TALK ME DOWN

[PACO]

Howdy yall.. so I built my PC about 2.5 years ago and didn't skimp out on any of the parts. I have an Ivy Bridge i7, 8gb RAM, SSD, Phantom case and a great PSU. I ended up purchasing the 7850 which was a middle of the pack card with major overclock potential. It has suited my needs well enough up until this point but lately it has been on the fritz and occasionally my screen is overwhelmed by artifacts and lines.. This has been happening more frequently and it is muy annoying.

WHAT WOULD I LIKE TO DO? Upgrade my Video Card.

WHAT ARE MY OPTIONS? GTX 980, GTX 970, WAIT FOR R9 SERIES WHICH IS STALLING FOREVER.

GTX 980.. It is priced ridiculously high and in no way is it worth getting over the GTX 970. The problem is that I have a devil on my shoulder who keeps whispering.. just do it PACO. I need need confirmation and re-affirmation that spending $650+ on a GPU that will depreciate faster than a car is a terrible idea.

GTX 970.. 4gb vs 3.5gb fiasco. This doesn't really bother me since I'll probably be doing most of my gaming at 1080p for the foreseeable future. The price vs performance is great but it still comes at a hefty price tag of about $450+ CAD after taxes. I'd also prefer to pick it up locally however my canadacomputers costs about an extra $20-30 which is trivial but the principle of it rubs me the wrong way..

R9 300.. I was expecting an announcement of this card this week at GDC. NVIDIA announced their new Titan however AMD has been asleep at the wheel. Initially the cards were slated for Q1.. now they are pushed back to Q2 and we are sitting in March with no formal announcement. I figured an announcement and some competition would drive down the prices and I'd also like to see what the competition has to offer before dropping $500.......

So ultimately I need help. There will always be something new and better coming out. What should I do? Bite the bullet and just buy a GTX 970? Go crazy and get a 980? Or hold out for a few more months and see where things go.

NEED COMMUNITY ADVICE.

[snky]

who cares

[PACO]

[KillEmAll]

I just bought the 970 last week and love it. Best bang for buck.

[Hermione]

Get the 970, i heard its the best bang for buck, and almost as powerful as the 980, i would of went with the 970 but instead got the 980 in case i play other games, i only play ut99 and csgo atm and hearthstone.

[HULKSMASH]

I'd say 970. The extra money for the slightest bit of performance that you won't even notice is not worth it.

Also artefacts usually mean rip card due to hardware failure and hence that you can send it back if it's under warranty. Meaning you get new card back that you can sell. Or keep as a backup. Or give to the poor like a true Robin Hood of our times. Just saying.

[HULKSMASH]

[PACO]

[kud]

I've had laptops do spazzy green/static/flickering lines and it was a problem with the screen (power inverter in that case). If you have an extra cord maybe use it while waiting for the video card to arrive. If you still have problems at least you'll know it wasn't the cord
http://ask.metafilter.com/234873/ShakyJ ... phics-card

[PACO]

It's a known problem. This is roughly what my screen looks like when it goes wacko jacko and FALLACY who has the same card has also experienced the same issue. I wouldn't mind giving NVIDIA a chance and I'd like a powerful enough GPU that lets me do local recordings while playing and streaming.

[Sdaco|JrmY]

http://www.dell.com/us/p/alienware-area51-r2/pd

[Hermione]

[KillEmAll]

[Monk]

None of the above, spend money on a present for marina.

[KillEmAll]

Pretty sure that Dell picture is reference only ACF

[kevinsan1ty]

[clankiller]

Underclock the card you have now and see if it happens. Looks like the ram on the card is getting too hot.

It it's seems Ok like that I would wait until amd r300 is released and then make a run at the 980 as prices will drop if the amd card is stronk..

CK..

[Sauron]

Give your current card a quick clean. Pop it out, disassemble, apply fresh thermal paste and relube the fans if necessary. Do all of that while waiting for your 970 to arrive. Its a beast.

