Need a good card for a gaming rig.

[yancifry]

Hi, I am currently planning on building a new rig in the next few weeks and I need to get a card ordered. I have built my own PCs forever now, but I am embarrassed to admit I don't care much for hardware tech so I never stay up on it at all. I usually end up going with whatever PC Gamer suggests for a high end system .

My budget tops out at $600 - $700. I dont want to do SLI or any overclocking. I play all kinds of games and usually flight sims are the ones that have the highest graphics requirements. I would also like something that is known to be fairly reliable if that is possible. I assume I can get whatever power supply I need so hopefully that wont come into the equation at all.

I was looking at a Radeon HD 5870. Good choice? Can I do better?

Thanks!

 

[jay2tall]

The 5870 is a good card, but last generation. I would stick with a 6000 series ATI card or 500 series Nvidia card. The ATI 6950 1GB or Nvidia GTX 560 Ti cards would give you equal to or better performance than a 5870. The GTX 570 is a great card if you can handle the $350 price tag.

There are also the 6950 2GB cards that are well known as they can be flashed with the 6970 BIOS. They have a dual BIOS switch that lets you flip between them in case you run into issues. It's free performance, however, if you are not an overclocker you may not be interested.

 

[shrkbay]

5870 is still capable of doing a lot, it's the most muscle of all AMD single GPUs, but it's worse than 6000 series due to old architecuture, probably for around its price you can also find a 6950 1GB, which performs a bit better or if you go a little higher - GTX 560Ti, it runs head to head with it