Should I get the Radeon 6870 or the GTX 560?

[TheScarecrow97]

So I'm pretty new to building computers. I've done some research, watched some videos and now that I'm pretty sure I know what I"m doing, I'm looking to build my first computer that I will be using primarily for gaming.

I've gotten it all down to the graphics card. Being on a fairly tight budget, i didn't intend to spend any more than approximately 130 bucks on the video card and was originally going to go with the 550 ti (which had a nice sale for 114 dollars I believe), but I decided to push it up a bit to about 160-170.

Now I'm stuck between the Radeon HD 6870 and the GTX 560 (not ti, of course). Which should I get? As far as I can tell from the small amount of research I've done, the general consensus is that the 6870 is a little better but it doesn't have anywhere near the overclocking ability of the 560.
I'm still not sure if overclocking is something I want to do, but I probably will go ahead at some point. So which will give me the most bang for my buck without overclocking? What about with overclocking?

 

[Deemo13]

Honestly it's more of a preference game here. They offer about the same performance, and are about the same price. Are you more of a Nvidia fan or AMD fan?

Which one looks better cosmetically?

 

[17seconds]

The points which turn the decision in favor of the 560 are:
- The 560 is well known to overclock very well. The 6870, on the other hand, has very little overclocking headroom. When overclocking, the 560 decisively pulls ahead in performance.
- More of the current popular game titles favor the 560 and Nvidia cards in general (BF3 and Skyrim to name a couple).
- Nvidia has more unique driver level features that cannot be matched by the AMD counterpart. Among these are PhysX, Adaptive VSync, FXAA, and Ambient Occlusion, to name a few.

If you don't plan to overclock, don't play any of the Nvidia-favored games, and don't care about the driver features, then get whichever one is cheaper. Obviously, I recommend the 560. Even if it costs a few dollars more, its worth it.

 

[TheScarecrow97]

The points which turn the decision in favor of the 560 are:
- The 560 is well known to overclock very well. The 6870, on the other hand, has very little overclocking headroom. When overclocking, the 560 decisively pulls ahead in performance.
- More of the current popular game titles favor the 560 and Nvidia cards in general (BF3 and Skyrim to name a couple).
- Nvidia has more unique driver level features that cannot be matched by the AMD counterpart. Among these are PhysX, Adaptive VSync, FXAA, and Ambient Occlusion, to name a few.

If you don't plan to overclock, don't play any of the Nvidia-favored games, and don't care about the driver features, then get whichever one is cheaper. Obviously, I recommend the 560. Even if it costs a few dollars more, its worth it.

Okay, thank you very much! I plan to play BF3 on it so the 560 sounds like the way to go for me. Thanks again.

 

[TheScarecrow97]

Best answer selected by TheScarecrow97.