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Buying a new graphics card

clownboy said:
Drivers already exist and are playing well with your system. Compatibility with existing components is virtually assured. I like both the GeForce and Radeon cards, but from the old days I have memories of them not playing well together.

Btw, love the system you put together.
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Thanks, it was a DIY system off of Newegg.
 
OrphanSlug said:
Trust me, I noticed a huge difference with the RAM. But I will add that vid card is nice. Only issue, make sure the case has room. This card is not small.
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My case is huge and weighs a ton. It doesn't seem like a mid-tower.
 
American said:
Okay, it's about $60 more.
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It's interesting that the Nvidia's do better at 1080P, which the R9's pick up at 1440P. It's all about the GDDR-5.

Oh, my rig;

XCLIO 2000 Black & Titanium Case
KingWin Gold Certified 80+ 1000 Watt PS
Asus P8Z77-V Premium Motherboard
Intel Core I7 3770K @ 5.06 gHz
Corsair CWCH70 Hydro Series H80 CPU Liquid Cooler
CORSAIR Vengence 16GB
PowerColor Radeon 290
OCZ Vertex 3 SATA 3 SSD
1TB WD Black Edition SATA 3 + 3TB Seagate SATA 3
Panasonic DVD
Windows 7 Ultimate - 64 bit
 
Uncensored2008 said:
It's interesting that the Nvidia's do better at 1080P, which the R9's pick up at 1440P. It's all about the GDDR-5.

Oh, my rig;

XCLIO 2000 Black & Titanium Case
KingWin Gold Certified 80+ 1000 Watt PS
Asus P8Z77-V Premium Motherboard
Intel Core I7 3770K @ 5.06 gHz
Corsair CWCH70 Hydro Series H80 CPU Liquid Cooler
CORSAIR Vengence 16GB
PowerColor Radeon 290
OCZ Vertex 3 SATA 3 SSD
1TB WD Black Edition SATA 3 + 3TB Seagate SATA 3
Panasonic DVD
Windows 7 Ultimate - 64 bit
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I have a liquid cooler on my cpu also. This system is almost 3 years old.
 
American said:
Okay, I've done a bit of searching and it appears the Radeon R9 290 is gotten good ratings. Thoughts?
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I've been out of the PC hardware buying interest for so long, I don't think that my opinion really counts.

Back in the day, I always liked nVidia graphics cards. Very stable, good performance, and driver updates always worked as expected. Had a few ATI cards along the way, those drivers never seemed to upgrade nicely.

Maybe things have changed since then (quite likely)
 
eohrnberger said:
I've been out of the PC hardware buying interest for so long, I don't think that my opinion really counts.

Back in the day, I always liked nVidia graphics cards. Very stable, good performance, and driver updates always worked as expected. Had a few ATI cards along the way, those drivers never seemed to upgrade nicely.

Maybe things have changed since then (quite likely)
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I think AMD bought ATI.
 
eohrnberger said:
Yeah, I think you are right about that. Has that helped their graphics cards product line? Must be.
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I have an AMD based graphics card now.
 
Lachean said:
In a free country, must one need something in order to own it?
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No, but you don't go around buying video cards like that unless you are doing something fun. I was just wondering what that was...
 
American said:
I didn't have a good experience with BF4 due to graphics lag.
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Well, the maps are so large, and there are so many explosions and bullets flying, it takes a pretty up-to-date PC to run those games with any decent graphics.
 
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American said:
Well I put my system up in the thread. The calculator recommends 573W with the 290X card.
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Good.. so you should still be able to add an USB harddrive or two :) .. those non powered kind. You have to remember that... I did not once, so I had a machine where the USB HDD either did not work or the machine shut down... thought I was going nuts, until I realized I had just switched out my graphics card with a much more powerful one than the original and did the math. Yep I was without the USB harddrive (or USB stick) almost at the max Wattage and well went over once I connected a HDD.
 
PeteEU said:
Good.. so you should still be able to add an USB harddrive or two :) .. those non powered kind. You have to remember that... I did not once, so I had a machine where the USB HDD either did not work or the machine shut down... thought I was going nuts, until I realized I had just switched out my graphics card with a much more powerful one than the original and did the math. Yep I was without the USB harddrive (or USB stick) almost at the max Wattage and well went over once I connected a HDD.
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Frankly my SSD is too small, but that's how it came. I need one about twice the size because Windows is always complaining at me that drive space is low. That's where Windows resides. Problem is I would have to reinstall Windows and start over, and that's a real pain in the ass.
 
