Which 560 or 6950 2GB

[szr02]

I am building a PC soon, and I need to make sure I get the best card. I have been moving slightly towards the 560 as it goes above my budget. I want to be gaming at 1920x1080 max resolution and high settings if possible. I have seen the following cards -

1. MSI GeForce GTX 560Ti Twin FrozR II 1024MB GDDR5 PCI-Express Graphics Card (reference speeds) -
http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=GX-130-MS

2. MSI GeForce GTX 560Ti OC Twin FrozR II 1024MB GDDR5 PCI-Express Graphics Card (overclocked version) -
http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=GX-114-MS&groupid=701&catid=1914&subcat=1341

3. MSI ATI Radeon HD 6950 2048MB GDDR5 PCI-Express Graphics Card - http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=GX-119-MS&groupid=701&catid=56&subcat=1752

I am heading towards 1, would I be able to overclock that card to OC version settings? Is the 6950 better card but it goes quite above my budget but dont want to make a mistake. I don't want to flash the 6950 to 6970 as I read few people have problems flashing those cards.

 

[beltzy]

Congrats on getting ready to build your rig! Here are a couple of things to consider:

1) Even though your first selection is at reference speeds, you can definitely OC any card to some extent even at stock voltage. Exactly how much depends on each card and can't be predicted just by knowing the product number.

2) These two cards (GTX 560ti and HD 6950 2GB) aren't mind-blowingly different as far as performance. Unless you're benchmarking or have a very, very good eye for how many FPS you are getting, you probably wouldn't notice the difference while gaming. The 6950 on average should outperform it, but not by a huge margin. However, the 69xx cards scale very well in crossfire so if you are considering picking up a second card down the line, keep that in mind.

3) Even modern games have a huge difference in how hardware intensive they are (some console ports like CoD series etc are very easy to "max" even with one card while other games take a thousand + dollars of gpu hardware to REALLY max). Any of these cards will give you the ability to play just about anything on very high settings at your resolution. If you decide you want to get some more horsepower, you can always double up on whatever card you decide on. Cheers!

* I usually try to tell people that if they have a preference for NVidia or AMD, that's totally ok and both camps have great cards at nearly every price point. There is no wrong answer here- both solutions are great.