I have spent a good few weeks looking at what's currently out there, I require a motherboard, CPU and GPU and my budget is a maximum of around £650, I do recognise that it's sometimes a better option to save an extra £50 or £100 but as it stands, £650 is most likely as high as I can go. For the near future I will be using a single 1080p monitor and due to my financial situation I will not be able to make any major hardware changes such as replacing a GPU for a long time ( I have a Core 2 Duo and R7 240 which replaced the overheating Geforce 9500GS since 2008) so I'm trying to find out what is really the best deal in terms of future-proofing.
My plan is to go for a 4690K + Asus Z97-K motherboard and pair it up with an MSI R9 290X, to be totally honest I was having some horrible issues with the AMD drivers and my monitor which eventually I could work around, but I'm sure you'll agree that Nvidia drivers are much less of a pain. Otherwise it seems like a good card, with 4GB of GDDR5 which as far as I can see you can't find on other cards at this price point. The cost for this would be £615 which means I get to throw in a Corsair K30 keyboard as an extra.
Is this the best deal I can get? I won't ask questions like "Will 4GB vs 3GB of VRAM make a big impact 5 years down the line?" since it's as much of a guess for me as it might be for anybody else. The GTX 780 seems to go head to head with the 290X but it has less memory, and the 780Ti costs much more and would require a different choice of CPU, the cheapest being an i5 4460, again a Devil's Canyon but non-overclockable, which would make the price £687, with a Zotac 780Ti which received mixed opinions from some people. So that leaves me wondering, does the raw power of the 780Ti justify the high price and will it last longer than the AMD card on 1080p / 1440p in the future or should I just stick with the 290X? I'm probably overthinking everything and the more reviews I read / benchmarks I look at, the more doubts I get.
Details on the rest of the components, although it's probably unnecessary: I will be keeping the Corsair XMS3 2x4GB 1333MHz kit, it served me well so far and I don't feel the need to make a compromise on the CPU / GPU just to have 1600MHz+ memory. I will also keep my WD Green hard drive which is slow but I can always add a boot SSD later as they're not too expensive, the introduction of M.2 slots makes it easy to grab a 32GB / 64GB SSD and keep it out of the way of other components.
My plan is to go for a 4690K + Asus Z97-K motherboard and pair it up with an MSI R9 290X, to be totally honest I was having some horrible issues with the AMD drivers and my monitor which eventually I could work around, but I'm sure you'll agree that Nvidia drivers are much less of a pain. Otherwise it seems like a good card, with 4GB of GDDR5 which as far as I can see you can't find on other cards at this price point. The cost for this would be £615 which means I get to throw in a Corsair K30 keyboard as an extra.
Is this the best deal I can get? I won't ask questions like "Will 4GB vs 3GB of VRAM make a big impact 5 years down the line?" since it's as much of a guess for me as it might be for anybody else. The GTX 780 seems to go head to head with the 290X but it has less memory, and the 780Ti costs much more and would require a different choice of CPU, the cheapest being an i5 4460, again a Devil's Canyon but non-overclockable, which would make the price £687, with a Zotac 780Ti which received mixed opinions from some people. So that leaves me wondering, does the raw power of the 780Ti justify the high price and will it last longer than the AMD card on 1080p / 1440p in the future or should I just stick with the 290X? I'm probably overthinking everything and the more reviews I read / benchmarks I look at, the more doubts I get.
Details on the rest of the components, although it's probably unnecessary: I will be keeping the Corsair XMS3 2x4GB 1333MHz kit, it served me well so far and I don't feel the need to make a compromise on the CPU / GPU just to have 1600MHz+ memory. I will also keep my WD Green hard drive which is slow but I can always add a boot SSD later as they're not too expensive, the introduction of M.2 slots makes it easy to grab a 32GB / 64GB SSD and keep it out of the way of other components.
Facebook
Twitter
Instagram