American said:
Frankly my SSD is too small, but that's how it came. I need one about twice the size because Windows is always complaining at me that drive space is low. That's where Windows resides. Problem is I would have to reinstall Windows and start over, and that's a real pain in the ass.
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Ghost the OS... And the only "pain in the ass" about any OS is the updates needed afterwards. Installing Windows takes like 10 minutes.

Plus SSDs dont use that much power, much less than ordinary HDD.
 
PeteEU said:
Ghost the OS... And the only "pain in the ass" about any OS is the updates needed afterwards. Installing Windows takes like 10 minutes.

Plus SSDs dont use that much power, much less than ordinary HDD.
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Yeah but what about the registry, and all my software?
 
American said:
Yeah but what about the registry, and all my software?
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Well I would always recommend re-installing everything from start. It is good to have a nice clean up :) And to be honest with most systems (minus the Windows updates) it only takes an hour or two tops. Windows could update in the background after all :)

But you can use GHOST type of software to take an image of the whole drive and basically transplant it. This is what network admins use or at least use to use back in the day, when restoring machines in large machine packs. Quick and easy. Heck I remember having a GHOST program do it every night on my university computers in the computer lab.. easy way to get rid of virus and changes.

Been years since I did that, but it should work. Since it is only the SSD you are changing then all the drivers and such should work for the new SSD as well.
 
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American said:
Frankly my SSD is too small, but that's how it came. I need one about twice the size because Windows is always complaining at me that drive space is low. That's where Windows resides. Problem is I would have to reinstall Windows and start over, and that's a real pain in the ass.
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No need to re-install your OS. Most drives come with software to clone the original drive onto the new drive. If your new SSD doesn't have that software, a google search can give you easy, reliable alternatives.
 
American said:
Frankly my SSD is too small, but that's how it came. I need one about twice the size because Windows is always complaining at me that drive space is low. That's where Windows resides. Problem is I would have to reinstall Windows and start over, and that's a real pain in the ass.
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The bane of the Steam Gamer is Winsxs. Games come and go, but .DLL's are forever. The way it works is, suppose you have an SSD as your C: drive, you NEVER install anything on C: - so a 32gb SSD should be good, right? Nope, Windows will install .DLL's in the Winsxs directory on CL - regardless of where you install the game, and uninstalling games won't help you, that Winsxs directory will just grow and grow, until you are out of space. This is one reason people will reformat on an interval, to kill off the junk in Winsxs. DLL hell.
 
Mycroft said:
No need to re-install your OS. Most drives come with software to clone the original drive onto the new drive. If your new SSD doesn't have that software, a google search can give you easy, reliable alternatives.
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If you duel/multi boot, cloning usually won't work.

I keep Ubuntu and Mint as separate boots and cannot clone as a result.

If you use a single OS, I generally recommend Acronis.
 
Uncensored2008 said:
The bane of the Steam Gamer is Winsxs. Games come and go, but .DLL's are forever. The way it works is, suppose you have an SSD as your C: drive, you NEVER install anything on C: - so a 32gb SSD should be good, right? Nope, Windows will install .DLL's in the Winsxs directory on CL - regardless of where you install the game, and uninstalling games won't help you, that Winsxs directory will just grow and grow, until you are out of space. This is one reason people will reformat on an interval, to kill off the junk in Winsxs. DLL hell.
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You know they always advise make your SSD C:\, and so Windows is installed on it. And some apps also cannot be installed on other drives. So it fills up. I have 10GB out of 60GB left, and the computer bitches about this very often.
 
American said:
You know they always advise make your SSD C:\, and so Windows is installed on it. And some apps also cannot be installed on other drives. So it fills up. I have 10GB out of 60GB left, and the computer bitches about this very often.
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It shouldn't complain until you are under 6gb, or 10%

You do want the SSD as your boot drive, the whole point is to speed things up. The Revo that I use is also a 60gb, but it is a PCIe board. Most motherboards only support 2 6gbps SATA ports, so if you want to deploy a third device, the way to do it is to use a PCIe slot and run across that high speed bus. This is SATA-3 that I'm talking about, you can deploy as many SATA-2 devices as you like.
 
Thanks for the advice. Back to the graphics card, I'm wondering what the real difference between the 290 and 290X is, besides price.
 
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