[xios]

Wouldn't be surprised if one of the pipes in the card could have gone bad. Have you ran any stress tests on it? I had an amd card that failed on me many years ago in the same fashion (See , and ). Sudden artifacting is 99% chance you have a failure on the card. See if you clean it and test on another port or mobo even.

In any case, take a look at this bench comparison and you'll see that the 980 really isn't that far ahead in most games. I consider 60 fps as kind of the baseline where you want games to be if you desire good experience out of them. You'll notice where the 970 gets more than that it's in the 70's and the 980 is only usually 6 frames ahead give or take. Where there are games below 60, say in the 30's or 40's, the gap is even closer. I honestly don't think that the price to performance ratio is worth it and the 970 is a solid performer on high settings from the latest games @ 1080p. Don't let the itch to upgrade it beyond that fool you. Two generations from now you'll get a bigger upgrade at a lower price and power drain so save some money now and invest in that for the future while you do a mid-cycle upgrade. The 980 also tends to run a lot hotter on load, something I'm not a fan of.

http://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/1355?vs=1351

And just in case you were wondering, I'm moving up from a 660ti to a 970 fairly soon myself.

[ttocston]

I say none of the above. Instead spend the money on bags and bags of these and report back of your findings.
http://www.amazon.com/Haribo-Gummi-Cand ... ummy+bears

[blade]

If your warranty has ended, you can still save your old card. Here is how: http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1421792

Yes, it does work. If you know how hardware is made, every factory is essentially a massive oven. It is not dangerous at all as long as you remove the outer plastic. Once you get it working properly, sell it on ebay.

BTW - go with 970. Here is why. The average person upgrades their card every 3 years. The 970 handles every current game at max settings and will for next year (after that, should handle high settings for another year). By 2017, there will be cards out that will blow even the 980 out of the water. You will end up upgrading at that time whether you buy 970 or 980 today. I promise you that.

[Lineage]

970 and take the wife to a nice dinner for letting you buy toys

[kE-]

[HULKSMASH]

Real men go full freddo.

Hermione +1 for mic gif.

[uenz]

even with a gtx 970 the bottleneck in your system will be the cpu imo.. dunno if worth

[RickJames]

I'm gonna be the advocate for the 980.

The extra .5 GB of video ram isn't something that makes a big difference now, but if anything in the future pushes your card to that spot, you'll need the 980.

6-10 fps in very graphically intensive games may not sound like a lot, but it's a significant difference. 70 fps is definitely a noticeable improvement over 60. A lot of the benchmarks that show only small fps gains for the 980 are running games at huge resolutions, where both the 970 and 980 struggle to break 30-40 fps. Very few modern games will push the 980 below 60fps at 1080p, and the performance difference between the 2 cards will be more significant at those fps levels.

I don't agree that you'll need to upgrade no matter what in a few years. The 980 should be more than you need for quite a few years. I mean, it's currently top of the pack, and even beats the titan for many apps. And the performance increases between generations of cards are inconsistent. The differences between the 5xx,6xx, and 7xx series of nvidia cards were relatively small. The 9xx series (Maxwell architecture) was a massive leap and amd still doesn't have a good answer to it. I think future generations will again be smaller performance increases until some revolutionary arch that puts Maxwell to shame comes out (not anytime soon).

The 980 also is currently the best option for running ut4 at1080p, 144fps, and probably will still be close to the best option in a few years.

If you want price/performance, the 970 wins. But if you want something more future proof that will give you the best or close to the best performance for the forseeable future and likely many years after, the 980 is worth the extra money.

PS. Any modern i5 or i7 won't bottleneck even tri-sli 980s in any modern game. There are tests showing 99% gpu utilization with 3 980s running different modern games on a system with an old 2.5 GHz i5

[blade]

[clankiller]

rumor has it this was run on a 390X card

https://www.unrealengine.com/blog/oculu ... highlights

CK..

[PACO]

I'm going to try and underclock the card and see if it helps. Appreciate all of the suggestions but I'm going to first try out the least intrusive measure. If the grey screens stop.. I will indeed take the wife out for a celebratory dinner.

[KillEmAll]

You can monitor your temps with this and see if it is a heat issue.