Should I upgrade my Gigabyte ATI 7870 to a EVGA GTX 670 FTW?

Zeleose

Honorable
Apr 20, 2013
5
0
10,510
I was thinking about upgrading, but I'm just not sure if it's worth it or not. I was going to sell my 7870 and pay the difference. I looked at comparisons of the two cards and it looks like it would be worth it.

I'm content with the performance I get with the 7870 but I just wasn't sure if I should wait until the next gen cards (which I probably won't be able to afford) or go with a nice upgrade getting better fps out of games. Thanks for the help.

For what it's worth I play at 1920x1200 resolution with an i5 2500k 3.3ghz with 16gb of ram (Forgot the specs of the ram).
 
The 600 Ti and 7950 run neck and neck with the slight fps lead of the 660 Ti being insignificant, but of late more and more players and reviewers are paying attention for the frame latency issue and this is the 7950's achille's heel.

http://techreport.com/review/23981/radeon-hd-7950-vs-geforce-gtx-660-ti-revisited/11

In common games at 1920 x 1080

Guru3D has the 7870 @ 701 fps versus the 670s 917 (+31%) and the 670's .... 660 Ti gets 851
TechPowerUp has the 7870 @ 1236.6 fps versus the 670's 1681.8 (36%).... 660 Ti gets 1387.1
HardwareInfo.uk has the 7870 GHz Edition @ 294.6 fps versus the 405.7 (38%) ..... 660 Ti gets 314.2

Only you can decide if an average 35% performance boost is worth the extra cost and effort .... generally i won't bother if less than 40% unless I have someone who wants to take the existing card off my hands.

Among the 670's, my top 3 are the Asus GTX670-DC2OG-2GD5, Gigabyte GV-N670OC-2GD and MSI N670 PE 2GD5/OC. All have great coolers but the Asus is the quietest and have had consistently high results manually overclocking (25% or more over "stock")

 

Zeleose

Honorable
Apr 20, 2013
5
0
10,510


Wow thanks for the very detailed response that helps me alot. I appreciate it! I'll have to think about it some more, but I might go with the Asus version of it and overclock it.

 

caydn12

Honorable
Mar 8, 2013
448
0
10,810


Please, before you buy a 670 for ~$375, watch this video:
http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=UcKWzVkgspc
The 7950 offers best bang for buck in mid-high area of gaming. If you upgrade now i would not go with nvidia. They are actually getting stomped on pretty hard by amd in the 600 vs 7000 series.

If you wait it out until the next series who knows? Amd could get wrecked in every way, but for now, dont go nvidia, unless you only play games optimized for nvidia card. Even then idk if you should go with nvidia lol:p

(Not an AMD fan boy, I am a fan of who is the best at the moment)
 

Zeleose

Honorable
Apr 20, 2013
5
0
10,510
I just really don't like the AMD driver support and much prefer Nvidia in that aspect. I agree though ATI is making some nice cards for a good price. Thanks for your input I'll look more into that.
 

caydn12

Honorable
Mar 8, 2013
448
0
10,810


Im running 13.3 drivers and they work great for me. I havent had any issues.
 

Zeleose

Honorable
Apr 20, 2013
5
0
10,510
Yeah, I just like updates more often on my drivers and I just don't like using beta drivers. I agree though that ATI has gotten better with their drivers, but you have to wait awhile to get the official release.