msi-gtx-760-twinfrozr-oc-2gb-gddr5-dual-dvi-hdmi-displayport-pci-e-n760-tf-2gd5-oc

I agree on the GTX 970 recommendation which is a very easy one to make because it's fast and power efficient, they've done a great job both in improving performance from the previous generation while getting power consumption down and it's a good upgrade over the AMD 78xx series.  I've been an AMD fan for a while (currently running a pair of 6950's) but their replacement is likely to be either a 970 or 980 for their better power efficiency and I find Nvidia's displayport 4K support is far better than AMD.

 

John